The L-Shaped Room

A queasy sample of the 'new British realism' of the early '60s, based on a novel by Lynne Reid Banks, with Caron as a pregnant French girl who holes up in a Notting Hill bedsit. The house, of course, is peopled by a surefire stockpot of picturesque characters, from seedy doctor and gay black to lesbian actress and chatty tart, not forgetting the tyro writer (Bell) who falls for Caron and draws literary inspiration from their story. Good performances, but it's all a bit like a po-faced trial run for TV's Rising Damp.