Room at the Top (1958) on Netflix
Joe Lampton takes a post in Warnley, set on rising above his origins. He pursues Susan Brown, an industrialist's daughter, and grows close to Alice Aisgill, an unhappily married Frenchwoman.
- Netflix4.4/5
- IMDb7.5/108,349 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes100%
Trailer
Plot summary
After the Second World War, Joe Lampton, twenty-five, leaves the factory town of Dufton for Warnley, where he takes a poorly paid post with no future in the Borough Treasurer's Department. He is ambitious and resents people born into money. Charlie Soames, a colleague who becomes his flatmate, warns him off Susan Brown, an industrialist's daughter who has been dating wealthy Jack Wales; Joe charms her anyway after they meet through a local theater group. Her parents try to steer him toward a woman of his own class and send Susan abroad. Joe also begins seeing Alice Aisgill, a Frenchwoman ten years his senior in an unhappy marriage to George Aisgill.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Room at the Top (1958)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Hermione Baddeley's performance in Room at the Top amounts to 2 minutes and 19 seconds of screen time, making it the shortest ever to be nominated for an acting Oscar.
- Producer James Woolf bought the rights to Braine's novel originally intending to cast Stewart Granger as Joe and Jean Simmons as Susan; Vivien Leigh was offered the part of Alice.
- Room at the Top is seen as the first of the British New Wave of kitchen-sink-realism film dramas, a genre the film is credited with starting.
- Freddie Francis says producer John Woolf wanted to fire him during the filming of Room at the Top, but director Jack Clayton refused.
