Before every threatrical “type,” there is an archetype, the model which inspires every version of that theme that follows.

At some point, sometime between the Golden Age of Tony Randall and “Ellen,” the “gay best friend” emerged as a movie, stage and tV trope, a character invented to give the leading lady support, self-confidence and if need be, a makeover.

“A Taste of Honey” is a dated but deliciously detailed slice of British “Kitchen Sink Realism,” a drama about an impulsive, confused teen stumbling through variations of the same mistakes her working class floozy of a mother made.

More than a few characters within it come off as stock “types.”

But consider what Shelagh Delaney’s 1958 play grappled with. There’s an inter-racial romance at a time when British culture and British cinema pretended, for most intents and purposes, that Black people didn’t live there. An out-of-wedlock pregnancy ensues.

And homosexuality was illegal at the time, “the love that dare not speak its name,” the ruin of Oscar Wilde and open secret of Noel Coward. Who does our heroine turn to in her pregnant hour of need? Her new “gay best friend.”

For his third film, after “Look Back in Anger” and “The Entertainer,” stage director turned “angry young man” filmmaker Tony Richardson made a most unconventional drama destined to play as utterly conventional over half a century later. His and Delaney’s archetypes became stock “types” with decades of sitcoms, rom-coms and “coming out” stories to follow once the Western world got around to accepting love is color blind and that gay people exist and have the same humanity as anybody else.

“A Taste of Honey” is a gritty black and white tale of post-war Britain still in the economic doldrums, with class mobility a dream not yet awakened.

Sassy Jo, played as a naive, wide-eyed innocent with a hint of “fury” about her by screen newcomer Rita Tushingham, is a teen more than ready to bail out of high school. And she’s had more than enough of her unaffectionate, deadbeat tippler of a mother (Dora Bryan).

Mum Helen may lead the sing-alongs down’tha’pub and have the eye of younger and well-off WWII vet Peter (Robert Stephens). But Jo figures 17 years of neglect and dodging landlords because her mother never pays the rent is enough.

Salford, the port town part of greater Manchester, has plenty of just-scrape-by working class jobs available to a lass like her.

But that nice chap (Paul Danquah) who helped carry her armfull of belongings from the bus to the next apartment they won’t pay rent on makes a lot of eye contact. When he sees her again with a skinned knee, he bandages her up at his workplace. He’s the cook on a coastal freighter. And he’s interested.

She’s interested in the fact that he’s interested.

Amid the whirl of her mother’s determination to remarry, with her ill-tempered, hard-drinking one-eyed new mate deciding the endless scorn of a teenager is not for him, Jo takes a tumble for her sailor. And when she realizes she’s pregnant, he’s already sailed away.

Luckily, she’s already sharing a flat with newly-homeless Geoff (Murray Melvin), who is sensitive, overtly fey and yet responsible enough to want to care for her and her baby on the way.

“You need somebody to love you while you’re looking for somebody to love,” he tells her.

Richardson opens the film with a frenetic girls’ game of netball, energetically shot with a hand-held camera, and spends the rest of the movie dazzling us with his attention to working class detail — the dumpy, tiny flats, the less-than-scenic working waterfront and the proletarian amusements of the proles.

We duck into pubs and a dance club (where Elvis Costello’s dad is the band leader) and visit the downmarket peep shows of the semi-seedy “resort” town of Blackpool.

But it is Delaney’s dialogue that reminds us that it’s not melodrama if you’re actually living through it.

“The dream is gone,” Jo sighs. “But the baby’s real,” Geoff reminds her.

Jo’s teen sarcasm prefigures the wisecracking Beatles/Python era to come — cutting remarks that draw blood.

“You don’t look 40,” Jo tartly tells her “tart” of a mother. “You look a sort of well-preserved sixty!”

The script is a grab-bag of tropes, some of them already worn and weary at the time of its composition — clueless, compassion-free landlords, hated stepfather, neglectful self-interested mother, et al.

But the interracial romance is a marvel of tolerance totally and tonally out of step with its times. Jo doesn’t make much of it and assures her ring-offering lover that her mother “isn’t prejudiced.”

And the thing about Geoff is that she “sees” him — they meet when he shops for Italian loafers in the shop where she works — without more of a clue than his manner and voice.

“I’ve always wanted to know about people like you,” she enthuses. “Mind your own business,” he snaps.

“You’re like a big sister to me,” Jo crows.

Tushingham is gloriously real — by turns fragile and defiant, angry and fearful and fun in what would turn out to be a career-making performance. Her first film would lead to a career that included turns in “Doctor Zhivago,” “The Knack…And How to Get It” and even Edgar Wright’s recent “Last Night in Soho.”

Melvin finds pathos in spine in a character that could easily have become a stereotype. He goe light on the affectations, so much so that he’d never pass muster as a Kenneth Williams impersonator, and the role is the richer for that. His career put him in “Damn the Defiant!” “Barry Lyndon,” “The Lost City of Z” and a recurring character on TV’s “Torchwood” before he died in 2023.

And Richardson would top “Honey” with “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” and the ribald romp “Tom Jones” followed by a long career in Hollywood (“The Border,” “Hotel New Hampshire”).

But back in their “angry” youth, all of them contributed to the revival of British cinema through a reinvention of drama, films that got down and dirty and down to the brass tacks, “kitchen sink” and all.

Rating: TV-PG, adult themes, smoking

Cast: Rita Tushingham, Dora Bryan, Murray Melvin, Paul Danquah and Robert Stephens.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Tony Richardson, adapted from the play by Shelagh Delaney.

Running time: 1:41