In late 1940s West Riding of Yorkshire, England, Joseph Lampton, an ambitious young man who has just moved from the dreary factory town of Dufton, arrives in Warnley to assume a secure, but poorly paid, post in the Borough Treasurer's Department. Determined to succeed, and ignoring the warnings of a colleague, Soames, he pursues Susan Brown, daughter of the local industrial magnate, Mr. Brown. Mr. and Mrs. Brown deal with Joe's social climbing by sending Susan abroad. Joe turns for solace to Alice Aisgill, an unhappily married older French woman who came to England as a teacher and married a haughty and abusive upper-class Englishman, who is now having an affair with his secretary. Joe and Alice also have an affair, though he continues his pursuit of Susan upon her return home. Once he has had sex with her, however, he loses interest and admits to himself that he truly loves Alice. Alice is overjoyed by Joe's decision to end his quest for wealth and social status in favour of simply being happy with himself and with her. The two of them decide that she should ask for a divorce from her brutal husband George Aisgill. But George refuses and declares that he will ruin Joe and Alice, both socially and financially, if their relationship continues. Meanwhile, Susan's father delivers the news that Susan is pregnant; he expects Joe immediately to stop seeing Alice, marry Susan and come to work for him as an executive. After Joe tells Alice that he will marry Susan, the heartbroken Alice gets drunk in a pub, drives up to a hill where she and Joe used to go together, and crashes her car. She is mortally injured and dies slowly over the ensuing hours before being found. Upon hearing the terrible news in his office, Joe goes to the flat where he and Alice had their trysts. Elspeth, a friend of Alice’s who owns this flat, arrives and screams at Joe that he has murdered Alice. Distraught over the loss of Alice and blaming himself for her death, Joe goes to a pub to drown his sorrow in alcohol. After being beaten unconscious by a gang of thugs for “stealing” one of their women, Joe is recovered by Soames in time to marry Susan. With that, and his new job with Susan’s father, Joe has at last accomplished all of the goals that he had so long sought, but that he no longer desires. Susan is euphoric, while Joe is devastated.
There are some differences from Braine's novel. His friend Charlie Soames, whom he meets at Warnley in the film, is a friend from his hometown Dufton in the novel. Also, Warnley is called Warley in the book. More emphasis is paid to his lodging at Mrs Thompson's, which in the novel he has arranged beforehand. In the book, the room is itself significant, and is strongly emphasised early in the story; Mrs Thompson's room is noted as being at "the top" of Warley geographically, and higher up socially than he has previously experienced. It also serves as a metaphor for Lampton's ambition to rise in the world.
Production
Producer James Woolf bought the film rights to the novel, originally intending to cast Stewart Granger and Jean Simmons. Vivien Leigh was originally offered the part of Alice, in which Simone Signoret was eventually cast. He hired Jack Clayton as director after seeing The Bespoke Overcoat, a short, on which John Woolf had worked and their film company had produced. Room at the Top is thought to be the first of the British New Wave of Kitchen sink realism film dramas. It was filmed at Shepperton Studios in Surrey, with extensive locationwork inHalifax, Yorkshire, which stood in for the fictional towns of Warnley and Dufton. Some scenes were also filmed in Bradford, notably with Joe travelling on a bus and spotting Susan in a lingerie shop and the outside of the amateur dramatics theatre. Greystones, a large mansion in the Savile Park area of Halifax, was used for location filming of the outside scenes of the Brown family mansion; Halifax railway station doubled as Warnley Station in the film, and Halifax Town Hall was used for the Warnley Town Hall filming. Room at the Top was followed by a sequel in 1965 called Life at the Top.
Reception
The film was critically acclaimed and marked the beginning of Jack Clayton's career as an important director. It became the third most popular film at the British box office in 1959 after Carry On Nurse and Inn of the Sixth Happiness grossing $700,000.
