"Room at the Top" - power and ambition and love in 1950s Britain

Jack Clayton's brilliant, cynical 1959 movie of John Braine's novel "Room at the Top" (1957) can now be seen in a complete High Definition print on YouTube. I hope this easy availability brings it to the attention of a new generation of not just film fans but those interested in Britain's social history in the Post War years.

Braine was at the centre of the "Angry Young Men" literary movement of the 1950s (although in reality there was no "movement" as such - just a coincidence of good writing by young writers troubled by the social mores of the times). Set in a northern town, and with a symbolic background of chimneys and the daily grind, "Room at the Top" is about aspiration and ambition - about how a determined, clever, handsome young man, Joe Lampton (Laurence Harvey) finds room at the top for himself artfully and by trampling over a few hearts along the way. New to the town of Warley - a step up from his more downmarket home town - Joe declares early his intention to succeed. His job as an accountant in the local authority offices is to be no more than a stepping stone to better things.

Notwithstanding the political revolution of the Labour government of 1945-1951 Britain's establishment regrouped and reinforced its barriers to entry. Kingsley Amis in "Lucky Jim" (1954), Stan Barstow in "A Kind of Loving" (1960), Alan Sillitoe in "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" (1958) as well as Braine and others describe these barriers and the difficulties of breaking them down. In "Room at the Top" class and privilege are the key. With his brashness and brains Lampton is clearly a man on the make. Warley's big cheese is Abe Brown (Donald Wolfit)  millionaire, factory owner, stalwart of the Conservative Club. A man used to getting his own way. Brown has a pretty daughter in her late teens, virginal and with a cut glass accent to contrast with her father's self-made-man Yorkshire. Susan Brown (Heather Sears) falls for Joe and he sees not just the challenge (easily overcome) of breaking down her barriers but also her potential usefulness to him in his determined climbing of the ladder. 

Whilst decorative and useful Susan Brown inspires no passion in Joe - but he also meets Alice Aisgill (Simone Signoret), older, beautiful, physically stunning, married, unhappy. Susan is prettily naive  but Alice is worldly and desirable. Lampton's seduction of Susan is carried out clinically and dispassionately. His affair with Alice is the real thing - for both of them. When it becomes known to Alice's husband George (Alan Cuthbertson) the latter threatens Joe with financial and social ruin unless he breaks it off. This is a pivotal scene symbolising the "Them and Us" world of that time and place. 

Another symbol of the class divide is the portrayal by John Westbrook of Sarah's boyfriend Jack Wales. Wales, like Lampton, was in the RAF during the war and also like Lampton was a Prisoner of War. But where Joe was a humble Sergeant Wales was an Officer and a heroic escaper from captivity. Wales demeans Joe by calling him "Sergeant" - a gratuitous bit of class snobbery that makes Lampton all the more determined to succeed!

When Joe Lampton gets Susan Brown "In the family way" the story approaches its climax. In a cameo of exceptional quality Donald Wolfit's Brown tests Joe's intentions over Game soup at the Conservative Club. "My father would be horrified to see me here" says Joe. "So would mine" says Brown suggesting that he has more in common with his daughter's seducer than might be thought. He offers Joe an incentive to break up with Susan which Joe flatly refuses. That was the test. The real offer is a job at Brown's and a ticket on the gravy train if he marries Susan. Joe accepts.

Alice is to be abandoned - a casualty of Joe Lampton's ambition and choice of fortune over love. Alice goes alone to the pub, drinks herself into a near stupor, drives away in her car and kills herself. A distraught Joe wanders alone through the Warley streets, lands up in a pub himself where he toys with a pretty empty-headed girl who briefly deserts her boyfriend for him. In another strongly symbolic moment the boyfriend turns on Joe and tells him not to think that his (Joe's) class gives him any rights. Joe is now the middle-class man he aspired to be - at least in the eyes of this stranger. Joe wanders away and is set upon by the boyfriend who was waiting for him with a gang. Joe gets beaten to a pulp for his temerity in having chatted up the girl, and for his seeming assumption that he had an entitlement to do so.

"Room at the Top" ends with Joe and Susan's wedding - it's the full monty with church and bridesmaids and the rest. Joe has arrived - and his beautiful bride is beside herself with perky happiness as they are driven away in the wedding car after the ceremony. But Joe is unsmiling. He has won, but in winning he has lost not just his one true love but some of himself. "Was that really all really worth it ?" you know he must be thinking? 

Lotty's War - the writer wants young people to see it. He's right.

When I was a child in the immediate postwar period I was mostly protected from war stories - at least at home. My Father had been a Prisoner of War on the Burma Railway. He didn't talk about it and it's only in the last twenty or so years I've realised what that meant. The ManBooker prize-winning novel "The Narrow Road to the Deep North" has, in some ways, told me more than I needed to know. How can we, in an Age when we see nightly the horrors of conflict in colour and High Definition, put it in context? 

What is history? It's facts, and dates of course but it's also feelings. That's where The Arts come in. "The Narrow Road" is fiction, but it is also true. The same applies to "Lotty's War". It's not a true story and I suspect that there is lots of poetic licence in it. But it does have a message, many actually, about how we are and how, in extremis, we respond to fear and danger and grotesque intrusion into our lives.

Guernsey in 1940. The Germans invade and take charge. The people are expected to kowtow - some do, others don't. Teenage Lotty, initially resistant to the German General, Rolf,  forcibly billeted on her, eventually gives in to his charms and becomes his lover. Her platonic boyfriend, Ben, joins the resistance and fights. Who is the wiser? Who is the more admirable? Who is the braver? Who are we to say?

It is a claustrophobic play and rather an old-fashioned one. We see everything through the eyes of these three characters. But the easy application of moral judgments doesn't help us. Rolf murders a starving local without a conscience. And yet he is kind and genuinely tender to Lotty. She protects Ben, but in a way she protects Rolf as well. She grows up in his hands and is grateful to have been allowed to do so.

This is a play for children first and foremost, which doesn't mean that it is a childish play. But it portrays its themes in a very accessible way. Rather like those children's' matinees we used to see in the 1950s - or the war comics we had around us at the same time. As it is now 2014 love and sex and violence and the horrors of war are quite graphically portrayed. But there is nothing that would stop this being a play that children as young as maybe ten or so could not see.

In war good people do bad things - and vice versa sometimes. In war starving people eats dogs. In war the normal rules of behaviour are suspended. You need to be discerning in your judgments in times when it is almost impossible to be so. In war a sleepy complacent little place like a Channel Island becomes a grotesque parody of a community distorted by the invaders. 

"Lotty's War" requires strong performances and in this production it gets them. Olivia Hallinan as Lotty is very good and Mark Letheren (Rolf) and Adam Gillen (Ben) as well. It is not a complex nor, mostly, a very surprising play. Nor, for me anyway, was it especially realistic or believable. By that I mean the story - not the themes. The themes are universal and a younger audience, especially, will surely find the shorthand of the plot illuminates these themes well. In that respect it is like a musical without songs. You accept the lack of reality of what is unfolding because there are lessons to be absorbed. But you don't necessarily believe what you see. Who is the villain, and who the hero? Who deserves to survive the trauma and who not. And does the idea of just deserts actually have any meaning anyway?