London Movies – Cathi Unsworth presents The L Shaped Room w leslie Caron

Director Bryan Forbes 1962 adaptation of Lynne Reid Banks’ groundbreaking 1960 novel centres on the lives contained within a boarding house in Ladbroke Grove, where every resident lives on the margins of what is deemed acceptable in post-War, pre-Swinging London. Jane (Leslie Caron) is a single girl with a secret ‚Äì pregnant and unwilling to wed ‚Äì who finds solace and a kind of loving in the company of Angry Young Man novelist Toby (Tom Bell), West Indian jazzer John (Brock Peters), veteran actress Mavis (Cicely Courtneidge) and Sonia (Pat Phoenix), the tart-with-the-heart in the basement. With his third movie as director, Forbes, who adapted the screenplay himself, evokes all the elements of a society in flux and the issues troubling early Sixties’ youth, with mesmerising central performances that perfectly capture a bomb-hit, gas-lit world whose inhabitants, nonetheless, dared to dream.

£5 non members. All Welcome.