The L-Shaped Room (New Waves #5)

The L-Shaped Room: Bryan Forbes (1962)

As the film opens, we see Jane, a French woman in her twenties, wandering around a West London that is equally seedy and dilapidated, in search of somewhere to stay.

She rents a top floor room (L shaped obviously) from an obnoxious landlady called Doris (Avis Bunnage). Its walls are paper-thin, the meter swallows up pennies at a rate of noughts and worse still, an infestation of bugs scurry around the mattress of her bed at night-time.

There are a couple of prostitutes ensconced in the basement flat – one, Sonia, played by Coronation Street legend Pat Phoenix, the other also named Jane, a young Hungarian who’s fled Communism. Mavis (Cicely Courtneidge), a washed-up music hall entertainer also rents a room, as does Johnny (Brock Peters), a young man from the Caribbean, and Toby (Tom Bell), an easy-going writer, who’s fond of a quip and is instantly attracted to Jane.

At this point none of the residents know that Jane is pregnant and she’s in no hurry to make the fact common knowledge. This is pre-pill, pre-Abortion Act Britain and there’s still a stigma surrounding single mothers from the unenlightened.

She visits a condescending private doctor who assumes that the father of her child doesn’t want to marry her. She has no desire to marry him. The doctor also jumps to the conclusion that she must have already decided to definitely have an abortion. Wrong again.

On the plus side, she befriends her flatmates to the extent that they begin to resemble a surrogate family. Most significantly, she embarks on a relationship with Toby but this brings out a prudish streak in Johnny that, up till now, had been disguised by his cheerful disposition. He reveals Jane’s secret to Toby and this leads to complications. Toby’s insecurities and occasional temper surface as he struggles with the idea that the woman he loves is having another man’s baby.

The L-Shaped Room is unusual for what is often termed a kitchen sink drama. Its London setting is in contrast to the provincial Northern settings favoured by the likes of Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz around this time.
The main protagonist is notably not only middle-class but foreign too. And Leslie Caron was already an established star when cast. Forbes – who was originally only adapting the book into a film to be directed by Jack Clayton – welcomed the decision as it would lift the film out of what he called in his autobiography, ‘the parochial kitchen sink rut.’

It does challenge the social conventions of the day, though, and like the defining films of the British New Wave it had recent literary antecedents – in this case, the 1960 novel of the same name by Lynne Reid Banks. It also displays a freshness and urgency that was a feature of the era, features young lead actors and certainly embraces many types of characters who had been largely ignored or stereotyped in British cinema previously.

The L-Shaped Room is overlong, but it’s a shame that it is sometimes overlooked.

It did witness a revival in interest in the mid-1980s, when The Smiths incorporated a clip of Mavis’s Christmas Party turn Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty into the title track of their The Queen is Dead album. I seem to remember the film being shown on British TV a year or so before, so would guess Morrissey must have been taking notes. More recently, it was screened at the London Film Festival in 2017.

The two leads deliver very strong performances. Caron picked up a Bafta and Golden Globe for her efforts, while many might have been tempted at the time to put money on Bell emulating the success that contemporaries like Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay and Alan Bates would go on to enjoy. Sadly, he didn’t, although he did have a very solid career in both film and TV.

A special mention too for Cicely Courtneidge. She’s a vital presence here too as Mavis and the scene where she explains why she never married and speaks about her ‘friend’ is especially poignant. ‘It takes all sorts, dear,’ being the closest she can get to admitting that she’s a lesbian.

If you like The L-Shaped Room, you might also enjoy The Whisperers from 1967, also directed by Bryan Forbes, who since The L-Shaped Room had helmed a further three films and turned down an offer of £800,000 to produce, adapt and direct Casino Royale.

Set in Oldham, this is a real antidote to the cycle of Swinging London movies that had by this point become more fashionable than the kitchen sink/new wave genre. This was released during the Summer of Love but don’t expect a Smashing Time.

You might not know this film. An unflinching exploration of senility, poverty and loneliness, it flopped at the box-office to the extent that it failed to even recoup the cost of its prints and advertising. It did, however, earn lead actress Edith Evans a Bafta and a Golden Globe for her performance as well as her third Academy Award nomination.

Forbes forged his filmmaking career with Whistle Down the Wind, a film with a cast consisting primarily of children but he certainly had the knack too of getting the best from older actors. Evans is staggeringly good here. You could argue it’s one of the finest pieces of acting in 1960s British cinema.

If you begin watching the film and feel it’s just too bleak, I’d advise you not too switch off as it just might slowly draw you in (although I couldn’t guarantee it). The Whisperers doesn’t appear to be available to buy anywhere which is a pity but it can be viewed on YouTube.