Room at the Top

Young, handsome, and eager for better things than his working class prospects, Joe Lampton arrives in a small city with a middling administrative job with limited prospects. At the local theater society with work friends, he's smitten by the winsome daughter, Susan, of the local industrial mogul, biggest man in town, Mr. Brown, whose wealth and status makes her all the more desirable. Warned against aspiring too high, crossing class boundaries, Joe instead develops a friendship with a decade older, sultry married French woman, Alice Aisgill. Her sophistication and need (her husband, George, demeaningly flaunts his affair with his secretary) and ability to appreciate Joe sparks a passionate affair. It turns out Susan returns Joe's interest, and they secretly date, despite Susan's jealous upper class snob boyfriend, charactonymed Jack Wales, who rubs his class superiority in Joe's face at every opportunity. Susan's parents prefer Jack, and their attempts to dissuade Susan include sending her off travelling incommunicado to France. As Joe plots to capture her affections, his affair with Alice deepens, enflames, and becomes ardent. Absence has also enflamed Susan, which desire Joe exploits upon her return, to manipulate her into bed. Having had her, Joe realizes he doesn't actually love the girlish Susan as much as her class status, while his truer, deeper desire is for the sophisticated, passionately needy Alice. As Mr. Brown's efforts to dissuade Joe become more aggressive, Joe and Alice seriously discuss her divorce. Then her husband George shows up and threatens Joe; he'll never let Alice go. At every turn older, higher status men are thwarting Joe, and he's damned if he'll let them, his masculinity expressed through his way with women, defiance of their men, and class aspirations. Just as it seems he's stymied with both women, he's summoned by Mr. Brown to lunch at the Conservative Club. Brown will set Joe up in business comfortably far away, if he promises never to see Susan again. Joe refuses, out of defiance. But, Brown reveals that Joe has passed his test, and informs Joe of his final offer: he will marry pregnant Susan, work for his new father-in-law, learn to manage his company, and break it off permanently with Alice. Recognizing he's trapped and this is his best shot, Joe accepts. Alice is shattered when Joe informs her, and Joe is furiously denounced by Alice's friend for his manipulation and crass class climbing. As colleagues and friends who doubted his ability to rise from his caste celebrate Joe's good fortune as news of his engagement spreads, he learns of Alice's drunk driving suicide, and is consumed by guilt and remorse. Joe drowns his sorrows at a working class bar, gets thoroughly drunk, flirts, canoodles, and gets brutally beaten by the girl's jealous boyfriend. His friends save and patch him up, and chastened and trapped, Joe accepts his fate in his by-all-appearance perfect wedding, where Susan is smitten, and completely, naively unaware of Joe's conflicted emotional reality.