Room at the Top (1959): The Birth of British New Wave Cinema (Review)

Released to Blu-ray this week by Studio Canal’s Vintage Classics label is the feature that effectively gave birth to the British film industry’s New Wave period of the 1960s, Jack Clayton’s 1959 movie Room at the Top, starring Laurence Harvey and Simone Signoret. The opening shot of Harvey’s threadbare socks as he sits, momentarily shoeless, in one of British Rail’s less than salubrious compartments, en route to a new career in a new town, heralds the new dawn of the 1960s. Everything changed for British cinema as stiff upper lips and stuffy drawing rooms were out, while regional accents and a heavy dose of social realism were in. This was the era of angry young men, railing passionately at the kitchen sinks of their seedy, L-shaped rooms. In the period after the release of Room at the Top, movies like Look Back in Anger, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner followed and capitalised on the prevailing mood, but this film, the feature-length debut of Jack Clayton, was where it all started.

Joe Lampton, the protagonist of Room at the Top, has long been a hero of sorts for me – ever since I read John Braine’s 1957 novel during my late teens. Coming from a Northern provincial town with smoke-belching chimneys surrounding its skyline, and possessing a fair sized chip on my shoulder regarding class and social injustice, Room at the Top was always going to resonate with me. Admittedly, St Helens is more Dufton, the industrial town that Lampton’s escaping from, than the upmarket Warnley (Warley in the novel), that he finds himself in, and I’ve never had Lampton’s ambition as I’d rather rip it all down than join it!

Played by Laurence Harvey, Lampton arrives in Warnley to take up a clerical role in the Borough’s Treasurer’s department, and while it may be low paid and seem like a bit of a dead-end for some, for Lampton it’s his big break. His acceptance of the role already means he’s escaped what society had marked for him – the daily grind of factory life in his hometown of Dufton – and he finds himself lodging in the most affluent suburb of Warnley, known as “the Top”. This is arguably an incredible feat of social mobility already, but Lampton doesn’t intend to stop there and, determined to get ahead, he sets his sights on Susan Brown (Heather Sears), the daughter of an influential industrial magnate. This romantic endeavour initially makes him an enemy of Susan’s parents, and although Mr Brown (Donald Wolfit), pulls out all the stops to stymie this working class lad and put him back in his place, Susan is unshakeably smitten.

Matters are complicated when Joe begins to find himself drawn to Alice Aisgill (Simone Signoret), a lonely French émigré ten years his senior, who’s unhappily married to George Aisgill (Allan Cuthbertson), a privileged, middle-class snob and serial adulterer. Though Joe initially feels a tryst with Alice is just something to pass the time in his pursuit of Susan and greater social mobility, he soon succumbs to the very real, deep-seated passions of their affair. Deciding that his future lies with Alice and forgetting his ambition, Joe’s revised plans are thrown into disarray when Susan reveals she’s having his baby, and her father offers him a job at his firm with a generous salary – on the proviso that he stops seeing Alice and marries his daughter.

This 1959 film version is just as strong as the novel, and in some ways the changes made for the big screen actually improve some areas – or at the very least offer them a new and interesting light. What’s sometimes missing is the novel’s post-war flavour as Braine has set his story during an unspecified period after World War II, with Joe himself having served in the RAF (albeit spending most of the conflict in a POW camp in Germany). The shadow of the war looms large over Braine’s writing and, in particular, his characterisation of Joe as, on paper, he’s someone who’s still young enough to believe that he has a future, but realistic enough to know that the system is rigged against working class lads like him.

Clement Attlee’s socialist Labour party may have got into government, but the tides of their promised equality aren’t turning quickly enough for Lampton. In provincial Warley he’s constantly reminded of his status by former officers who are the same age as him, and the old boys network of capitalist mandarins who run the town. There’s also a sense that, in a society well used to the precarious state of war, people have become accustomed to grabbing what fun they can as, although the war may be over, rationing is still in place, and the habits of extra-marital affairs and small-town corruption are hard to shake. Where Clayton’s movie maintains the shadow of wartime is in the character of Alice or, more specifically, the casting of Simone Signoret.

