Room at the Top (1959)

Peter's Nite
Salad, Pizza, Carrot Cake, Ice Cream

Review: "In this striking debut from director Jack Clayton, who never again achieved at this level, Lawrence Harvey plays a small-town man who comes to the city to make it big. Harvey, he of the shark face and empty eyes, is coldly charming, and quickly wins the admiration of those who are unable to see through the blustery exterior to the cold inside. He sets his sights on Susan (Heather Sears), the daughter of a local bigshot: the movie is about his calculated efforts to win her over against her uppity family's resistance. In the meantime, he starts an affair with Alice (Simone Signoret), a member of a theater group he joins in order to get closer to Susan, the heiress.

Alice is ten years older and infinitely wiser than Susan, but she falls for Joe anyway, probably because he is open and honest with her. Joe starts to fall for her too, complicating his plans. He must choose between the love of his life, which turns out to be Alice, and what he thought he wanted, represented by Susan."

Screenonline: "It is difficult to categorise Jack Clayton's work as a film director. Given that all of his feature films were adapted from novels, he could be seen as the most literary of British film-makers, and yet he was also deeply committed to using all the resources offered him by cinema. His films were always carefully crafted but they also contained moments of spontaneity and rawness.

This craftsmanship earned him the respect of his fellow film-makers but - with the notable exception of Room at the Top (1959), which in many ways was his least typical film - he rarely enjoyed substantial commercial success. A director of remarkable talent, Clayton's uncompromising independence led not just to a relatively small output - with only eight feature films completed in his entire career - but also to his often being out of step with what the market, and sometimes also the critics, wanted."

John Braine: "John Braine was born in Bradford in 1922 and spent much of his early life at Thackley near Shipley. In 1933, he won a scholarship to St Bede’s Grammar School but he was not an academic success and left in 1938 without a School Certificate.

He took various minor jobs, finally settling at Bingley Library as a librarian until, in 1942, he was drafted into the Royal Navy where he trained as a wireless telegraphist. Before he could find active service, he was invalided out of the Navy, suffering from tuberculosis, and was sent to convalesce at the sanatorium at Grassington, in the Yorkshire Dales.

When he was discharged, he resumed his position at Bingley Library and finally passed his School Certificate in the summer of 1944. In 1947, he attended Leeds School of Librarianship, returning to Bingley as Senior Assistant Librarian. Whilst living and working there, he became involved in the Bingley Little Theatre, an experience that was to provide inspiration for themes in Room at the Top and other novels that he later wrote.

Determined to become a writer, Braine left his job at Bingley in 1951 and went to live in London. He did some writing for Lilliput, The New Statesman, and Tribune, but his early days as a writer were a desperate struggle and for a time he lived in poverty, finally returning to Bradford in November 1951 for the funeral of his mother. Shortly afterwards, his health deteriorated and he was re-admitted to Grassington Sanatorium for eighteen months. It was whilst he was there that he developed an idea for a novel based on a verse play he had written called The Desert in the Mirror, inspired by the theme of Faust, about a young man who sells his soul for riches. The novel’s original working titles were Born Favourite and Joe for King. Shortly before it was published – and having encountered the obligatory publishers’ rejection that most gifted writers seem to face, as though their talent cannot be judged – Braine wrote gloomily:

“I was a failure at the age of thirty-five, not even able to provide a home for my wife and the coming child. And the novel on which I had pinned my hopes had been rejected by four publishers.”

When the novel that he had written in longhand in his hospital bed was finally published in March 1957 as Room at the Top, it became an overnight success, thrusting John Braine onto the international stage and bringing him fame and fortune.

He went on to write a dozen novels over the next thirty years, as well as TV adaptations of his later books, and two non-fiction works, J B Priestley, and Writing a Novel. His second novel, The Vodi, drew heavily on his time spent as a tuberculosis patient at Grassington. His fourth novel, The Jealous God, was also strongly autobiographical.

John Braine died in October 1986. Grassington Sanatorium was demolished several years ago to make way for an executive housing development. Room at the Top has never been out of print."

In "What Would a Writer Do?" John Braine reminds writers that they must give considerations of “self” over to the work: “You must realize that you yourself don't matter. Only the work matters” (48). All serious writers understand this concept as an element of the process, the writer's working for an altered state of concentration. The problem for the teacher is how to induce it so that students can experience writing in the way writers do.

Screen On Line: "Room at the Top, released at the beginning of 1959, was the first of the 'new wave' films. It came from established industry producers, John and James Woolf, and was a huge box-office hit. This success opened up new possibilities for British filmmakers. Audiences had proved they were prepared to see adult storylines, gritty realism and political comment, and so the new wave as a commercial proposition was born. War films and romantic comedies dried up and the provinces and proletariat were suddenly discovered.

