Plot intro
Joe Lampton (Laurence Harvey) is a working class, ambitious young man who gets a job in Yorkshire which connects him to people of greater wealth and higher social status. He does what any hot-blooded young man does and ends up sexually entangled with two women. The first is young Susan Brown (Heather Sears), whom he wants to marry and whose parents disapprove of Joe. The second is sultry, French Alice Aisgill (Simone Signoret) who is 10 years older, unhappily married and desperate to escape her life…
Room at the Top is an appropriate film to round off the '50s. It continues the trend of topic-du-jour films which tackle a hard-hitting theme and analyse it to death through a female character. In the other Best Actress movies of the '50s we’ve had domestic abuse, Italian immigrants, mental health, and the death penalty, and we end the decade with class and sex. Rock on!
Indeed, for anyone who has seen a lot of films from this era, Room at the Top is surprisingly open when it comes to sex. Characters snog each other profusely in cars and dark corners and discuss the act immediately afterwards with an openness that seems tame to our eyes but is quite explicit for 1959. It was rated X in America and even got banned in some parts of the world. The sexual element is very pertinent and this will continue into the Best Actress winners of the '60s. It’s interesting that the Best Picture winners of this era were colourful musicals and historical epics while the acting awards went to more intense, domestic pieces.
But for me Room at the Top is one of the weaker additions to the Best Actress canon. As I said, its cultural significance has been a bit lost to the winds of time because it feels tame when once it was controversial. And the way it addresses class is so lacking in subtlety it’s almost comical. There are some decent moments that illustrate the class divides and difficulties in that perennially bleak part of the UK, The North. Joe attempts to approach Susan and her family at a swanky ball, leading to an immensely awkward conversation as it quickly becomes apparent that they just want him to go away. Susan’s boyfriend, a former soldier of higher ranking than Joe was in the war, talks down to him by calling him by his army rank, a constant reminder of his social inferiority.
But these observational moments are counter-balanced by lengthy, over-written scenes that inevitably end up with Joe yelling “I’m working class, I am!” because apparently we need to be reminded of this every 10 minutes. We are spoon-fed the conflicts in a very Downton Abbey kind of way with characters almost explaining to the camera “You can’t marry her, she’s too wealthy and upper class and you are not etc etc”. The increasingly tragic events in the story become predictable and expected and as a result the over-two-hour runtime feels even longer.
I also don’t think Signoret gives the best of performances, at least compared to the sort of hard-hitting stuff we’ve had from Vivien Leigh, Ingrid Bergman and Shirley Booth or to the women she defeated (Doris Day, both Hepburns AND Elizabeth Taylor). She’s sultry and serene and her outsiderliness as a European in homogenous Yorkshire is spoken about but I don’t think the loneliness and desperation is fully conveyed by her. The character and performance are drearily lugubrious and melodramatic so her inevitable death didn’t elicit the reaction the writers hoped from me.
Interestingly, though, she was the first French actress to win an Oscar and no other French actor would win until Juliette Binoche in 1997, followed by Marion Cotillard in 2008. Her artistic credentials were pretty substantial. She lived under Nazi Occupation in Paris during which she mixed with artistic crowds at the famous Cafe de Flore. She stuck with international and independent films for the most part of her career, avoiding the superficial glitz and glamour of Hollywood. I imagine her miserably chain-smoking and drinking wine and discussing Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and being very, very French.
She was married to two blokes in the movie industry called Yves. The second, Yves Montand, is considered one of the greatest French actors around and indeed his performance in the classic French films Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources is astonishing. He did, however, have a few affairs including a well-publicised one with Marilyn Monroe. I don’t think he could have picked a woman more different from Signoret herself.
Signoret would achieve one more Academy Award nomination for Ship of Fools (also Vivien Leigh’s final film) and she died from cancer aged 64 in 1985. She and Montand are buried beside each other in Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
The scene in which Joe tries to approach and make conversation with the wealthy Brown family and their friends during a ball is fraught with Abigail's-Party-style awkwardness.
Signoret’s death felt trite and expected all the way through. Killing off the super-tragic, super-miserable character is far too easy to do and it felt like lazy writing from the creators.
Black and white film, footage of gritty streets with working class poverty on full display, passionate displays of infidelity and sex: yes everyone, it’s the British New Wave of cinema, highlighting ‘kitchen-sink realism’ for the first time!
Let’s start with the honest kicker, time hasn’t been that kind to this film. Watching it now, after many evolutions of this genre, this is just a bit too unrelenting, a bit too on-the-nose. But I want to be kind because the audiences of 1959 had probably never seen anything like this. ‘Kitchen-sink realism’ hit Britain's novels, plays and films across the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, always featuring angry young men from working class backgrounds often fighting for success or to survive. It threw a spotlight on grimy pubs, small living rooms and mucky streets. Gone was the glamour of wealthy environments and forefront is ‘reality’ - booze-swilling loud-mouthed men and women and their day to day lives. Think John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger (which famously showed women ironing on stage) and Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey (where a teenager has a baby out of wedlock with a Black sailor and then moves in with her gay friend). One detail that stuck with me was when we see a religious sampler on the wall in a bare country cottage, obviously handmade and somehow depressing in its status as lone decoration.
This film is right at the forefront of this movement, no doubt shocking audiences. It features sex prominently (another staple of the movement, trust the British) but also we see other tropes like the non-elegant woman. Hermione Baddeley nabbed an Oscar nomination for her small role as Elsie (two minutes 19 seconds - the shortest ever screen appearance for a nomination), a common-as-muck type who plays the piano loudly, and eventually shows an alarming burst of rage towards our anti-hero, northerner Joe Lampton (regional accents being another trope).
Amid all this riotous change, Simone Signoret walked away with the Oscar as Alice Aisgill. Looking at it after several decades, it’s a nice, subtle performance but doesn’t have anything particularly special about it. But again I’m thinking of our late ‘50s audiences who wouldn’t have seen a sensual, jealous and romantic woman displayed in such a way. It must have felt truly groundbreaking and while she holds herself well, her finest moment for me came at the very start of the film where married woman Alice shows interest and jealousy when handsome Joe flirts with Susan, a rich (and available) woman. I liked the detail of the amateur dramatics group (again highlighting real leisure activities) and there’s a great deal of unbridled lust (not least when Joe who dates Alice and Susan simultaneously persuades Susan to let him take her virginity).
It’s not a film or performance that’s stuck in my mind particularly and I think it’s notable that this was Signoret’s only win, but as a piece of history and a film at the turn of a hugely influential new movement, I enjoyed the chance to note this film, and enjoy its inclusion in the often glossy and rich-obsessed Oscars.
I enjoyed the chance to watch this piece of film history and honour the British New Wave in doing so.
This film hasn’t aged that well for me, proving quite dull and uninteresting. Signoret is fine but no one excels.
Mark
3/10
