Angry Young Men: Rebels without a pause

The post-war class struggles of the BBC's new 'Room at the Top' are with us still, says Gerard Gilbert

(BBC)

As the girl asked the motorbiking Marlon Brando in The Wild One: "What are you rebelling against?". To which Brando replied: "Whaddya got?" Director Nic Ray was to go one step further down this dead-end seeming road by naming his 1955 James Dean drama Rebel Without a Cause, while in 1956 in Britain – the year of Suez – the first liberating tremors of the rock'n'roll invasion would translate into cinemas being trashed to the beat of Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock".

That same year the press officer of London's Royal Court Theatre used the term Angry Young Man to describe Jimmy Porter, the protagonist in John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger. But at what point do the Angry Young Men intersect with this generalised youth revolt? Were Osborne, John Braine (Room at the Top) and Alan Sillitoe (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) literary Teddy Boys ripping open their metaphorical cinema seats with words instead of switchblades? And what of today's Angry Young Men and Women – raging against youth unemployment and the general stunting of their prospects in a land where the oldies seem to have licked all the icing off the cake, and once again the passport to a future is public school and Oxbridge? I mean, come on, whaddya got?

A new BBC4 dramatisation of Braine's Room at the Top gives us an opportunity to ponder again the motivation of the "Angries" – and to peer into the soul of that iconic trio: Joe Lampton, Jimmy Porter and Arthur Seaton. Jack Clayton's original 1959 screen version of Braine's book blazed a path for the new wave of social-realist "kitchen-sink" cinema featuring working-class actors speaking with working-class regional accents.

Laurence Harvey played Lampton, the Bradford lothario who taught himself accountancy while a prisoner of war in Germany. Arriving in a new town determined to better himself, ex-RAF airman Lampton discovers that one route to the top – by way of local posh girl Susan Brown – is blocked by Susan's councillor father. Meanwhile, and not part of his plan, he falls in love with an unhappily married older woman, Alice Aisgill, played in the film by French actress Simone Signoret who won the Oscar in the same year that Marilyn Monroe was up for Some Like It Hot. Monroe had to make do with the Golden Globe.

"Simone Signoret's performance is absolutely stunning and heart-breaking," says Amanda Coe, who has adapted BBC4's version of Room at the Top, restoring Alice to her Yorkshire origins (she is played here by the Bolton-born Maxine Peake).

Another significant alteration has been to locate the story back in its original decade. "The book is set very firmly in 1948 and the film feels very much a product of the late 1950s," says Coe. "The book is very much about the austerity of the immediate post-war period."

Mancunian actor Matthew McNulty plays Joe, his accent more convincing than that of the original Harvey, a famously wooden actor of Lithuanian stock brought up in South Africa. "Laurence Harvey as Joe is often used as a stick to beat the film with," comments Phil Wickham of the British Film Institute. "Certainly he sports a strange Johannesburg-Bradford accent. Yet there is something about his blank, narcissistic presence that works in showing Joe's essential weakness".

Joe's rebellion, as Coe points out, is a conservative one. "He's not a class crusader," she says. "He's very much out for himself – they [the Angry Young Men] are keen on getting themselves through class barriers but they weren't helping anybody else come up along with them.

"They're rebelling against the constraint of this extremely class-bound society that they're a product of ... that generation of mainly working-class grammar-school boys who'd been in the Army. Society was in a state of flux after the war and they sensed an opportunity not to live the lives their parents had."

Coe says she personally identifies with Joe and the book, coming from Yorkshire. "My own dad was born in exactly the same time as John Braine and grew up in the same area, and there was this unquestioning sense of that's what your life was and that's what you did. He was a butcher – and his dad was a butcher and his granddad was a butcher – he came out of the RAF and went straight back to do the same thing. Whereas Joe Lampton – he was a prisoner of war and he does his accountancy exams in the prison. It's quite funny now to think he's this groovy hero smashing the class barriers by being an accountant.

"The anger that Joe, and, by inference, John Braine has ... you just feel it's very, very raw... that literally somebody wouldn't have a conversation with you if they thought that they were of a higher social class. Your prospects at work were very limited [depending on whether] you'd been to a public school or not. These are things that still exist, obviously, but it was just so shockingly overt back then."

The emergence of this Old Etonian-packed coalition Government in 2010, along with the apparent grinding to a halt of social mobility in Britain, must surely inspire some latter-day John Braine.

"Yes, but they would have to be angry in a different way from someone like Joe," says Coe. "The things Joe wants are the things that broadly people now take for granted – really basic things like decent food, central heating ... there's a lot of stuff in the book about objects and possessions." As there is in some rap music, although songs such as Travie McCoy's "I Want to be a Billionaire" set their sights somewhat higher.

"Also," adds Coe, "the female characters in the book were very interesting to me. They are part and parcel of the story, so it's not only about angry young men. Maybe the way forward for society was not just to have the young men being angry but to get the women being a bit miffed as well."

That would come later, of course, with feminism – not a movement to find much sympathy with the Angry Not-So-Young Men, the likes of Kingsley Amis and the five-times married John Osborne. "And that's one of the interesting things about the Angry Young Men," says Coe. "They're quite reactionary figures, in fact."

Room at the Top starts on BBC4 on Thursday 7 Apr

Anger management: Just count to three

Joe Lampton (Room at the Top)

A demobbed RAF airman who studied accountancy while a PoW, Lampton is determined to make something of himself as he moves to a new job in a new town. Famous for saying: "I'm working class ... not really a coffee man."

Jimmy Porter (Look Back in Anger)

Despite his university education, Porter works on a sweet stall in a Midlands market, sharing a flat with his verbally abused upper-class wife Alison. Famous for asking: "Why do we spend half Sunday reading the newspapers?"

Arthur Seaton (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning)

Seaton works in a Nottingham bicycle factory when he's not having an affair with a workmate's wife – and with her sister. Famous for saying: "Don't let the bastards grind you down."