Looking at Film from Every Angle
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Now that you’ve (hopefully) had a chance to watch Room at the Top, please join us in discussing this film by posting your comments below.
And don’t forget, Ryan Hope, you need to make your selection today for April 2012. You can send it by e-mail or PM on UAADB.
This is one film that has an English gloss that defies the ensuing tragedy to come. The screenplay seems to be out of the 60’s more than the late 50’s. It certainly is a must see to understand how cinema could advance us to a future “Darling”. The only problem I have is the Best Actress performance is brilliant except it really is category fraud. It should have been Best Supporting. One does wonder how this award happened at all considering Signoret’ husbands leftist leanings and the House on UnAmerican Activities.
Simone Signoret was an international superstar who had already won two BAFTA awards – she would win a third for Room at the Top. There’s no way she would have been considered a supporting player in the film at the time. How she won over Audrey Hepburn in The Nun’ Story and Elizabeth Taylor in Suddenly, Last Summer, the two favorites in the race is the real head-scrathcer.
HUAC, though technically in existence until 1975, was in decline after the fall of Sen. Joe McCarthy in 1954. In 1959 the commitee was denounced by former president Harry Truman as the most un-American thing in the country.
By the time of the Oscars, Yves Montand was in Hollywood filming Let’s Make Love opposite Marilyn Monroe with whom he was allegedly having an affair. Could be Singoret picked up a few sympathy votes because of that.
The film also streams without interruption on IMDb.
Historically important as the first British New Wave film, Room at the Top does not take place in then contemporary England. The novel was set in 1947 and so, presumably, is the film even though the fashions are very much of the late 1950s. We know this because Laurence Harvey’s character is supposed to be a 25 year-old former WWII POW whose home was bombed and his parents killed during the war.
Simone Signoret gets top billing as the older woman with whom Harvey’s character has an affair, but Harvey’s character is the main one, a social climbing heel who wants to marry the boss’s daughter (Heather Sears) so he can join the upper classes. Signoret, seven years older than Harvey in real life, but ten years older in the film, is the woman he turns to when he fails to make much progress with Sears. Eventually the two have a falling out and he seduces Sears only to realize he loves Signoret, but it’s too late. Forces have already been set in motion for Harvey to get what he originally wanted at a greater cost than he would have imagined.
Harvey plays the anti-hero with such cold precision that’s it’s difficult to believe him when he eventually tells Signoret that he loves her. Signoret, on the other hand, is truly heartbreaking in a seminal role as the cast aside older woman. Hermione Baddeley as her friend makes the most of limited screen time and has a killer scene near the end where she tells Harvey off. Sears as the young innocent, Donald Wolfit as her controlling father and Donald Houston as Harvey’s friend also provide memorable performances.
There was a 1965 sequel called Life at the Top with Harvey and the luminous Jean Simmons in Sears’ role, but it was not a hit at the box office. It was followed by a 1970 British TV series with Kenneth Haigh called Man at the Top, which was also made into a film in 1973.
Worth seeing both as a piece of film history and for Signoret’s Oscar winning performance, a role that was originally offered to Vivien Leigh.
It streams on YouTube for free. Here’s a link to parts 1,2:
I had placed the film into my queue on Netflix, but it disappeared. I went back in to find it because it was available on streaming and found that the film was not only not available for streaming (anymore, perhaps?) but wasn’t even available on DVD, so I didn’t get to catch this one, which is a shame.
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