Room at the Top | Der Weg nach oben

Synopsis:

25-year-old ambitious Joe Lampton (Laurence Harvey) wants to get to the top: As an employee of the tax office in the small town of Warnley in the North of England, he has realised that this cannot be achieved through hard work and proficiency in his profession alone. So, in his spare time he joins the theatre group in which Susan Brown (Heather Sears) plays, the daughter of a wealthy industrial magnate. She falls in love with Joe, as he had planned, but her parents are against the relationship. And Joe’s feelings thwart the plan of his ascent through marriage, because he falls in love with Alice (Simone Signoret), a French woman ten years his senior and unhappily married…

About director Jack Clayton:

Jack Clayton (*1921 in Brighton, East Sussex) began his career in the British film industry in 1935 as a “tea boy” and worked his way through almost sixty years all the way to the top. Already for the first film he directed, the short film “The Bespoke Overcoat” (1955), he won the award for Best Short Film at the Venice Film Festival as well as an Oscar. He achieved international fame with his second directorial work, the drama “Room at the Top” (1959), which heralded the “British New Wave”. The film was a great financial and artistic success and received six Oscar nominations, including one for Clayton as Best Director (Oscars went to the screenwriters and Simone Signoret as Best Actress in a Leading Role). Shortly thereafter followed the highly acclaimed horror film classic “The Innocents” (1961) after Henry James, starring Deborah Kerr. Another milestone of his career was “The Great Gatsby” from 1974 with Robert Reford, a film criticized by the critics, but that did fine at the box office and is now considered a classic in film history.

Clayton was a remarkably “choosy” director who kept taking long pauses between productions and, according to his own statements, “never made a film I didn’t want to make”. He repeatedly rejected movies that became big hits for other directors (e.g. “Alien”), but he was also plagued by bad luck and bad timing. The Hollywood studios called him “difficult”, and the studios stopped a number of film projects in the 1970s that were either taken out of his hands or cancelled in the final stages of preparation. As a producer, Clayton was involved in the John Huston films “Moulin Rouge“, “Beat The Devil” and “Moby Dick“.

Despite his relatively small oeuvre, Jack Clayton’s films are held in high esteem by critics and colleagues from the film industry such as Martin Scorsese, Guillermo del Toro, François Truffaut, Harold Pinter and Steven Spielberg.

About Simone Signoret:

Simone Signoret was born in 1921 in Wiesbaden (Germany) as the daughter of André and Georgette Kaminker. She was the oldest of the couple’s three children. Her father, a linguist and translator, was a French officer of Polish-Jewish descent and worked for the French occupying forces in the Rhineland. Signoret grew up in Paris in an intellectual atmosphere, studied English and became a teacher. She also worked as an author for the French newspaper Les Nouveaux Temps.

During the German occupation of France Signoret belonged to a group of writers and actors who met at the Café de Flore in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. At that time her interest in acting arose and she was encouraged by her friends to start an acting career. In 1942 she began to play supporting roles and was able to earn enough money to support her mother and brothers financially while her father was exiled in the UK. Signoret took her mother’s last name because she wanted to hide her Jewish roots.

She was often offered roles as a lover or prostitute because of her appearance and personality. Her acting got great attention in “La Ronde” by Max Ophüls, a movie that was temporarily banned in New York because it was considered immoral. Her portrayal of a prostitute in Jacques Becker‘s “Casque D’Or“, for which she received the BAFTA for Best Actress, also caused a sensation. Simone Signoret played in some of the most famous French movies in the 1950’s, among them Marcel Carnés “Thérèse Raquin, Henri-Georges Clouzot‘s “Les Diaboliques” and, together with her partner Yves Montand, Rouleau‘s “The Crucible“, based on Arthur Miller‘s play and with a script by Jean-Paul Sartre.

In 1958 Simone Signoret travelled to England to shoot “Room at the Top“, for which she received several awards, including the Best Actress Award at the Cannes International Film Festival and the Oscar for Best Actress. She was the first French actress to receive an Oscar and the first woman to receive the award for her performance in a foreign film. Signoret then received offers to work in Hollywood but declined and continued to work in France and England. Among other films she played alongside Laurence Olivier in “Terms of Trial“. In 1965 she returned to the United States to shoot “Ship of Fools” for which she received another Oscar nomination, and played in several Hollywood movies before returning to France in 1969.

In addition to her acting career, Signoret was very involved in politics throughout her life, campaigning for a ban on nuclear weapons and against the Algerian War and the Franco regime in Spain. Signoret died of pancreatic cancer in 1985 at the age of 64 and was buried in the cemetery of Père-Lachaise.