Northerner Joe Lampton becomes involved with Lord Ackerman, the powerful chairman of a pharmaceutical concern, his beautiful wife Alex, and daughter Robin. But trouble starts when Joe is made Managing Director of one of Ackerman’s companies and makes a shocking discovery: his predecessor committed suicide...
大人物, Muž nahoře
UK15
UK
A real curiosity, this. Of all the 70s tv shows to get a big screen outing, this feels in some ways like the least likely prospect: despite technically being a sequel to 1959's Room at the Top, this is very much tied to the tv series that had inspired, and without the crowd-pleasing broad appeal of sitcoms turned features (the On the Buses films, for example, which were also Hammer productions) or the tried and tested genre fare (Doomwatch or The Sweeney, say) a dialogue heavy big business drama doesn't seem like a natural choice for expansion.
The result is a mixed bag. Keeping Haigh, who'd starred in the tv series, and hiring director Mike Vardy, himself a veteran of…
John Braine concluded the story of his most famous protagonist, the cynically ambitious working class hero Joe Lampton, with the 1962 novel life At The Top. This was subsequently filmed in 1965 with Room At The Top star Laurence Harvey reprising the role of Lampton.
But whilst that was the end of Lampton in print and Harvey as Lampton, it wasn't actually the end of Joe Lampton's story; in 1970 Braine resurrected his (anti) hero for the two television series entitled Man At The Top with the mercurial Kenneth Haigh taking the role of Joe. I can't really comment on these episodes which ran from 1970 to 1972 as I haven't seen them but in 1973, Hammer brought Joe Lampton…
Kenneth Haigh may have originated the Angry Young Man with his performance as Jimmy Porter in the stage productions of Look Back in Anger, but 15 years later he is the main problem with this portrayal of another archetypal AYM - Room at the Top’s Joe Lampton.
This second sequel to the vanguard film of the British New Wave has a so-so script, veering between pithy lines and ridiculous plot developments - John Junkin may have been responsible for the former, Hugh Whitemore presumably the latter. Every woman that encounters Joe Lampton drops her knickers for him, or in Nanette Newman’s case, her body double does. Why they should do so is an utter enigma. He is rude and charmless,…
Watched Online.
It's no "Room at the Top," but it's not bad.
Kenneth Haigh's mustache is so 1970's it hurts. His monologue about the old woman killed me.
This film is ruthlessly British. It's a different type of Horror film for Hammer, though it fits well in their catalogue.
Not much to add to the lengthy preceding review. This is a perfectly early-70s film. It looks more like a made-for-TV movie, than actual 'cinema'. But the widescreen format helps a little, and there is gratuitous (female-only) nudity for those who want that. This is a feature-length extension of the UK series of the same title, based on the writing of John Braine (ROOM AT THE TOP). It follows the protagonist, Joe Lampton (now played by Kenneth Haigh) beyond his experiences in the two earlier films (the first sequel is LIFE AT THE TOP 1965). Laurence Harvey played Joe in both those films and despite his occasionally cool manner (appropriate at times for Lampton) he is ultimately sympathetic as a…