As a trailblazer which had a big impact on the British film industry and its audience, Room at the Top has inevitably faced a backlash. After an initial consensus that it was daring and different, a new consensus emerged that it was stolid and indifferent.

Maybe it's time for the backlash against the backlash, for there are many fine things in Room at the Top. It may lack the punch of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (d. Karel Reisz, 1960), the lyricism of A Taste of Honey (d. Tony Richardson, 1962), the humour of Billy Liar (d. John Schlesinger, 1963) or the depth of This Sporting Life (d. Lindsay Anderson, 1963), but it has the virtues of a direct challenge to national complacency and a searing emotional honesty about personal relationships.

No other new wave film takes on the class system as boldly. It offers a complex analysis of class warfare that challenges the accepted state of things in Britain at the time. Joe is proud of his class but, unlike Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night, keen to leave it. The only way to do this is by cold calculation and emotional manipulation."

Simone Signoret (March 25, 1921 - September 30, 1985), was a French actress.

"She was born Simone-Henriette-Charlotte Kaminker in Wiesbaden, Germany to Andre and Georgette (Signoret) Kaminker. She was the oldest child of three, with two younger brothers. Her father was a French army officer and a linguist who later worked in the United Nations. She grew up in Paris in an intellectual atmosphere and studied the English language in school, earning a teaching certificate. She tutored in English and Latin and worked part-time as a typist for a French newspaper.

During the German occupation of France, Signoret formed close bonds with an artistic group of writers and actors who met at a local cafe. By this time, she had developed an interest in acting and was encouraged by her friends to follow her ambition. In 1942, she began appearing in bit parts and was able to earn enough money to support her mother and two brothers as her father, who was Jewish, fled the country. She took her mother's maiden name for the screen to help hide her Jewish roots.

Signoret's sensual features and earthy nature led to type-casting and she was often seen in prostitute roles. She won considerable attention in La Ronde (1950), a film which was banned briefly in New York state as being immoral. She won further raves, including an acting award from the British Film Academy, for her portrayal of yet another prostiute in Jacque Becker's Casque d'Or (1951). She went on to appear in many notable films in France during the 1950s including Therese Raquin (1953), Diabolique (1954), and The Crucible (1957).

In 1958, Signoret went to England to film Room at the Top (1959), which won her numerous awards including the Academy Award for Best Actress. She was the first woman to win the award appearing in a foreign film. She was offered films in Hollywood but turned them down and continued to work in France and England. She did return to America for Ship of Fools (1965) which earned her another Oscar nomination and she went on to appear in several Hollywood films before returning to France in 1969.

In her later years, she was often criticized for gaining weight and letting her looks go but Signoret, who was never concerned with glamour, ignored the insults and continued giving finely etched performances. She won more acclaim for her portrayal of a weary madam in Madame Rosa (1977) and as an unmarried sister who unknowingly falls in love with her paralyzed brother via anonymous correspondence in I Sent a Letter to my Love (1980)."

Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads, which sew people together through the years.
-- Simone Signoret

"Laurence Harvey was born October 1, 1928 in Joniskis, Lithuania. His real name was Laruschka Mischa Skikne, which he changed when his parents emigrated to South Africa to escape persecution for their Jewish faith, when he was five years old. At 15, he debuted on stage with the Johannesburg Repertory Theater, but later he joined the army and served until the end of WWII.

He went to England after the war and enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, staying there three months before joining a Manchester repertory company where he soon began to play leads. He was married three times first to Margaret Leighton in 1957, then to Joan Cohn in 1968 and then to Pauline Stone in 1972. They had one daughter named Domino. After his breakthrough film Room at the Top in 1959, Hollywood again took interest in Harvey, and in 1960 he co-starred with John Wayne in The Alamo, followed by an appearance in the Elizabeth Taylor hit Butterfield 8. A role in the 1961 British production The Long and the Short and the Tall was next, trailed by a pair of Hollywood flops, Two Lovers and Summer and Smoke. Finally, in John Frankenheimer's masterful The Manchurian Candidate, he found a role perfectly suited to his talents, portraying a brainwashed assassin shorn of emotion; the performance was the best of his career, but in a cruel twist of irony the film was pulled from distribution by producer/star Frank Sinatra when its plot too closely foreshadowed the tragic death of President John F. Kennedy. He worked steadily until his death from stomach cancer at his home in Hampstead, London, in 1973."