Dreary in its Realism: "Room at the Top" (1959)

Jack Clayton's 1959 drama "Room at the Top" is a British drama concerning the love triangle between an ambitious young man (Laurence Harvey), the daughter of a rich industrialist (Heather Sears), and an unhappily married older woman (Simone Signoret, who won the 1959 Oscar for Best Actress for this part).

The Academy went hog-wild over this film, also giving it the Adapted Screenplay Oscar, as well as nominations for Best Picture, Director, Actor (for Harvey), and Supporting Actress (for Hermione Baddeley, who appears in only three scenes, for a grand total of about four minutes).

The tone of the film is harsh, which matches the performance by Harvey as the young government clerk who has his eyes set on landing a girl with money, to help him overcome his own anger about his working-class upbringing.  Despite the fact that the object of his attentions (Sears, who is blandly pretty yet also a little annoying) has a boyfriend and a set of disapproving parents, Harvey pursues her.  When she appears to have no interest in him, he falls into an affair with Alice (Signoret), whom he meets at a local dramatics society.

Signoret's performance is touching, but a little on the dull side.  There's none of the excitement that was so evident in her work in the 1955 thriller "Les Diaboliques".  But of the three leads, she has the most complex character and does come off best of the three main performers.  Her Alice is sympathetic, even without the inclusion of her caricatured bastard of a husband, and it is refreshing to see an "older" actress given a romantic leading role, rare at the time but even rarer in the youth obsessed film industry of today.

"Room at the Top" was daring in its day for its realistic depiction of sexual situations between adults, and still has a strong sense of realism in the drama.  But too much of the film just feels dreary, and unpleasant.  I really don't understand the frenzy of Oscar love for this movie, and even feel that Signoret's win was undeserved when compared with Audrey Hepburn's work in "The Nun's Story".