Room at the Top (Jack Clayton, 1959)

Jack Clayton’s Room at the Top feels distinctly overwrought now, with its nakedly ambitious protagonist Joe Lampton barely uttering a word in the early stretch that doesn’t relate to his calculated social-climbing, and then reduced to near-catatonic silence in the end as he achieves a version of his ambitions, at the cost of (at least temporarily) losing his soul. The notoriously problematic actor Laurence Harvey tacks too strongly into both states, eradicating much possibility of subtlety, but at least aiding the film’s harshly elemental impact (one of the film’s most effective elements is his unspoken realization that the wealthy girl of his dreams is, basically, unbearably boring). Despite these excesses, it remains a fascinating social document, depicting a society of painful limitations, consumed by self-defeating power games (one of the more striking scenes is that in which the husband of Lampton’s older lover confronts him, setting out with cold meticulousness why the affair has to end, the relish he takes in his victory far outweighing any remaining feeling for his wife). Certainly it’s not a world devoid of pleasures and camaraderies, but they depend on a benign acceptance of limits, a shutting of one’s mind to all vertical possibilities. Sex, of course, is the most prominent of the horizontal availabilities, fueling a significant hidden infrastructure and a network of behind-back conversations. Simone Signoret won an Oscar as the lover, but even the mild exoticism she brings to the film feels like more than the milieu deserves or can accommodate (albeit this is largely the point). Looked at now, it’s no doubt a museum piece on any levels, not least for the prominence of heavy manufacturing in the economic hierarchy. But while Britain may have given itself several coats of paint since then, the inequalities and abandonments have only become more savage, rendering the film’s moral contortions almost quaintly benign by comparison.