The L-Shaped Room **** (1962, Leslie Caron, Tom Bell, Bernard Lee, Cicely Courtneidge, Brock Peters, Emlyn Williams, Nanette Newman, Patricia Phoenix, Avis Bunnage) – Classic Movie Review 2427

Writer-director Bryan Forbes’s 1962 film is a fragrant slice of Sixties London kitchen-sink life. It is one of the highspots of the brief flowering of British Sixties New Wave cinema. But it has international French star Leslie Caron in the main role as a pregnant, unmarried 27-year old French woman called Jane Fosset, who takes a room in a seedy boarding house in a then run-down Notting Hill.

There, she moves into the L-shaped room of the title and befriends a young man called Toby (Tom Bell), a struggling young writer who lives on the first floor. They start a romance that is disrupted when he learns she is pregnant.

The building is full of unlikely but quirky and fascinating characters, all of them social outsiders who are beloved of novel writers. Among them are an old lesbian actress (Cicely Courtneidge), a maladjusted black American (Brock Peters), a pair of prostitutes (Patricia Phoenix, Avis Bunnage), and of course an unpublished writer – that’s Toby.

The former actor turned director Forbes keeps the characters and storylines involving, and ensures excellent performances from the cast. Caron is outstanding and performance deservedly won her the Golden Globe Award and BAFTA Award for Best Actress and she was also Oscar-nominated as Best Actress.

Douglas Slocombe’s black and white cinematography is striking and Forbes again uses the distinguished John Barry as composer. Both the material and realist handling have dated well. At 126 minutes, it is a long movie, perhaps over-long and it is cut to 120 minutes on home video. Forbes’s screenplay is based on Lynne Reid Banks’s once famous novel.

Also in the cast are Bernard Lee, Emlyn Williams, Nanette Newman, Harry Locke, Ellen Dryden, Jenny White, Gerry Duggan, Joan Ingram, Mark Eden, Stanley Morgan, Gerald Sim, Kay Walsh and Anthony Booth in an early role, playing Youth in Street.

The Smiths open their 1986 album The Queen Is Dead with a sound sample from the scene at the house in London during the Christmas season, in which Mavis leads her fellow Brits through an off-key chorus of Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty.

Peter Katin’s recording of Johannes Brahms’s Piano Concerto No 1 in D minor, Opus 15 is used as the background music, with excerpts throughout the film.

Forbes offered Paula Prentiss the main role, but they finally worked together in 1975 in The Stepford Wives.

Phoenix and Booth married on 10 September 1986 till her death on 18 September 1986, aged 62.

RIP Anthony Booth, known for Till Death Us Do Part (1968), The L-Shaped Room (1962), Brannigan (1975) and The Contender (2000), who died on 25 September 2017, aged 85.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2427

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