Jack Clayton (1959)

Room at the Top was released in Britain in January 1959, a few months ahead of Tony Richardson’s Look Back in Anger.  Jack Clayton’s film was thereby the first of the kitchen-sink dramas of the British ‘New Wave’, and it may also be the best of them.  This adaptation, by Neil Paterson, of John Braine’s 1957 novel would probably have been even better with a different Joe Lampton.  Laurence Harvey is good in the love-making scenes with Simone Signoret’s Alice Aisgill, the married woman who is ten years Joe’s senior, and in the closing stages, after Alice’s death.  He never quite convinces, though, as the socially and professionally ambitious, chippy protagonist – determined to get on in the post-war world (the story is set in 1947), with years as a soldier and POW behind him, and the prospect of white-collar security and stasis ahead.  Harvey’s problems are a shaky Yorkshire accent and, quite simply, his height:  it’s hard for him to be looked down on.  A year or so later, Albert Finney broke through in Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.  With slightly different timings, Joe Lampton, rather than Arthur Seaton, might have been Finney’s first great screen role.

Otherwise, it’s hard to fault the casting, especially Simone Signoret’s.  Alice isn’t French in the novel but changing her nationality was an inspired idea, not only enabling Signoret to play the role but also sharpening Alice’s sense of isolation in her unhappy marriage to the abusive cold fish businessman George Aisgill (Allan Cuthbertson), and, more largely, in the provincial North of England.  Signoret’s blend of sensuous power and emotional rawness is a wonder – so, too, her ability suddenly to change the temperature of a scene (the first big falling out between Joe and Alice is a good example).  How she does this is imperceptible; that she does it, unarguable.  It’s heartening that Signoret’s acting, which still feels modern, was fully recognised in the major film awards of the time.  Heather Sears is Susan Brown, daughter of a local-lad-made-good industrial magnate (Donald Wolfit) and the girl whom Joe sets his sights on before Alice complicates the issue.  Sears is best remembered for playing young women whose romance with the hero is doomed to failure:  the following year, she was Miriam Leivers to Dean Stockwell’s Paul Morel in Jack Cardiff’s first-rate film of Sons and Lovers.  Heather Sears is thoroughly persuasive as Susan, as she would also be as Miriam.

Despite his reputation as a stage ham, Donald Wolfit gives a nicely judged performance.  He’s well partnered by Ambrosine Phillpotts as the snooty Mrs Brown, although John Westbrook overplays nasty Jack Wales, Susan’s socially more suitable suitor, who repeatedly goads Joe by mocking his humble origins.  Jack Clayton and Neil Paterson do well to show entrenched class prejudices as a two-way street:  Beatrice Varley is on screen for only a couple of minutes but she’s piercingly true as Joe’s salt-of-the-earth aunt, who urges her much-loved nephew not to get ideas above his station. Hermione Baddeley is Alice’s friend, Elspeth, whose flat the lovers use for their assignations.  Donald Houston and Richard Pasco are Joe’s work colleagues at the municipal offices.   Smaller parts feature plenty of faces familiar from films and television – Avril Elgar, Ian Hendry, Raymond Huntley, Mary Peach.  Brief appearances by the likes of (among others) Wendy Craig, Basil Dignam, Everley Gregg, Miriam Karlin, Wilfrid Lawson and Prunella Scales didn’t even get a credit.  In a cameo as a drunk who buttonholes Joe to tell him a crap joke, Paul Whitsun-Jones is vividly disgusting.

After Alice dies in a car crash, Joe, mired in self-reproach, gets drunk, too, on a pub crawl around the factory-town backwater he hails from.  He chats up a barmaid (April Olrich) whose boyfriend (Derren Nesbitt), with some of his pals, beats Joe up.  Physically and emotionally floored, and with next to nothing to say, Laurence Harvey comes into his own.  His face is even more expressive in the final sequences, at Joe’s wedding to Susan.  At the close of the novel, this seems still to be going ahead – it’s mentioned on the last page that Susan has gone to London to buy a wedding dress – but Braine stops short of the altar.  The screenplay shrewdly takes things further, to subvert the screen convention of a matrimonial happy ending.  As he sits, trapped, beside Susan in their wedding car, Joe Lampton finally sheds a tear, and not out of sentimental joy.  The film retains John Braine’s name for Joe’s native heath:  Dufton, which is spot on for a Yorkshire limbo.  Neil Paterson adjusts by one letter Braine’s main setting of Warley, presumably inspired by his home city of Bradford.  It becomes Warnley, to nicely admonitory effect.

Braine’s sequel novel, Life at the Top (first published in 1962), was also adapted for the screen, in a 1965 film directed by Ted Kotcheff.  Laurence Harvey again played Joe, who now has everything he wanted – money, family, status – but is still dissatisfied.  No surprises there – or that the follow-up book and film failed to have the impact of forerunners which clearly predicted Joe’s future.  He was more successfully reincarnated, by Kenneth Haigh, as the title character of an ITV drama series, Man at the Top, which ran for a couple of seasons between 1970 and 1972.  The best proof of the enduring strength of the characters Braine created in the original novel came, however, decades later, in a two-part BBC version of Room at the Top shown in 2012.  Written by Amanda Coe and directed by Aisling Walsh, this version didn’t offer a performance in the Simone Signoret class but was nevertheless very well acted all round – with Matthew McNulty (Joe), Maxine Peake (Alice – much the best thing I’ve seen her do) and Jenna Coleman (Susan) in the main parts.  Julia Ford was also, needless to say, splendid, as Joe’s landlady – a part cut from the film.

Over the course of more than thirty years, Jack Clayton directed only seven features (and, before those, one short, the Oscar-winning The Bespoke Overcoat (1956)).  His slim oeuvre also includes The Innocents (1961), The Pumpkin Eater (1964) and The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1987).  It’s a remarkable body of work, even if The Great Gatsby (1974), which looked set to be Clayton’s bonanza, proved anything but.  (I’ve not seen the two other films, Our Mother’s House (1967) and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983).)  In Room at the Top, his first feature, Clayton, with the help of Freddie Francis’s black-and-white cinematography, brings time and place impressively to life – especially the interiors:  pub snugs; the rehearsal and performance venue used by the am-dram group, where Joe first gets to know Susan and Alice; the workplace geography of reception, desks, corridors.  (The location filming was done in Halifax, including its town hall.)  The closing shots of Joe and Susan’s bridal Rolls Royce receding into the future make the heart sink.  The sustained quality of Jack Clayton’s Room at the Top lifts the spirits.

22 December 2021