Room at the Top
Great Directors
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Classics, Drama, Romance, UR
Jack Clayton’s 1959 romantic drama tells the story of Joe (Laurence Harvey), a young and ambitious man who has just moved to Yorkshire to work for the Borough Treasurer’s Department. He instead becomes romantically involved with Alice (Simone Signoret in an Oscar-winning performance), and what ensues is a complicated affair that forces Joe to confront what he really wants in life. Clayton brings insight, sensitivity, and visual flair to this dynamic and personal look at youth in love.
Up Next in Great Directors
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Momma Don't Allow
This lively Free Cinema short captures a night out at the Wood Green Jazz Club, where teenagers jive to trad jazz. Funded by the BFI Experimental Film Fund, it was filmed over the course of nine Saturdays by Karel Reisz, then programmer of the National Film Theatre, and a young BBC television dir...
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Together
Italian director Lorenza Mazzetti borrowed techniques from the neorealist school to conjure this striking study of East End life, one of the original Free Cinema shorts. Following the ambling existence of two deaf-mute dock workers, Mazzetti crafts a poetic depiction of post-war London populated ...
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We Are the Lambeth Boys
Karel Reisz’s honest and sympathetic depiction of South London teens aimed to challenge the media perception of ‘Teddy Boys’, and would be one of the last films to appear under the Free Cinema banner. One of the key elements of the Free Cinema films was the sympathetic representation of working-c...
