How Room at the Top brought the X-rated movie in from the cold

The 1959 Oscar winner – recently re-released by the BFI – was considered revolutionary in its treatment of sex, class and ambition. It’s not so shocking now. Geoffrey Macnab looks at why, and investigates how it transformed attitudes towards film censorship

Simone Signoret and Laurence Harvey in ‘Room at the Top’ (Shutterstock)

For once, the French were shocked by the uninhibited erotic charge of a British-made movie. In the summer of 1959, when Jack Clayton’s Room at the Top screened at the Cannes festival, the local reviewers and audiences blushed at the scenes of the two stars, Laurence Harvey and Simone Signoret, enjoying a little illicit love in the afternoon.

“Its sexual frankness has astonished French critics and the public in the same way that maturing offspring often take aback their more settled parents,” critic Alex Walker reported from the French Riviera.

Back in the UK, audiences were rendered equally hot and bothered by a mainstream film, with well-known actors, which had turned up at their local cinemas carrying an “X” certificate. The poster itself, depicting Harvey naked above the waist with his face on Signoret’s breasts, was enough to set knees trembling.