Room at the Top **** (1959, Laurence Harvey, Simone Signoret, Heather Sears, Donald Wolfit) – Classic Movie Review 1483

Director Jack Clayton’s influential 1959 double Oscar-winning film is a Fifties British classic in its own right and significant as the first of the British New Wave of realistic film dramas.

Its star Laurence Harvey may have had a relatively slim talent but he is just right in the film that he will always be remembered for. Nevertheless, it is Best Actress Oscar-winning Simone Signoret who easily steals the show in her scenes as his spurned lover Alice Aisgill.

Harvey is a perfect fit for Joe Lampton, the ambitious, weak and amoral Northern English young accountant/clerk determined to succeed in business, who sacrifices the married older woman (Simone Signoret) he loves in his social-climbing scheme to marry nonentity Susan Brown (Heather Sears), the insipid daughter of a boorish wealthy factory owner/businessman (Donald Wolfit).

In its day, it was a British cinema landmark for its frank discussion of sex, zeitgeist-capturing portrait of disillusion and disaffection, and its in-depth depiction of working class life. As influential in the cinema as Look Back in Anger was in changing the face of British theatre, it led the way to the series of British kitchen sink realist films like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Kind of Loving, A Taste of Honey, Live Now – Pay Later and This Sporting Life.

It is another one of those British films of the period with a great cast, which includes Ambrosine Phillpotts, Donald Houston, Raymond Huntley, John Westbrook, Allan Cuthbertson, Richard Pasco, Ian Hendry, Mary Peach, Miriam Karlin, Wilfrid Lawson and Hermione Baddeley.

As well as Signoret, screen-writer Neil Paterson also won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for his adaptation of John Braine’s 1957 bestseller, which he said was based on Guy de Maupassant’s Bel Ami, filmed in 1947 as The Private Affairs of Bel Ami. De Maupassant was Braine’s favourite author.

There were four other Academy Award nominations, including for Best Picture, Best Director for Clayton and Best Actor for Harvey and Best Supporting Actress (Hermione Baddeley). Baddeley’s performance is the shortest ever to be nominated for an acting Oscar, with just two minutes and 20 seconds of screen time. There were three Bafta awards, for Best Film, Best British Film and Best Actress (Signoret). Signoret also won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival.

It was filmed at Shepperton Studios, with extensive location work in Halifax, Yorkshire, standing in for the fictional towns of Warnley and Dufton, with some scenes shot in Bradford.

Sequels: Life at the Top in 1965 and Man at the Top.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1483

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