The L-Shaped Room is a 1962 British drama romance film directed by Bryan Forbes, based on the 1960 novel of the same name by Lynne Reid Banks.[2] It tells the story of Jane Fosset (Leslie Caron), a young French woman, unmarried and pregnant, who moves into a cheap London boarding house, befriending a young man, Toby (Tom Bell), in the building.[3][4] The work is considered part of the kitchen sink realism school of British drama.[5][6] The film reflected a trend in British films of greater frankness about sex and displays a sympathetic treatment of outsiders "unmarried mothers, lesbian or black" as well as a "largely natural and non-judgmental handling of their problems". As director, Forbes represents "a more romantic, wistful type of realism" than that of Tony Richardson or Lindsay Anderson.[7]
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Caron's performance earned her the Golden Globe Award and BAFTA Award for best actress, as well as a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress.[8][9][10]
Cicely Courtneidge gave what she considered her finest film performance, in a role wholly unlike her usual parts; she played an elderly lesbian, living in a drab London flat with her cat, recalling her career as an actress and forlornly trying to keep in touch with former friends.[11] The Times described her performance as a triumph.[12] For Bell, the film marked his breakthrough as a leading actor in film and television.[13]
A 27-year-old French woman, Jane Fosset (Caron), arrives alone at a run down boarding house in Notting Hill, London, moving into an L-shaped room in the attic. Beautiful but withdrawn, she encounters the residents of her house, each a social outsider in his or her own way, including a gay, black trumpeter.[2]
Jane is pregnant and has no desire to marry the father. On her first visit to a doctor, she wants to find out if she really is pregnant and consider her options. The doctor's assumption that she must want either marriage or an abortion annoys her to the extent that Jane determines to have the child. She and Toby (Bell) start a romance which is disrupted when he learns that she is pregnant by a previous lover. They try to work things out but he is also unhappy with his lack of income or success as a writer.
Jane befriends the other residents and they help her when she goes into labour. Toby visits her in hospital and gives her a copy of his new story, called The L-Shaped Room. After leaving hospital, Jane journeys home to her parents in France, saying goodbye to the room where she has lived for seven months.
Critical reception
In The New York Times, Bosley Crowther wrote "[Leslie Caron] pours into this role so much powerful feeling, so much heart and understanding, that she imbues a basically threadbare little story with tremendous compassion and charm. The credit, however, is not all Miss Caron's. She must share it with an excellent cast, including Tom Bell, a new actor who plays the writer on a par with her. Particularly she must share it with the remarkable young director Bryan Forbes, who also wrote the screenplay from a novel by Lynne Reid Banks. Mr Forbes is a sometime actor whose first directorial job was last year's beautiful and sensitive Whistle Down the Wind. In this little picture, he has achieved much the same human quality, with shadings of spiritual devotion, as in that."[6]
The film was restored and issued on DVD and blu-ray in 2017; extras include later interviews with Caron and Reid Banks.
"Top Rental Features of 1963". Variety. 8 January 1964. p. 71. Waymark, Peter. "70 years on stage for Cicely Courtneidge", The Times, 3 September 1971, p. 14
