A poor boy moves to the big city and ends up in a love triangle with a wealthy woman and a poor woman—and, spoiler, the poor woman dies. Ah, so this is just British A Place in the Sun.
Joe Lampton (Laurence Harvey) has moved from the nothing village of Dufton to the big city of Warnley and he’s got society girl Susan Brown (Heather Sears) in his sights. She’s got a boyfriend, but that’s no matter—he’s playing the long game, knowing that Susan is his ticket to the top. While biding his time, he also begins a “friendship” with Alice (Simone Signoret), an older, married Frenchwoman.
He bounces between the women, finally resolving to be with Alice—until he finds out that Susan is pregnant. Out of obligation, he breaks up with Alice, and Alice responds by driving her car off a cliff. Susan and Joe get married and check out how happy Joe is about it.
As they say: “marry for money and you’ll earn every penny.”
Rating: 5/10. It’s tough to empathize with any of the characters, but points for Laurence Harvey’s Northern England accent and the way he says “Susan.”1
Cast and Crew
Laurence Harvey is easy on the eyes and plays prickly and tempestuous in his role as Joe; even if he’s a downgrade from Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun, he still ends up being pretty good. Beyond this role, Harvey starred alongside Elizabeth Taylor in BUtterfield 82 (1960).
I also warned you in the Cat on a Hot Tin Roof post that we’d, slowly but surely, start working our way through Tennessee Williams’ oeuvre. Here we go: Laurence Harvey starred in Summer and Smoke (1961), a film adaptation of a Williams play.3 Like some of the other Williams plays we’ve discussed, this one’s about sexuality in the South, this time between a minister’s daughter and a hedonistic doctor. The pair have an intense emotional and spiritual connection4, but then the doctor goes and marries a different, more respectable girl.
Simone Signoret played Alice in Room at the Top and won an Oscar for the role. Like Anna Magnini, who we discussed in Wild Is the Wind, Signoret was tagged with the “earthy” label, but her earthiness was more sensual.5 Signoret’s biggest movie was the 1955 French classic Les Diaboliques, where a wife and her husband’s mistress conspire to murder the husband.6 Signoret was married to Yves Montand, the actor and singer7 who starred with (and had an affair with) Marilyn Monroe in Let’s Make Love (1960). If someone is asking you trivia questions about Les Diaboliques and Simone Signoret, 1) you’re at a really cool trivia, and 2) can I come to that cool trivia you’re at.
The Trivia, Part I
When describing the fun to be had in Warnley, one of Joe’s coworkers mentions Friday night snooker. Snooker is like pool, sort of, but the table’s bigger and the balls are smaller and more plentiful. It’s played with fifteen red balls and six other colored balls, plus a cue ball; the starting position is shown below. The number next to each ball designates the number of points you get when you “pot” (sink) it. (The cue ball isn’t shown, but you put it within the D-Zone to break off.)
You can’t just shoot in the balls willy-nilly, though. Instead, every time you come to the table, first you have to pot a red ball, then a colored ball, then a red ball, and so on. After potting a red ball, that ball stays off the table, but when you pot a colored ball, it’s replaced in its original position. Once all the red balls are potted, you shoot the colored balls in value order, not replacing them, until all the balls are gone. If you miss or foul, it becomes your opponent’s turn to try and pot balls and score points.
The most points you can get (without opponent fouls) is 147; this is composed of 15 reds (one point each), 15 blacks (seven points each—remember, the colored balls come out after you pot them, so you can hit in the black 15 times) and, once the red balls are gone, the six remaining colored balls potted consecutively (two through seven points each). Here’s Ronnie O’Sullivan, the best snooker guy, doing just that.8
One nuance to the game is “snookering,” where you don’t pot a ball but leave your opponent with a tough shot. Snookering can cause fouls, and when your opponent fouls, you get points. At some point, the table might not have enough balls left for you to pass your opponent’s point total, so at that point you’ve gotta try and make them foul through snookering.
