It’s still a surprise to find former ballerina and star of American in Paris and many more Hollywood films trudging around a grey and white London looking for a room to rent but it happened and Leslie Caron was deservedly awarded a Golden Globe and a BAFTA for best actress only missing out to Patricia Neal in Hud at the Oscars (along with Shirley MacLaine, Rachel Roberts and Natalie Wood!). She is indeed outstanding and is perfectly cast as the woman in trouble who is able to get ahead of her situation.
In an interview accompanying the 2017 remaster, the remarkable Caron – then 86, now 94 – explains that in a meeting with screenwriter and director Bryan Forbes, she explained that she felt her character would have more agency and be less timid than as originally written. As she spoke, Forbes seemed to be doodling away at his desk but when he finished he presented her with an instant re-write of the part incorporating her views. So it was that her French sensibilities were able to alter the course of the film with results that remain impressive.
There’s some critical opinion that won’t quite accept Forbes as a full member of the Kitchen Sink Club but in ways his film reflects the broader sensibilities of say an Antonioni or Truffaut in terms of the communication between men and women. Tom Bell’s Toby is full of masculine energy as well as writerly disappointment and struggles to connect with Jane at first. Even when they eventually do, he’s at a loss in terms of how to respond: where she leads he finds it difficult to follow because of male pride and values that he might have expected himself to be free of.
At the end he presents Jane with his manuscript for a story called The L-Shaped Room and it’s perhaps the only way he can explain the changes she has made in him. Caron is the perfect carrier for this sentiment; it’s not even swinging and here she is making her own choices, deciding on her choices, rebuffing support from the father of her child Terry (Mark Eden, later the villain Alan Bradley in Coronation Street, killed by a tram in Blackpool!) on the grounds that she doesn’t love him. Tough choices and from a time when marriage was preferable to illegal abortion for some.
The film is indeed gentler than contemporary efforts set
further North but I’ve a feeling that Forbes’ later successes have influenced the
view of this film which deals with a number of taboo areas in a calm way that’s
more accepting and less moralising than you might expect. Another famous Corrie
legend, Patricia “Pat” Phoenix plays Sonia a sex worker with whom June has a very matter of fact albeit guarded, discussion about the nature of her work. The women understand even if the men struggle.
This is also one of those films that makes Reel Streets essential reading and it’s fascinating to see their “then and now” pictures of the locations especially when Jane trudges down St. Luke’s Mews, W11 as viewed from Basing Street, then Clydesdale Road, W11 and looking across to Colville Square. These streets look very fine now but in 1962, Notting Hill was less in demand…today's white-washed Georgian townhouses were yesterday's slums along with the mews with doors hanging at odd angles and a general air of poverty.
Those golden old days before eh?
Talking of which there are others in the house where June finds her accommodation in the famous L-Shaped Room - basically two rooms split into one sharing a tiny window in the top storey of a Georgian ruin, infested with bed bugs, damp and much else besides. Her fellow lodgers all have tales to tell and are all, in their own ways, outsiders.
