Bryan Forbes (1962)

There are things in The L-Shaped Room that point up Bryan Forbes’s persisting limitations as a film-maker.  When his camera moves round Notting Hill, where the story is set and the movie was shot, he conveys no sense of real life going on there.   The streets may be actual London streets (and the cinematography is by Douglas Slocombe) but the details the camera picks up – the signs outside shops, a News of the World advertisement on a hoarding – have the quality of set dressing.  (The scene-setting introduction compares unfavourably with Ken Hughes’s The Small World of Sammy Lee, which I saw a couple of weeks before The L-Shaped Room.)   The participants in a CND march taking place at the margins of a later sequence come across not as political activists but as banner-waving movie extras.  The central relationship of the film is between Jane, a young, unmarried mother-to-be who rents a room in the attic of a grotty boarding house, and Toby, a saturnine would-be writer and tenant on the floor below.  When he finds out Jane is pregnant by another man, the relationship starts to founder.  We notice a headline in a newspaper – ‘KEEP SMILING’ – in the mess of Toby’s room.  We can’t fail to notice the irony:  Bryan Forbes’s bald overemphasis makes sure of that.   Although John Barry wrote a score for the film, it’s upstaged by the Brahms Piano Concerto No 1, played by Peter Katin.   The Brahms is too much:  it comes across mostly as a rip-off of David Lean’s use of Rachmaninov in Brief Encounter, occasionally as a means of stressing the gulf between its own sublimeness and the story’s unlovely locale.  The music plays, for example, while the camera lingers on the walls of the greasy spoon where Jane gets a waitressing job in order to pay the rent.

Yet his handling of the relationship between Jane (Leslie Caron) and Toby (Tom Bell) also shows the best of Bryan Forbes.   I don’t know how much of the couple’s dialogue is his invention and how much has been retained from the source material, Lynne Reid Banks’s 1960 novel of the same name, but Forbes’s screenplay for The L-Shaped Room includes some very well-written conversations, and the two main actors are admirable.  I was puzzled by the heroine’s forename, when it’s made clear from the start that she’s French.  There seems no good reason for this other than that Reid Banks’s heroine, who’s English, is also called Jane but it’s hard to fault Leslie Caron’s characterisation.  The Frenchness is effective:  Jane’s nationality and Caron’s sophistication and naturalness as a screen performer – she expresses emotions more fully, more physically than the rest of the cast – combine to suggest that Jane is a cut above.  (We learn she’s from a middle-class family.)  When she views the room in the boarding house and first moves in, Jane is careful to keep her distance and her cool, even though she’s naturally upset by her circumstances and angered by the unscrupulous nerve of the landlady, Doris (Avis Bunnage), in charging what she does for the damp, cockroach-infested, L-shaped room.    As Jane gets to know Toby and Johnny (Brock Peters), a jazz musician and the tenant on the other side of a paper-thin partition between the two top-floor rooms, she gradually becomes more easily communicative.  You never notice Leslie Caron indicating this change; you simply register, and believe, that it’s occurred.  Tom Bell imparts, from the beginning, the brittleness of Toby’s character – he does so even when Toby is (as he often is) witty and charming.   The way Bell moves and the set of his facial muscles intimate a young man tense with a sense of rejection, weighed down by the chips on his shoulder.  Toby’s inability to accept that Jane is carrying another man’s child (even though that man is definitely an ex-boyfriend) doesn’t come out of nowhere.  The potential for Toby’s selfishness and insecurity to express themselves, in a crisis, as cruel unreasonableness is always there in Tom Bell’s portrait.  And the character’s writing ambitions are a useful pretext for Toby’s occasionally purple turn of phrase.

