In this soul-ripping British drama, Laurence Harvey starts out standing tall in his ambition to make his way up from the working class to the posh life. He has the confidence of a guy who’s been around the block (WWII vet, former POW), but he’s also young enough that his future is wide open.
Harvey doesn’t have many connections. His parents pointlessly died in their home during the war. Now, he drifts freely. He’s the new guy in a city that seems to burst with opportunity. Nobody knows him. He can redefine himself. He thinks that he can be anything.
He’s also not intimidated by the wealthy. He lives in a cheap flat and has nothing but a few suits to his name, but he will flirt with a rich man’s girl right in front of that guy’s face, no hesitation.
In other words, he’s asking for trouble.
The setting: Post-war England. A country that’s still picking up the pieces. In some of the poor parts, piles of rubble remain where homes once stood, even years later.
However, the class divide continues to stand. No Luftwaffe bombers ever blew up that wall. Harvey can’t move a muscle without being reminded that he’s of low stock. His co-workers at his new office job remind him. The upper class trolls at the gate aggressively remind him when he attempts to hobnob among their kind as he pursues porcelain doll Heather Sears, the rich girl of his dreams. (Ambrosine Phillpots as the girl’s mother is particularly memorable and acidic. She’s one of those older ladies of wealth whose condescension is effortless. She will insult our protaganist for his status with the same ease in which she might say “The weather’s nice today”.)
Even his name–Joe Lampton–has no place among the upper crust. Joe Lampton sounds to these people like the guy who should be cleaning your fish, not courting your daughter.
There’s only one person in Lampton’s life who doesn’t treat him like he’s hopeless.
That’s Simone Signoret’s lovely Alice, a seasoned 40-something bohemian French actress. Alice is married to a rodent of a husband who takes care of her in exchange for feeling like he owns her. She sees right through Joe’s bullshit. She sees through him and everyone else. She’s Joe’s mentor and this film’s wisest voice. She and him start out as friends, but they eventually make the sign of the double-backed whale together and they fall in love, though neither one wants to admit it at first.
Meanwhile Joe still pursues the rich girl like an idiot. She represents everything that he came here for in the first place.
He carries on affairs with both women and you could criticize him for that–our hero does not always make the most wholesome choices–but in the world of this film it’s not simple insensitivity.
Joe is incomplete. He thinks that knows what he wants, but then this other path reveals itself. It’s inticing and beautiful. It’s the one place in which he deals with a truly open-hearted person.
But Joe isn’t a maverick in that way. He’s not a bohemian. When he takes part in community theater (a popular pasttime in England in the 1950s, I guess) he falls flat on his face. It’s not his world. He doesn’t have the imagination to stray far from his goals. He doesn’t have the vision to see that his dream life is also as empty as anything he’s ever known. He plays games until life sets a horrible trap for him.
Joe doesn’t know shit, but this film intends to teach him. Director Jack Clayton, in his debut feature, goes to town on him–and us–with no mercy. Clayton is a keen observer. His eye is tasteful and tells the story with clean lines and crystal clarity. Every moment of scandalous implication lands just right. Without any overselling, we always know exactly what everyone’s talking about as they speak with 1959 discretion about matters of sex.
When Clayton hangs back with a master shot (which he often does), he doesn’t let anyone get away with anything. His frames can be subtle warzones in which several different faces have a different reaction to the same thing.
I watched this twice in one night and it was even better the second time. There’s lots of delicious foreshadowing early on and the whole film acquires new dimension when you go into into knowing that you’re watching a tragedy unfold.