Room at the Top

Finally I'm able to conclude my articles on the Best Picture nominations of 1959 with Room at the Top. The DVD is out of print in the United States, so I had to buy one off of eBay that came all the way from Hong Kong. It was worth the effort, because in the final analysis I think it's the best of the five films that were nominated.

Directed by Jack Clayton, in his feature debut, Room at the Top was one of the prime examples of the British New Wave, an outgrowth of the "Angry Young Man" movement in British theater in the fifties, that led to films that were stark, gritty views of working class people. Based on a novel by John Braine, the film was shot in black and white and you can almost feel the soot in the air. It was also brazen for its time, and it's frank portrayals of pre- and extramarital sex earned it an X rating in Britain.

The story centers around Joe Lampton, played by Laurence Harvey. He's just arrived in a middle-sized mill town, but it's a metropolis compared to where he came from--the house he lived in that was bombed during the war hasn't been rebuilt. He has a job working for the town government, but his ambitions exceed his class. Therefore, he turns his eye on the pretty young daughter of the local bigshot (Heather Sears), vowing to marry her, even though he doesn't particularly love her that much.

Joe has a chip on his shoulder, and resents anyone acting superior to him, particularly Sears' erstwhile boyfriend, who was a hero during the war (Joe was a P.O.W.). Joe schemes to win Sears, but when her father sends her away to France to try to cool the romance Joe falls into an affair with an older, lonely married woman (Simone Signoret). Much to his amazement, he realizes he loves Signoret, but her husband won't grant a divorce.

What I admired most about this film was its honesty. Harvey's character is a prick, which is tricky business when the entire film hangs on him. As an audience, we don't really root for him, but we can identify with his struggle. When Sears' boyfriend continually calls him "sergeant," or when he's beaten up by teddy boys, we can feel a pang of empathy for this guy, who has been shit on all his life and just wants a leg up.

More sympathy is for Signoret, who won an Oscar for her portrayal. She's an outsider, a French girl who is stuck in a dingy English town. She strives for some culture, participating in the local amateur theater group, but suffers in an unhappy marriage with a philandering husband (chillingly played by Allan Cuthbertson). When Harvey asks him why he won't let her go, Cuthbertson replies, "Because she's my wife," asserting pride of ownership over any human emotion.

In addition to Signoret, the screenplay won the Oscar (beating Ben-Hur). Harvey was also nominated, as was Hermione Baddeley as Signoret's friend. According to one source, it's the briefest performance ever to get a nomination--two minutes and twenty seconds of screen time.

As I was watching the film I wondered if Woody Allen had seen it recently before he wrote Match Point, as the similarities are striking. Allen added a murder, but otherwise they're both clinical studies of the class structure of British life.