“Joe … be gentle with me … ” It’s easy to imagine this demure invitation to premarital sex getting some ribald hooting in British cinemas in 1959. Jack Clayton’s multi-Oscar-winning film was adapted by Neil Paterson from John Braine’s moody, zeitgeisty bestseller, and it’s rereleased now with the traditional trigger warning about offensive and outdated attitudes. Now, that could mean pretty much everything about this film – but without doubt it is specifically aimed at Hermione Baddeley praising the hero’s manliness and grimacing: “Too many pansies about these days … ”
Room at the Top gave us Laurence Harvey as Joe Lampton, the smouldering, ambitious young working-class Yorkshireman with a chip on his shoulder and a burning desire to get on, and get laid. Achieving both, he calculates, could mean getting engaged to a rich young woman after (or during) the sowing of wild oats elsewhere to which he considers himself fully entitled. But he’s terrified of being tied down. So Joe is the poster boy for what no one in 1959 called toxic masculinity.
