The Room At The Top’s Themes

By William Migdol

The Room At The Top is a 1959 film taking place in a factory town. The film follows a man, Joe Lampton, portrayed by Laurence Harvey, as he works to get a higher paying job after getting a job in the Treasurer’s department with too low pay for him. In this town, he meets Susan, the daughter of a successful industry manager. Joe has an affair with the unhappily married Alice, despite his continuous attempts to pursue Susan. After spending a night with Susan, he realises he wants to be with Alice and tells her he wants to spend his life with her. Alice’s husband threatens to ruin Joe’s and Susans lives if he were to continue being with her but he continues to be with Alice. Over a lunch, Susan’s father tells Joe that she is pregnant and he is the father and therefore he needs to marry her and if he does he will give him a high paying job at his company. Joe tells Alice he can’t be with her to which she gets depressed. That night she gets drunk and drives, crashing her car and dies.  Following that night, a depressed Joe marries Susan who then cries in the car as they leave the chapel, for he has received the successful life he has always wanted with a wife and a high paying job, yet he knows he will never be happy since he can never be with Alice again, as shown below.

I thought the movie was probably one of the sadder movies I have seen. The idea of being abused in a horrible relationship only to receive the tiniest bit of hope that you can live a happy life just to have it taken away from you is so horrible to think about. I had trouble rooting for Joe in this movie. While I thought he was respectable as a working class person, he was horrible toward Susan and Alice and only ended up in the upper class at the end of the movie due to this horribleness. I think though that this could be seen as a social commentary that the people in the “room at the top” are the worst people that don’t really deserve to be up there. If the film were to come out today, I would classify it as conventional due to the topics not being considered that taboo; however, given that premarital sex, the films least taboo subjects, was still considered against societal norms when this film came out, I would classify this movie as being unconventional. Since the film is conventional now but it wasn’t when it came out, I think this film most likely “set the stage” for future films to follow these themes. Room at the top was the first movie in what is called, “The British New Wave,” nine films designed to try to portray real people and issues people really face. While Joe being a working class person was relatable, the rest of the movie was not. Unfortunately, most people aren’t able to go from working class to upper class.

Many critics found this film to be an incredible film, earning it two oscars, one for it’s writing and one for Simone Signoret’s acting.

Writer Yael Zarhy-Levo says, “claiming that even though the effect was not immediate or direct (because ‘documentaries and features are separate worlds’), the film-makers had aimed a revolution ‘at the industry itself: and indeed, with Room at the Top, the first response came through commercial channels’.” By challenging these taboo topics, the movie worked to change not just the lives of people watching it, but the film industry as a whole.

Even when it first came out, people understood how popular the film would be. Former New York Times writer A.H. Wheeler said when this story came out,  “‘Room at the Top’ may be basically cheerless and somber, but it has a strikingly effective view.” They acknowledged that the film had several grim themes throughout the entirety of the film, but also addressed that these topics are important to discuss which is why films like these exist.

By addressing taboo topics head on, this film allowed the film industry to tackle challenging issues and allowed the film industry to further develop to where it is today.  Movies still need to take risks such as these in order for films to advance and this movie most likely had a hand in the way movies have been since 1960.