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 but 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.
Brock, Leslie and Tom
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.
Vintage Classic promo for the Blu-ray
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. No bed bugs were harmed in the making of this film although it’s difficult to say especially when Johnny (Brock Peters) the man in the I-shaped room next to the L, shows up with a means of squishing them. Brock Peters has a lovely intensity as the jazz-playing Johnny who, from Toby’s throw-away comment, we are to read as a gay man – his jealousy of his friend’s relationship perhaps being a reflection of his loneliness and need for inclusion?
Cicely Courtneidge, Leslie Caron, Bernard Lee, Avis Bunnage and Brock Peters
Similarly with Cicely Courtneidge’s superb turn as the ageing actress Mavis who famously performs Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty as featured later in the introduction to The Smith’s The Queen is Dead. She is so well-wrought and full of nuanced dark corners. There’s a scene in which she reveals herself to June by showing her a picture of the love of her life and the latter’s reaction says all we need to know. Jane is non-judgemental and, again, that’s something – clichés aside – you might expect from a broad-minded Parisian? Not that Sylvia Sims or June Richie couldn’t have done just as well?
Then there’s no-nonsense land-lady Doris (Avis Bunnage) who drives a hard bargain and yet doesn’t want to appear mean in front of one of her gentleman friends. Even the cameo players have depth such as Gerald Sim as the doctor in hospital who helps Jane to give birth with non-judgemental sympathy. Even in the big Smoke there are friends to be found and if that makes Forbes a tad more romantic than his peers then so be it. This is the story of one woman’s ability to make her choice and it is uplifting and more complex than many a more sanitised or superficially grimy take.
Dusty
Verdict:
Watch this film for the streets of London, for the craft of the actors and the
rightly lauded work of the leading lady, it’s a snapshot of the Golden Age of
post-war Britain. For those who dream of resetting this country at some point
in the past… maybe a timely reminder of life when it was harder for everyone,
not just the outsiders in the boarding house.
I watched the Vintage Classics Blu-ray which features the 2017 restoration and interviews with Leslie Caron and the writer of the original book, Lynne Reid Banks. There’s also a featurette on The L Shaped Room and the British New Wave. This was the start of the Sixties when this country began to look up and beyond the austerity post War and Empire, when Victorian laws were revised and thrown away. Clearly, we are still in the middle of this process…
PS: You can find Reel Streets here - it is very well researched and highly addictive!