The Trivia, Part II
When Joe meets Susan, she has a boyfriend who was an officer during WWII. That boyfriend talks down to Joe, who was just a sergeant during the war, and Joe complains about it to his work friend:
[He was] all phony acts and putting on a squadron leader act with me. Even threw the DFC at me. If we’d have done whatever it was he did we would have only got a DFM. Just medals, no crosses for us. Different brands of courage, don't you know.
This was literally true. The DFC, or Distinguished Flying Cross, was awarded to officers for acts “of valor, courage or devotion to duty whilst flying in active operations against the enemy.” The DFM, or Distinguished Flying Medal, was a less-prestigious award that rewarded the same actions, but was for enlisted men. In 1993, the British government made it so distinctions of rank were not considered in bravery awards, made all ranks eligible for the DFC, and got rid of the DFM.
The U.K. sovereign “has the sole right of conferring titles of honor on deserving people,” and those sovereigns have created a ton of decorations, orders, medals, and commendations. Some to know:
Victoria Cross: The highest U.K award for bravery. It was created by Queen Victoria in 1856 for extreme acts of bravery in the face of the enemy.
George Cross: the 2nd-highest award for bravery. It’s awarded for acts of bravery in circumstances of extreme danger, though not in the face of the enemy. (For instance, acts of bravery in civilian life or during peacekeeping missions.)9
Orders. There are some noteworthy named orders, including the Order of the Garter (the oldest and highest order), but mostly you’ll just need to know the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. The first two below mean you’re a knight or dame (meaning you get called Sir Tim Berners-Lee or Dame Barbara Cartland or whatever), whereas with the others, you just get the letters after your name.
Knight/Dame Grand Cross (GBE)
Knight/Dame Commander (KBE or DBE)
Commander (CBE)
Officer (OBE)
Member (MBE)
Odds and Ends
Room at the Top is an adaptation of a 1957 novel by John Braine; Braine’s one of Britain’s “angry young men,” and we’ll cover their moment in 1960…Hermione Baddeley’s performance as the woman who owns the pad Joe and Alice hook up in is the shortest ever to be nominated for an acting Oscar; you can watch her whole performance here…in 1965, they made a sequel to Room at the Top called Life at the Top (though that film replaces Heather Sears with Jean Simmons)…the News of the World was a tabloid published every Sunday from 1843 until 2011, when it was shuttered due to a phone tap scandal.
Also, after writing all of this, YouTube now thinks all I want is videos about snooker. And you know what? YouTube is right—videos about snooker are awesome.
“Sooooooosan.”
BUtterfield 8 is about Gloria Wandrous (Liz Taylor), a troubled Manhattan call girl. One of her clients is Weston Liggett (Harvey), a wealthy married man; another is Steve Carpenter (Eddie Fisher), a struggling composer. Eddie Fisher ends up as Mr. Liz Taylor #4; we’ll get to that story soon enough.
Summer and Smoke also starred Geraldine Page and Rita Moreno.
I’m guessing that means he—to use an unfortunate phrase from a 2022 song from NLE Choppa that somehow peaked at 28 on the Billboard Top 40 chart—sluts her out. Also, music is so weird right now.
This just means that, instead of peasants, she was often cast as prostitutes.
The film was remade in 1996 as Diabolique with Sharon Stone and Isabelle Adjani.
Yves Montand was discovered by Edith Piaf; here’s his version of her “La vie en rose.” Also, he was exhumed as part of a paternity suit, which, damn.
If you watch the video, you’ll see that it’s not like pool, where the person who breaks smashes up all the balls and tries to run the table. In snooker, you’re less likely to pot balls on the break since the pockets are less forgiving and you can’t hit the triangle of red balls head-on (since the pink ball guards it). And, if you blast the reds and don’t pot one, you make it easy for your opponent to run the table on you.
The George Cross, notably, was given to Malta—yeah, the country of Malta—for its gallantry during the Siege of Malta during WWII. That cross is the cross on Malta’s flag.