It’s a pity that the least satisfactory scene between Caron and Bell is the big bust-up when Johnny has told Toby that Jane is pregnant and he turns on her.  You can understand why Bryan Forbes liked the idea of staging this showdown on a flight of stairs in the boarding house but it puts pressure on the actors to keep finding interesting ways of moving round in a constricted space and the effect is a little artificial.  On the whole, though, the interactions between Jane and Toby are exceptionally convincing.   In the early stages of their relationship, they’re relaxing happily in a public park, when a warden (Joan Ingram) warns them about canoodling.  Toby’s fury at this intervention and Jane’s hurt puzzlement at the intensity of his reaction are a foreshadowing of what will happen when something bigger comes between them.  Once it does, Bryan Forbes rather skates over how they manage to patch things up but the scenes between the couple on Christmas Eve dramatise very well the thin ice on which Jane has to skate with Toby.   His outbursts of anger, followed by self-recrimination and self-pity, make him dislikeable in a challenging way (and make him hate and feel sorry for himself all the more).   There’s an unusual consistency in his personality:  in the fine scene in which he visits Jane on the maternity ward after her child has been born, Toby’s sheepish contrition is modified by his anxiety to tell Jane that the short story he’s completed (and which he’s called ‘The L-Shaped Room’) is the best thing he’s ever written.  She, by this point, has decided to return to her parents in France.  Leslie Caron captures beautifully Jane’s calm, regretful recognition that it’s the sensible thing to do.

The L-Shaped Room is, I think, a sincerely feminist film.   This comes across at an obvious level in the exchange between Jane and the obstetrician with a sideline in illegal abortions, who first confirms that she is pregnant and assumes she must want either to marry or to be rid of the baby.  It comes across more penetratingly in the arrogant assumptions of the younger men in the story, Johnny as well as Toby, about how few sexual partners a ‘decent’ woman should have.  Emlyn Williams overdoes the nasty suavity of the obstetrician but three other small male roles are excellently played:  by Mark Eden, as the man who made Jane pregnant; by Bernard Lee, as a regular visitor to the landlady’s quarters; and by Gerald Sim, as the humorous and sympathetic hospital doctor who eventually delivers Jane’s baby.  Brock Peters as Johnny is less satisfactory.  Best known for his role in To Kill a Mockingbird, Peters is too deliberate in everything he does and out of sync with the rhythm of nearly every scene in which he appears.  His lack of subtlety is more of a problem because Johnny’s moral attitudes are interestingly and believably confused:  although he inveighs against ‘the whores downstairs’ (Patricia Phoenix and Verity Edmett), he appears to decide that Jane is no better than them not because she’s single and pregnant but because she sleeps with Toby, and Johnny is jealous.  His subsequent reconciliation with Jane is implausible though this is probably the fault of the script rather than of Brock Peters.

The key supporting parts for women are Doris, the prostitute Sonia (Phoenix) and the lonely, superannuated music hall entertainer Mavis (Cicely Courtneidge), who lives on the ground floor of the boarding house with her cat, her distant memories of a theatrical career and a photograph of the woman, now dead, who was the lesbian love of Mavis’s life.   Sonia, like many of her predecessors on screen, sits at her dressing table philosophising about her line of work.  Doris is quickly established as a mercenary bigot.  The obviousness of all three characters makes you fear the worst and there are times when the acting of Avis Bunnage and Cicely Courtneidge is overexplicit and stagy.   Yet they and Patricia Phoenix demonstrate what can happen when an actor really commits to a caricature.  There’s condescension in the conception and writing of these roles but the actresses find their own truth in them.   (Phoenix is especially good and Bunnage, with her darting eyes and aggressive snout, projects a remarkable brutal shrewdness.)  When the boarding house personnel gather for a knees-up on Christmas Day and Cecily Courtneidge’s Mavis dresses up in the soldier’s uniform she wore in the theatre, for a rendering of ‘Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty’, you know the sequence is going to be a big number in just the ways that it turns out to be.  Mavis forgets her words then recovers then her routine is interrupted by Jane’s going into labour.  Yet the actors’ verve and conviction – and Bryan Forbes’s belief in them and in what they’re doing – make the scene powerfully engaging.

11 August 2015