Gallery of Art revisits ‘Room’

“Room at the Top,” durably involving and haunting as it nears a 50th anniversary, will be revived tomorrow at 4:30 p.m. in the auditorium of the East Building of the National Gallery of Art, as part of a brief retrospective series called “England’s New Wave, 1958-1964.” It shares the opening weekend with Tony Richardson’s movie versions of the John Osborne plays “The Entertainer” (today at 3:30 p.m.) and “Look Back in Anger” (tomorrow at 2 p.m.).

A quartet of features will be shown the following weekend: “A Kind of Loving,” “This Sporting Life,” “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” and “The Angry Silence.” The series concludes Feb. 3 with Mr. Richardson’s film version of a topical novel of the period, “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.”

Derived from a novel published in 1956 (the same year “Look Back in Anger” was kicking up a theatrical rumpus), “Room at the Top” began a cycle of deliberately outspoken and disruptive romantic or social melodramas from Britain. At the time, discriminating moviegoers were inclined to regard it as not only the breakthrough attraction but also the best of the bunch. There’s no reason to revise that assessment.

The English “new wave” acquired a different identity sooner rather than later: the naturalistic films were quickly overshadowed by James Bond, the Beatles and celebrations of “swinging London.”

The human-interest imprint of “Room at the Top,” which depicts a romantic triangle that exposes the essential moral weakness of an ambitious young man named Joe Lampton (memorably portrayed by Laurence Harvey), remains exceptionally strong. His betrayal of a somewhat older consort, Simone Signoret as Alice Aisgill, a Frenchwoman unhappily married to a snobbish Englishman, was genuinely painful to observe.

Alice’s sympathetic nature and broken heart brought Miss Signoret best actress awards from the 1959 Cannes Film Festival jury, the British Film Academy and ultimately Hollywood’s Motion Picture Academy. Also a contender for best movie, direction (Jack Clayton, who brought years of experience and finesse to a belated first feature), actor (Mr. Harvey), and supporting actress (Hermione Baddeley in a small but scintillating performance as Alice’s loyal friend), “Room at the Top” won a second Oscar for screenwriting.

Filmed in 1958, “Room at the Top” opened in Britain in January 1959 and two months later in the U.S. One of its most bracing — and exploitable — attributes was comparative erotic candor. This distinction hasn’t been effaced despite two decades of explicit cinematic sex. The reason is that the characters seem to possess believable drives and susceptibilities.

Mr. Harvey’s scenes of intimacy with Miss Signoret and Heather Sears, the cherubic starlet cast as Joe’s ingenuous but well-to-do sweetheart, Susan Brown (the daughter of an industrialist played with gruff authority by Donald Wolfit) seemed confidently straightforward and wised-up — at the time. According to the British film critic and historian Alexander Walker, many of his colleagues were ill-prepared for Miss Sears’ semi-comic expressions of sexual gratification, which drew on Susan’s favorite superlative, “super.” Evidently, the movie also undermined crumbling censorship standards and earned some unforeseen gratitude for the X certificate, which limited attendance to adults but had usually been a preserve for shabby soft-core product. All of a sudden there was a defensible, prestigious X movie in circulation.

Moreover, there was such an aura of modernity and style-setting frankness about “Room at the Top” that many spectators tended to ignore the fact that the story wasn’t set in the immediate present. It harks back to the immediate aftermath of World War II, when war memories and resentments were fresher than they could have been in the late 1950s.

But the sense of the movie was not that the filmmakers were restoring a saltier sense of reality to the late 1940s, when movies were very circumspect about sex and avoided swear words. “Room at the Top” seemed to be reflecting currents of change in the movie culture, circa 1959, that obscured its period trappings.

Admirers of the movie also tend to overlook the fact that an unhappy sequel, “Life at the Top,” appeared in 1966 to confirm the implications of the fadeout, where Joe and Susan loom as a bad marriage on their wedding day. Mr. Harvey and Mr. Wolfit returned to revive their original roles, with Jean Simmons as an embittered older Susan. The sole screenwriting credit went to Canadian novelist Mordecai Richler, then a London resident who had contributed rewrites to “Room at the Top” without sharing credit on the Oscar-winning script. By that time, Joe Lampton’s sellouts had become too stale to arouse curiosity, but his first incarnation retains much of its original novelty and impact.

TITLE: “Room at the Top”

RATING: No MPAA rating (released in 1959, a decade before the advent of the film rating system); adult subject matter, consistent with the R category; sexual candor, occasional profanity and fleeting graphic violence

CREDITS: Directed by Jack Clayton. Produced by John and James Woolf. Screenplay by Neil Paterson and (uncredited) Mordecai Richler, based on the novel by John Braine.

RUNNING TIME: 117 minutes

DVD EDITION: VCI Home Video

WEB SITE: www.vcihomevideo.com