Room at the Top

INSISTENT

In retrospect, Laurence Harvey’s fate seemed preordained when he burst big time on the movie scene in Jack Clayton’s lavishly praised 1959 kitchen sinker Room at the Top. As the angry working class bloke fucking his way to the top, Harvey didn’t closet his real Lithuanian-South African roots as much as alter them; by self-determined image he was the perpetual upstart snob longing to be legit and respected. (And by nearly all published accounts, he was still looking to belong when he died in 1973.) There was something insistently aloof about him—here and in its follow-up Life at the Top, in BUtterfield 8, The Alamo, Summer and Smoke, The Manchurian Candidate, Walk on the Wild Side, Of Human Bondage, Darling, in Columbo: The Most Dangerous Game. We sensed in him an innately creepy operative and about him a misfit never able to shed a simmering animosity. And his tall emaciated frame exacerbated the problem by showcasing a snit’s labeled air while barely masking warning signs, most of them ignored by his on-screen conquests to their own peril. It’s what made him interesting to watch, up to the point which almost always came when he had to fire his verbal guns in a not very disguised male bitch assault. Not that Harvey suggested sexual evasiveness—though in real life he was briefly a male prostitute, liked young men, was mentored and unrequitedly loved by producer James Woolf—he just never really suggested something solidly masculine. Notwithstanding his roboticism in Manchurian Candidate, in which his relationship with Angela Lansbury inadvertently mirrored in ways his marriage to Margaret Leighton, he never played characters most audiences were convinced he was right for, even if he was born to play them. So in watching him opposite Simone Signoret in Room at the Top the question arises whether he’s enough of whatever he is to get it up. Signoret’s a decidedly used-up married late thirtysomething who knows casual sex should but likely won’t remain casual and except for her fake “acting” in a local theatre production in the movie, she appears to be a marvel of naturalism. Possibly too much of one: like Harvey, she’s insistently being what she is; there’s no action she indulges, despite matter-of-factness or instinct, not planted for us. Especially the cigarette smoke streaming from her nose—we want to cough away the fumes but, like Oscar voters, we’re mesmerized by the nostril potency. (I’d still have checked the ballot for Audrey Hepburn in The Nun’s Story.) Different from Anna Magnani’s “naturalism,” originally raw and earthy yet in short order reduced to drama queen scenes, Signoret’s technique is grit with quiet measured sensuality, a force of studied intuition. Heather Sears is a British version of Sandra Dee without sexual mores guilt—she really liked her first bang—and her parents Donald Wolfit and Ambrosine Phillpotts are faultless casting.

One of Britain’s angrier young writers back in the 50s to mid-60s, John Braine was famous for not only the novel Room at the Top and its sequel Life at the Top, but also for his vitriol over “Lithuanian bisexual” Laurence Harvey being cast as his working class Joe Lampton trying to do as little as possible to make it to the top and stay there in the film versions. He was ticked off as well that Heather Sears did not remain Harvey’s wife in the latter, replaced by Jean Simmons. He had to be mollified by Jack Clayton’s direction in the former, which remains highly respected for its intense view of British class separation. But soon into 1965’s Life at the Top, under Tom Kotcheff’s far less stringent guidance, we tend to resign to it as a disappointing experience, and for a bit more than an hour, it is. Harvey seems to just stare his way through his boredom, dropping his social criticisms as cue-missing stabs. However, by the time he enters local politics, as a Tory(!), and is asked to vote the party line against legislation helping those they were elected to serve and not themselves, he revolts, creating havoc. The movie is suddenly alive, with brutal personal affronts, particularly against his father-in-law. Lampton’s wife feels some heat, too, but with Simmons the responses seem less the Sandra Dee need to use daddy’s charge account (though she does to get new carpet) than trying to reconcile with her husband—and save his livelihood—after both have had brief affairs with others, one of them, Honor Blackman, not quite supplying what she made generous in Goldfinger. Entertaining cameos by Robert Morley and Nigel Davenport.

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ralphbenner@nowreviewing.com