If the British New Wave/kitchen sink cycle of films has one failing for me, it’s in its lack of representative female voices, and in a world of movie adaptations of works by Braine, John Osborne, Alan Sillitoe and Stan Barstow (to name but a few), only Shelagh Delaney stands out. Delaney’s A Taste of Honey is rightly lauded, but it’s a rare example of a kitchen sink movie that features female protagonists who more than match their working class male counterparts. When adapting the 1960 Lynne Reid Banks novel The L-Shaped Room for the big screen, director Bryan Forbes made the heroine a French woman because, he reasoned, English audiences would more easily accept her impending, unmarried, single-parent status if she were from the continent.

Even in early 60s Britain the general consensus was that it was the French who fucked, not us, as Philip Larkin would put it in his poem Annus Mirabilis, “Sexual intercourse began in 1963 … between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP”. But Forbes wasn’t the first to accede to this belief of a ludicrous puritanism that still held sway within British society. Room at the Top changes the nationality of Alice from the Englishwoman of novel, to French and, in doing so, robs us of a homegrown heroine for the genre. The decision was made because it was felt that audiences would accept the adultery if it featured a more free-thinking European who had seen something of the world, and had been rocked by its events.

I must admit that the gambit works better here than it did in Forbes’ decision to cast Leslie Caron in his movie. For a start, there’s that sense of the war again, but Alice’s gratitufe at being rescued by George from the devastation of Nazi-occupied France cannot sustain a marriage, nor can a small town like Warnley keep Alice. The decision to cast a French actor immediately sets her apart from her co-stars who play characters that are Yorkshire, born and bred, and as an audience, we cannot fail to understand her isolation and the sense of her true self being slowly stifled from within. Just as Joe’s reminded of his status and ‘his place’ by his so-called ‘betters’, so too is Alice expected to remember her fortune at not only surviving the war, but being gifted this new opportunity by George.

Outlined as it is here by Clayton and his screenwriter, Neil Paterson (who won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for his work on this), it’s small wonder that Alice and Joe find their way to one another. Then there’s the fact that the role is played by Signoret, an actress who oozes sex appeal and embodies the part so perfectly, she was given the Oscar for Best Actress, and also took home the BAFTA for Best Foreign Actress too. It’s true that there’s a direct line from Alice Aisgill to the dream of the classy, sensual older woman who has zero airs and graces, but all that followed from this point on was a short-hand sketch that denigrated the romance and tragedy inherent in both Braine’s novel and this adaptation.

So, what then of our leading man? Laurence Harvey was an actor who often received criticism for his allegedly wooden performances, but it’s important to remember that he was, in his time, a big name international star who was Oscar nominated for his performance here. I think he’s great as Joe, despite being a little too old for the role, and then there’s the small matter of his wavering accent. Harvey was born in Lithuania, spent his formative years in South Africa, and arrived in the UK in 1946 at the age of eighteen, which makes it hardly surprising that his Yorkshire accent isn’t wholly convincing.

Where Harvey really convinces in the role is in his suitably brooding intensity which, when combined with just the right amount of Jack the Lad,, saw him reprise the role in the 1965 sequel Life at the Top. His Joe Lampton is the one I personally envision when re-reading Braine’s work or picturing the character, and he’s still the one to beat when it comes to actors who subsequently tackled the part on screen. Kenneth Haigh played Lampton in the 1970-1972 series Man at the Top and its big-screen spin-off of the same name released in 1973, and Matthew McNulty took on the role in the faithful 2012 BBC adaptation by Amanda Coe, which co-starred Maxine Peake as Alice – at last giving the story and the genre a strong and British female protagonist.

The extras for this Studio Canal Vintage Classics release include a new interview with Delena Kidd (who had a small role in the movie as Eva), an extract from a BEHP audio interview with Sir John Woolf, two audio Commentaries – the first with Jo Botting and the second with Neil Sinyard, a stills gallery, and a trailer.

Mark’s Archive – Room at the Top (1959)