Forgotten Movies: The L-Shaped Room
I read the book by Lynne Reid Banks before I saw the movie. She also wrote two sequels to the story as well as the terrific kid's book THE INDIAN IN THE CUPBOARD.
This is the 1962 story of a pregnant French girl who finds a room in a boarding house when her father kicks her out and gradually comes to find a home there too. Other than Leslie Caron in the starring role, the cast is fairly unfamiliar to me although that is Brock Peters playing the horn. One of those movies where you could wallow in its misery. My favorite kind at fourteen (and sometimes now). One of the many British movies about the working class from the fifties and sixties. It is rare now to find movies that treat urban blue-collar people seriously although perhaps it was then too. American audience, in particular, like glamour in their movies, I think.
7 comments:
I saw this years ago along with a lot of the other British "kitchen sink" dramas. I liked most of them. I think black & white is what they should be in, as most movies of that era seem to have been.
I didn't realize there were two sequels to the book.
Jeff M.
I agree that audiences prefer escapism to Reality. The Brits used to do this kind of gritty working class movie well.
I get this confused with "Thank You All Very Much" (based on Margaret Drabble's THE MILLSTONE) in which Sandy Dennis plays the pregnant and unmarried woman and an incredibly young Ian McKlellan plays her love interest.
There were plenty of warnings in the pop culture for us gals that my mother's mantra in my teen years--DON'T GET PREGNANT!--was the way to go!
We saw that Sandy Dennis movie too, along with several others she made in that era - mostly downers. (Wikipedia lists that one as A TOUCH OF LOVE, though we definitely saw it under the title THANK YOU ALL VERY MUCH.)
I remember the days before abortions were legal and birth control pills were easily available very well. We knew several people who had pregnancy scares, and a close friend of my brother's had to drop out of school and get married and get a job when his girlfriend got pregnant.
It is a very different world today.
Jeff M.
Don't know anything about this one. Been a very long time since I watched any movies made before about 1970
As you might remember, Patti, I saw this one when I was about eleven, and it certainly hit home...probably the first kitchen sinker I saw.
Where are the subtitles? I couldn't understand most of what the bloke said.
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