Saturday Night Cinema: Life at the Top

Tonight’s Saturday Night Cinema feature is Life at the Top, starring the sharp and cruel Laurence Harvey and the equally biting Jean Simmons.  If you missed Room at the Top, I ran it back in June 2012 here. It is essential viewing. Life at the Top is the belated sequel to Room at the Top. John Blaine’s “angry young man” British novel was made into a film in 1959. Life at the Top is not as good as Room, but there are very good moments, and I am a big Laurence Harvey fan. And Harvey is back as Joe Lampton, the man-on-the-rise  who in Room had given up true love in favor of a career-boosting (and antiseptic) marriage to his boss’ daughter.

Jean Simmons as the equally unhappy wife is memorizing.

Life at the Top (1965)

Screen: ‘Life at the Top’ Opens at the Paris Theater:Climber’s Career After Marriage Explored

ARE you curious to know what happened to the hero of “Room at the Top” after he married the boss’s daughter in that 1958 British film and went riding off into the sunset in a Rolls-Royce limousine? You can find out by going to see Laurence Harvey still playing the weasel role in the 10-years-later sequel, flatly tagged “Life at the Top,” which opened yesterday at the Paris. But don’t expect to be shocked.

For what you will see is an extension of that surly, self-serving character who abandoned his married mistress to take a socially superior wife, still going on being precisely the sort of bounder he was in that previous film. There is nothing different about him, except that he seems to have lost that certain skill for deft and opportune maneuver he had as a younger, hungrier man.

He is still expensively married to the premaritally pregnant wife, who was youthful Heather Sears in the last film, but is well-matured Jean Simmons in this. He is the rueful father of a disgustingly priggish 9-year-old son and a cute little 4-year-old daughter, who appears to be his singular pride and joy. He still lives in the mill town of Warley, where he rose to his present affluence from the slums, and he is skillfully controlled and dominated by his ruthless mill-owning father-in-law.

Indeed, he is lying so precisely in the bed we sensed he’d made for himself that the film takes on at once the somber asepet of a catalogue of bleak I-told-you-so’s and it never really changes that complexion through its hard, unrelenting two-hour flow.

For the fact is that John Braine, the author of the novels on which both films are based, did not come up with any new exposures of the nature and resources of his man to provide the scriptwriter, Mordecai Richler, with material for a strong dramatic film. Rather he simply provided a series of personal episodes to reveal the emptiness and tedium of the lives of the wealthy bourgeoisie. And these the director, Ted Kotcheff, and the cameraman, Oswald Morris, have sharply etched on the screen.

This picture could be a documentary of all the ugly, tawdry, complicating things that might happen to restless married people when they found themselves helplessly caught in the stuffy social surroundings of the industrial Establishment. There are testy crises with the children, and a secret and senseless affair between the wife and a languid, lordly neighbor, which the husband finally breaks in upon in one of the few amazing and truly painful scenes in the film.

There is a brief and entirely insufficient demonstration of the husband taking a stand of independence in a meeting of the town council, then a lot about him running away to London with a television talker and his futile search for another job amid a group that could be dropouts from “Darling,” before he tucks his tail between his legs and goes back home to assume, by a baseless stroke of fortune, the job of his father-in-law.

The one hope for some new revelation of spirit and strong intention in our man—in the episode of his being put on the town council and having a chance to do something about the slums—is scotched after one bold rebellion, so we are only left to conclude what we have strongly suspected from the beginning. Our hero is a weakling and a fraud.

This allows him to be human and bathetic, and, as Mr. Harvey plays the role, it also presents him to the audience as a sour and self-lacerating cad. But it does not endow him with the slightest sympathetic or tragic quality. His fate is inconsequential. That is the weakness of the film.

Miss Simmons is remarkably impassioned and agonized as the wife, and Donald Wolfit is again horrendous, with many facets, as the father-in-law. Michael Craig is cool and cheeky as the neighbor who manfully cuckolds his best friend, and Honor Blackman makes a sly, deceitful witch of the well-set-up television talker who lures the sullen rebel for a spell. Several others are beautifully British and provincial in lesser roles.

It’s just too bad that the hero can be nothing but a cliché when he reaches the top.

LIFE AT THE TOP, screenplay by Mordecai Richeler, based on the novel by John Braine; directed by Ted Kotcheff and produced by James Woolf. A Romulus production presented by Royal Films International. At the Paris Theater, Fifth Avenue and 58th Street. Running time: 117 minutes.
Joe Lampton . . . . . Laurence Harvey
Susan Lampton . . . . . Jean Simmons
Norah Hauxley . . . . . Honor Blackman
Mark . . . . . Michael Craig
Abe Brown . . . . . Donald Wolfit
Tiffield . . . . . Robert Morley
George Aisgill . . . . . Allan Cuthbertson
Sybil . . . . . Margaret Johnson
Mrs. Brown . . . . . Ambrosine Phillpotts
Ralph Hethersett . . . . . Ian Shand
Mottram . . . . . Nigel Davenport
Graffham . . . . . George A. Cooper
Harry Lampton . . . . . Paul Anthony Martin
Barbara Lampton . . . . . Frances Cosslett
Arthur Wincastle . . . . . Charles Lamb
Lend Mayor . . . . . Rex Deering

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