Background and Production
James Woolf bought the novel, originally intending to cast Stewart Granger and Jean Simmons. He hired Jack Clayton as director after seeing The Bespoke Overcoat.
Room at the Top is considered the first of the British New Wave of realistic and gritty film dramas. It was filmed at Shepperton Studios in London, with extensive location work in Halifax, Yorkshire, which stood in for the fictional towns of Warnley and Dufton. Some scenes were also filmed in Bradford, notably with Joe travelling on a bus and spotting Susan in a lingerie shop and the outside of the amateur dramatics theatre. Greystones, a large mansion in the Savile Park area of Halifax, was used for location filming of the outside scenes of the Brown family mansion. Halifax railway station doubled as Warnley Station in the film, and Halifax Town Hall was used for the Warley Town Hall filming.
Vivien Leigh was originally offered the part of Alice, which eventually went to Simone Signoret.
Read more about this topic: Room At The Top
Famous quotes containing the words background and, background and/or production:
“... every experience in life enriches one’s background and should teach valuable lessons.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)