LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Laurence Harvey: Joe Lampton
built 639 days ago
Harvey repeated the role of Joe Lampton in an equally frank sequel, Life at the Top. The film was less successful than its forbear... because it covered no new ground; it just confirmed the details of the empty life in store for Harvey's character at the end of the first film.
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Harvey played King Arthur in the London staging of the Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe musical Camelot, in 1964 at Drury Lane. He became very good friends with Elizabeth Taylor and his Manchurian Candidate co-star Frank Sinatra, and was a member in good standing of high society, then dubbed "The Jet Set". Like Joe Lampton, he had made it to the top.
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Harvey reprised his Oscar-nominated role as Joe Lampton in Life at the Top (1965), but the film was not a success. Audiences in the mid-1960s were changing, in tune with the culture at large. Audiences now embraced the humorous amorality of Michael Caine's Alfie (1966) and rejected the humorless Joe Lampton, who hearkened back to the "Kitchen Sink Dramas" that has dominated British popular culture since John Osborne's Look Back in Anger in 1956. Just as Look Back in Anger signalled a shift in culture, "Darling" and "Alfie" were bellwethers of a new generation who were ready to have it all, on their own terms, with just a modicum of angst demanded by motion picture morality. Harvey belonged to a generation, the youngest members of the generation that had fought the Second World War, that was quickly being supplanted.
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The human-interest imprint of "Room at the Top," which depicts a romantic triangle that exposes the essential moral weakness of an ambitious young man named Joe Lampton (memorably portrayed by Laurence Harvey), remains exceptionally strong. His betrayal of a somewhat older consort, Simone Signoret as Alice Aisgill, a Frenchwoman unhappily married to a snobbish Englishman, was genuinely painful to observe.
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Joe Lampton