Room at the Top | Simone Signoret, Laurence Harvey

Room at the Top | Simone Signoret, Laurence Harvey | Careful..

DVDs:

Room at the Top

	Room at the Top Simone Signoret, Laurence Harvey Vci Video, 1999 average customer review:based on 20 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

"What do I have but your love"

This story of a little ambitious louse played perfectly by Laurence Harvey and his decision whether or not to to marry the boss' daughter a young woman he does not love, or the much - older French woman who he clearly is more deeply connected to, is a highly convincing film. Simone Signoret is tremendous as the elderly desperate woman who asks in the key scene of the play, "What do I have but your love?"
The background is dready industrial Northern post- war England.
An emotionally powerful movie.

Careful..

...you may get what you want. Almost reminded me of the Twilight Zone in places - cinematically and storywise. It's not science fiction of course, but the irony in this unsettling story has elements of that most awesome of TV shows. To have what you love or what you think you should have? That is the question!

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Room at the Top

Based on John Braine's cynical novel, one of the first "angry young man" tales, Clayton's brilliant social drama is distinguished by sharp, biting dialogue and sexually explicit language unusual for its time. It's also a lacerating critique of the British class system that's lost none of its punch. Laurence Harvey's Joe makes a credible central character, but it's Signoret who holds your attention, and breaks your heart, as Alice. The gifted French actress won an Oscar for her sensitive portrayal.

Local boy makes good

Jack Clayton's remarkable 1958 film changed British cinema, and brought a new understanding of the role of sex in postwar society. Set in the years after the war, the film is primarily about the changes in the class system wrought by the Second World War and the new Atlee government: the working-class hero of the film, Joe Lampton, released from a POW camp at the war's end, works in an accounting firm and dreams of making good by marrying the pretty daughter (Heather Sears) of the richest manufacturer in town. His sounding board for his ambitions, a married older Frenchwoman Simone Signoret) living in his Yorkshire town, progresses from being the erotic outlet for his frustrations to being the genuine object of his true love once he realizes the insipidity of the millionaire's daughter, but he is unable to make good on his promises to his sentimental educator and opts instead for the easy life when he gets the younger woman pregnant.

The story of this ambitious handsome boy making good, as Pauline Kael has pointed out, is an old one, common to novelists as diverse as Stendhal and Theodore Dreiser. What makes it special here is the splendid acting of Harvey and Signoret, the tactful direction of Clayton, and the genuinely stunning cinematography of Clayton's frequent partner Freddie Francis. The film treats its story maturely and freshly, and the lovemaking and squabbling scenes between Harvey (here much more virile and less pinched than usual) and Signoret (as dreamy and carnal as ever) seem as sophisticated as anything else from the period. The film suffers only at the end when nemesis comes to dog Harvey's Joe for his selfishness and the realistic tone of the first three-quarters of the film becomes compromised by the overapplication of dramatic irony. But it's still one of the best films dealing with that tremendously sociologically rich period in Britain after the Second World War.

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Room at the top

What!!!! $754.98 for a DVD on Amazon? This must be a big mistake. I have seen the movie so please correct this Amazon asap!

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

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