General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Girl with Green Eyes

The Girl with Green Eyes (released as Girl with Green Eyes) is a 1964 British drama directed by Desmond Davis, adapted by the Irish novelist Edna O'Brien from her 1962 novel The Lonely Girl, the second book of her Country Girls trilogy. Rita Tushingham plays Kate Brady, a shy young woman from rural County Clare who moves to Dublin and begins an affair with Eugene Gaillard (Peter Finch), a middle-aged, still-married writer; Lynn Redgrave plays her exuberant flatmate Baba Brennan.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Release	14 May 1964 (UK); 91 minutes, black and white³^•⁴
Source	Edna O'Brien's novel The Lonely Girl (1962), second volume of the Country Girls trilogy; O'Brien wrote the screenplay⁵
Director	Desmond Davis's first feature, after working as a camera operator with Tony Richardson⁶
Principal cast	Rita Tushingham (Kate Brady), Peter Finch (Eugene Gaillard), Lynn Redgrave (Baba Brennan)¹
Production	Woodfall Film Productions; distributed by United Artists; budget $190,000²^•⁴
Award	Golden Globe, Best English-Language Foreign Film, 1965⁷
Reception	83% on the Tomatometer (6 reviews); 64% audience score²

Spoilers

Story

Kate Brady leaves her family farm in the Irish countryside for Dublin, where she works in a grocery shop and shares a room with Baba Brennan, a former convent-school friend who is more worldly and socially confident than she is.²^•⁸ The two young women go dancing and date men they meet, and on a trip to the countryside they encounter Eugene Gaillard, a sophisticated middle-aged author. Kate and Eugene fall in love, but the romance draws hostility: Kate's father, on learning of it, is determined to break it up, and an anonymous letter denounces the liaison.²^•⁵

The affair fails from Eugene's side as much as from society's. He proves to be more paternalistic mentor than partner, and the relationship disintegrates when he realizes he has little in common with Kate; she in turn faces the condescension of his middle-class friends. The film ends with Kate setting out for London, a departure the French critic Justin Kwedi reads as a move toward possibility at the dawn of Swinging London.²^•⁵

Production

Woodfall and the British New Wave. The film was made for Tony Richardson's Woodfall company, with Richardson as executive producer and Oscar Lewenstein as producer.⁹ Desmond Davis, born in London in 1926, had cut his teeth in film working with Richardson on three of the key "kitchen sink" dramas of the early 1960s, A Taste of Honey (1961), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), and Tom Jones (1963); Girl with Green Eyes was his first feature as director.¹⁰ It was the first Woodfall adaptation not set in Britain, moving the story to Ireland as in O'Brien's novel.⁶

The film was shot on location in Dublin and County Wicklow, and its fondness for real locations and city pleasures marks it as part of the new realism of the decade.¹⁰ Manny Wynn was the cinematographer, John Addison composed the score, and Brian Smedley-Aston edited.⁹ Although the title promises green eyes, the film was shot in black and white, so the eyes of the title are never actually seen on screen.⁴

Context in Edna O'Brien's work

The Lonely Girl follows O'Brien's The Country Girls (1960) and continues the story of Kate and Baba, two young women leaving rural Ireland for Dublin; the trilogy was noted for challenging the archaic mores of Irish society and depicting the young women's emancipation.⁵ O'Brien, whose strict religious upbringing in rural west Ireland featured throughout her writing, adapted her own novel for the screen.¹¹^•⁶ The film's frank handling of sexual matters was noted as ahead of its time by Miramax, which later released it on home video.⁷ Davis and O'Brien worked together again on I Was Happy Here (1966), and Davis reunited Tushingham and Redgrave for the comedy Smashing Time (1967); O'Brien's novel was later adapted again as The Country Girls (1983).⁵^•¹⁰

Reception and legacy

The film won the Golden Globe for Best English-Language Foreign Film at the 1965 ceremony.⁷ On Rotten Tomatoes it holds an 83% Tomatometer from six critics and a 64% audience score; Dennis Schwartz called it "the film that made Rita Tushingham a star," while Joan Didion, reviewing in Vogue, liked the story but found the picture itself spurious.² A contemporary Letterboxd reviewer describes it as an overlooked Woodfall production that trades the social urgency of earlier kitchen-sink adaptations for a bittersweet coming-of-age romance with a flavor of French poetic realism in its Dublin docks finale.⁶ The film has been issued on Blu-ray by the BFI and streams on the Criterion Channel, which places it in its British New Wave collection.⁶^•¹²

A separate American television film titled The Girl With Green Eyes, directed by John Erman and starring Rita Tushingham, Paul Winfield, and Jonathan Goldsmith, aired in the United States on 3 January 1977; it is unrelated to the 1964 feature.¹³

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026