Room at the Top

Director: Jack Clayton

1959 / 117min / DCP

The opening shot of the British New Wave and the defining work of so-called “kitchen-sink realism,” Clayton’s wrenching romantic melodrama sets its scene in a Yorkshire still very much in the grips of a calcified English class system and postwar austerity, starring Laurence Harvey as an ambitious working class lad with dreams of upward mobility who simultaneously pays court to his boss’s daughter (Heather Sears) and carries on a tempestuous affair with an unhappily married Frenchwoman 10 years his senior (Simone Signoret). “Freddie Francis’s cinematography is extraordinarily good… he contrives some tremendous closeup compositions of people’s faces looming disturbingly out of the screen in foreground and background, years before Brian De Palma’s ‘split diopter’ lens effects in movies like Carrie.” —The Guardian

Room at the Top was restored in 2k by the BFI in 2019 for its 60th Anniversary.