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    Nostalgia Central
    Home»Movies»Movies by Decade»Movies - 1950s
    Movies - 1950s Movies - R 3 Mins Read

    Room At The Top (1959)

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    Room at the Top was adapted from John Braine’s first novel, about an ambitious young man in a local government office in a large and bleak northern town who makes a set for a wealthy industrialist’s daughter, and – when thwarted – turns to an older married woman.

    Eventually, he is forced into marriage with the girl, the older woman meeting her death after a drinking orgy.

    The character of Joe Lampton is ambivalent, bitter, his social animus perhaps deriving from a slum childhood and a war spent mostly in a prison camp, but driven forward by a kind of confident, day-dreaming quality, a refusal to admit the impossible.

    His eventual translation from the cobblestones of the lower end of the town to the Tudor gables at the top is meant to show his sublimation of life’s values to ambition.

    He has destroyed one life and knowingly goes into a loveless marriage accompanied by the material comforts for which he has always hankered. It is, in his terms, not a bad jail sentence.

    In retrospect, Braine’s book is hardly as startling as it may have seemed at the time. The stance is a traditional, stolid one of disapproval.

    roomatthetop_wendycraig

    In the film, the tight-lipped and rather frigid performance of Laurence Harvey does not explain the character’s motivation. Donald Wolfit, as the industrialist, delivers an impressively theatrical portrait of a nineteenth-century mill-owner, although the performance hardly fits this particular film.

    Simone Signoret, as the older woman, is not too happily cast, either, volatile Gallic temperament not mixing well with Yorkshire reticence.

    But the critics’ admiration was mainly on account of the love scenes between Harvey and Heather Sears; at last someone in a British film actually admitted that the sex act was enjoyable and for the first time such dialogue was passed by the British Board of Film Censors.

    What seemed startling in 1959 had later become banal, but Room at the Top was at least a turning point in this sense.

    Joe Lampton
    Laurence Harvey
    Alice Aisgill

    Simone Signoret
    Susan Brown

    Heather Sears
    Charles Soames

    Donald Houston
    Mr Brown

    Donald Wolfit
    Elspeth

    Hermione Baddeley
    George Aisgill

    Allan Cuthbertson
    Mr Hoylake

    Raymond Huntley
    Jack Wales
    John Westbrook
    Mrs Brown
    Ambrosine Phillpotts
    Teddy Merrick
    Richard Pasco
    Eva Kent
    Delena Kidd
    Cyril Kent
    Ian Hendry
    Mavis
    April Olrich
    June Samson
    Mary Peach
    Bernard
    Anthony Newlands
    Miss Gilchrist
    Avril Elgar
    Miss Breith
    Thelma Ruby
    Bert
    Derren Nesbitt
    Meg
    Prunella Scales
    Mary
    Katharine Page
    Janet
    Anne Leon
    Joan
    Wendy Craig
    Gertrude
    Miriam Karlin
    Reggie
    Kenneth Waller
    Raymond
    Andrew Irvine
    Darnley
    Stephen Jack
    Miss Tanfield
    May Hallatt
    Ethel’s mother
    Sheila Raynor
    Ethel
    Gilda Emmanueli
    Mrs Thomson
    Jane Eccles
    Harry
    Dennis Linford
    Grant
    Michael Atkinson
    Uncle Nat
    Wilfred Lawson

    Director
    Jack Clayton

    Video


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