Taglines: A savage story of lust and ambition.
Room at the Top movie storyline. The English factory town is dreary but Joe Lampton has landed a job with a future. To have something to do at night he joins a theatrical group. His boss’s daughter Susan is playing ingenue roles on stage and in real life. She is attracted to Joe and Joe thinks about how much faster he will get ahead if he is the boss’s son-in-law. This plan is complicated by his strong desire to be with an older woman who also belongs to the theatrical group. She is French and unhappily married. Joe believes he can get away with seeing both women.
Room at the Top is a 1959 British film based on the 1957 novel of the same name by John Braine. The novel was adapted by Neil Paterson with uncredited work by Mordecai Richler. It was directed by Jack Clayton in his feature-length directorial debut and produced by John and James Woolf. The film stars Laurence Harvey, Simone Signoret, Heather Sears, Donald Wolfit, Donald Houston and Hermione Baddeley.
Room at the Top was widely lauded, and was nominated for six Academy Awards, winning Best Actress for Signoret and Best Adapted Screenplay for Paterson. Its other nominations included Best Picture, Best Director for Clayton, Best Actor for Harvey, and Best Supporting Actress for Baddeley. Baddeley’s performance, consisting of 2 minutes and 19 seconds of screen time, became the shortest ever to be nominated for an acting Oscar.
There are some differences from Braine’s novel. His friend Charlie Soames, whom he meets at Warnley in the film, is a friend from his hometown Dufton in the novel. Also, Warnley is called Warley in the book. More emphasis is paid to his lodging at Mrs Thompson’s, which in the novel he has arranged beforehand (in the film, his friend Charlie arranges it soon after they meet). In the book, the room is itself significant, and is strongly emphasised early in the story; Mrs Thompson’s room is noted as being at “the top” of Warley geographically, and higher up socially than he has previously experienced. It also serves as a metaphor for Lampton’s ambition to rise in the world.
Producer James Woolf bought the film rights to the novel, originally intending to cast Stewart Granger and Jean Simmons. Vivien Leigh was originally offered the part of Alice, in which Simone Signoret was eventually cast. He hired Jack Clayton as director after seeing The Bespoke Overcoat, a short, on which John Woolf had worked (uncredited) and their film company had produced.
Room at the Top is thought to be the first of the British New Wave of Kitchen sink realism film dramas. It was filmed at Shepperton Studios in Surrey, with extensive location work in Halifax, Yorkshire, which stood in for the fictional towns of Warnley and Dufton. Some scenes were also filmed in Bradford, notably with Joe travelling on a bus and spotting Susan in a lingerie shop and the outside of the amateur dramatics theatre. Greystones, a large mansion in the Savile Park area of Halifax, was used for location filming of the outside scenes of the Brown family mansion; Halifax railway station doubled as Warnley Station in the film, and Halifax Town Hall was used for the Warnley Town Hall filming.
Room at the Top (1959)
Directed by: Jack Clayton
Starring: Laurence Harvey, Simone Signoret, Heather Sears, Ambrosine Phillpotts, Donald Wolfit, Donald Houston, Hermione Baddeley, Allan Cuthbertson, Raymond Huntley, John Westbrook
Screenplay by: Neil Paterson, Mordecai Richler
Production Design by: James H. Ware
Cinematography by: Freddie Francis
Film Editing by: Ralph Kemplen
Art Direction by: Ralph W. Brinton
Makeup Department: Tony Sforzini
Music by: Mario Nascimbene
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: British Lion Films (UK), Continental Distributing (US)
Release Date: January 22, 1959 (UK), March 30, 1959 (US)
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