Educating Rita

“Sometimes students end up being the best teachers.”

Rita (Julie Walters) is a 26-year-old hairdresser with a quick tongue who signs up for the Open University because she wants to find out who she might be. Her tutor, Dr. Frank Bryant (Michael Caine), is a professor of literature whose marriage has failed and who rarely gets through a day without a bottle or two of whisky. Lewis Gilbert, adapting Willy Russell's stage play, keeps most of it to two people talking in a tutor's study.