The L-Shaped Room

Infobox Film
name = The L-Shaped Room
imdb_id = 0057239


director = Bryan Forbes
writer = Bryan Forbes
starring = Leslie Caron
Tom Bell
Brock Peters
music = John Barry (composer)
cinematography = Douglas Slocombe
editing = Anthony Harvey
producer = Richard Attenborough
Jack Rix
James Woolf
distributor = British Lion Films (UK)
Columbia Pictures (US)
released = 1962
runtime = 126 min.
language = English |

"The L-Shaped Room" is a 1962 film, directed by Bryan Forbes, which tells the story of a young French woman, unmarried and pregnant, who moves into a London apartment building, befriending a young man in the building. It stars Leslie Caron and Tom Bell.

The movie was adapted by Bryan Forbes from the novel by Lynne Reid Banks.

It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress (Leslie Caron).

ynopsis

The L-Shaped Room follows a young French girl, Jane (Leslie Caron), who arrives alone at a boarding house in Fulham, London. Beautiful and withdrawn, she encounters the residents of her house through the meandering first act of the film, each a social outsider in their own way.

Jane is pregnant, we learn, 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 facile assumption that she must want either marriage or an abortion so insults her that she determines to have the child.

Cast

*Leslie Caron - Jane Fosset
*Tom Bell - Toby
*Brock Peters - Johnny
*Cicely Courtneidge - Mavis
*Avis Bunnage - Doris
*Bernard Lee - Charlie
*Patricia Phoenix - Sonia
*Gerry Duggan - Bert
*Emlyn Williams - Dr. Weaver

In popular culture

The theme of a young woman becoming a single mother in the sixties is also explored by Margaret Drabble in The Millstone.

The Smiths chose to open their 1986 album, "The Queen Is Dead", with a sound sample from this film — taken from the scene at the house in London during the Christmas season, in which Mavis (Cicely Courtneidge) leads her fellow Brits abroad through an off-key chorus of "Take Me Back To Dear Old Blighty".

Music

Peter Katin's recording of Johannes Brahms's Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, Op. 15 is used as the background music, and excerpts occur frequently throughout the film. [ [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057239/soundtrack IMDB music] ]

External links

*imdb title|id=0057239|title=The L-Shaped Room