- Starring
- Laurence Harvey, Simone Signoret, Heather Sears
- Writer
- Neil Paterson
- Director
- Jack Clayton
- Rating
- n/a
- Running Time
- 115 minutes
Overall Score
Rating Summary
Room at the Top follows an ambitious yet bitter young man named Joe Lampton (Harvey) who moves to the city of Warnley to become an accountant at the Treasurer’s Department. He decides to marry Susan Brown (Sears) the daughter of an industrial magnate who looks down on him due to his lower class stature, as a means of social climbing, but he also seeks emotional support in a relationship with Alice Aisgill (Signoret), an older French woman who is unhappily married to an abusive upper-class Englishman named George (Allan Cuthbertson). Eventually, he finds himself trapped in between those two relationships and has to part ways with Alice, despite having developed feelings for her.
Room at the Top is a bit of an odd film to dissect. Released at the height of the British ‘Angry Young Man’ movement, the film is notable as director Jack Clayton was not really among the movement, but rather someone with connections to the British film industry at large, having worked as part of the crew for such notable British productions as The Thief of Bagdad, Moulin Rouge and Moby Dick. Being his directorial debut, a tone and feeling of simmering dread creeping throughout this film was there. It’s well suited as it felt like one of many deliberate stylistic choices in this film.
Watching the film requires an appreciation of the intricacies of its characters, conflict, relationships and conversations, giving viewers a sense of the dark history of a character such as Aisgill thanks to Signoret’s sensual yet understanding performance. On paper, she’s pretty vague but Signoret adds so much more to her through her acting, implying a dejectedness coinciding with a determination to make the best out of her situation and be truly there for a vulnerable Joe. Harvey gives somewhat of a blank-slate performance as the complicated Joe but it works in service of the character and he can still be fairly likeable when he needs to be.
The biggest problem of Room at the Top is that it short-changes its characters with the most potential. Again, Signoret brings Aisgill to life, but there isn’t quite as much of her on the page or on screen as there arguably should be. Similarly, a notable side character Elspeth (Hermione Baddeley), is only in the movie for two minutes and fifteen seconds! Baddeley does her absolute best to make those two minutes mean something, but it’s hard to not want more of her, almost entirely because of Baddeley.
On a technical level, the film does look gorgeous. Mario Nascimbene’s score is minimal but effectively noirish. The production design really captures the dingier, grittier aspects of the place Joe has moved to, as well as an appealing level of polish in the upper-class areas. Freddie Francis’ cinematography is starkly monochromatic, rich and textured, pulling viewers into this world despite the inconsistent writing. Clayton’s direction similarly embraces a moody style that, even if familiar with it from other films, it keeps one’s attention.
In the end, the film is a complex look at relationships that while, occasionally vague to a fault, still keeps viewers engrossed in its story. This is one of the films that absolutely deserves more widespread recognition for its part in British cinema. In comparison with a film like This Sporting Life, Room at the Top is decidedly less experimental than other films from this era of British kitchen sink dramas, but it is definitely worth the watch for fans of the genre or otherwise.
still courtesy of Romulus Films
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