Cinema
Room at the Top
Jack Clayton · 1959
Synopsis
Joe Lampton, the son of working-class parents and a former prisoner of war, arrives in Warnley, an industrial town in Yorkshire, where he takes a modest job in the municipal finance department. He joins the amateur theatre company in which Susan Brown, the daughter of a rich industrialist, acts, and there meets Alice Aisgill, a Frenchwoman about ten years his senior, unhappy with an unfaithful husband; they become lovers. Susan's parents, hostile to Joe, send their daughter abroad; Mr Brown eventually summons him and sets out his terms.
Context
The film comes from a novel by John Braine published in 1957, written while he was a librarian at Bingley, in Yorkshire; the screenplay is by Neil Paterson. It received six Oscar nominations and won two awards, for the adapted screenplay and for Simone Signoret, a Frenchwoman who acted in English and who had received the best actress prize at Cannes the same year. It was the first feature film of its director, after a short film that had itself won an Oscar.
Who it is for
Nearly two hours; a story of social climbing in a working-class town of postwar Yorkshire.
Prizes and reception
Best British Film of the year for the British Academy of Film and Television Arts; regarded as the film that opened the British New Wave.
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