Unwed Dignity

The L-Shaped Room. The plot is frayed from use and old age, the characters are mostly Characters, and the sound track turns on a spigot marked Brahms to cue every tender moment. But L-Shaped Room shrugs off these shortcomings to become a beautiful and refreshing film. Part of the credit goes to Director Bryan Forbes (Whistle Down the Wind), whose screenplay honestly makes the unwed-motherhood story a low-key masterpiece of candor and sensitivity. A larger share goes to Leslie Caron; she plays not a girl who "got into trouble" but a young woman of remarkable dignity who, after a loveless weekend affair, chooses the less convenient road. Faced with the insinuating soft sell of an abortionist, she decides to have her baby and go it alone.

But there is respite to her loneliness: in the grubby lodging house where she creeps to wait out her time, she meets a penniless young writer (Tom Bell) and falls in love. Leslie lives in a dingy cubbyhole under the eaves, an L-shaped chamber sliced out of a larger room by a flimsy partition; beyond this wall lives a Negro musician (Brock Peters). For a while Leslie manages to keep the fact of her pregnancy from her lover. But the musician, eaten with jealousy, tells him that he has heard her being sick in the mornings. Secrets are hard to keep in an L-shaped room when, on the other side of the partition, someone is lying awake, listening.

The L-Shaped Room marks Leslie Caron's successful transition from gamin to grownup. Her love scenes with hawk-faced Tom Bell are vivid; her way of mumbling silently to herself in moments of despair evokes such heartbreak that viewers will want to hug her and say, there, there, everything will be all right. There is a taste of Honey and an aftertaste of Anger about The L-Shaped Room that give it an honorable place among British slice-of-life films.

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