July 23, 1963 - The somewhat unusual title of the motion picture “The L-Shaped Room,” a British film currently playing in American theaters, stems from a trick used by certain English landlords to double the rent potential of a room. In the film, Leslie Caron (center), playing a young French girl who comes to London to escape the suffocating atmosphere of her provincial upbringing, moves into a furnished room in a seamy section of London. It is an L-shaped room and owes its distinctive shape to a right-angle partition that has been installed to cut a tiny box out of the original area, thereby making two rooms out of one. Directed and written for the screen by Bryan Forbes, “The L-Shaped Room” was produced by Richard Attenborough and James Woolf. It features supporting performances by Brock Peters (left) and Tom Bell (right). In The New York Times, critic Bosley Crowther wrote of the film: “Leslie Caron pours into this role so much powerful feeling, so much heart and understanding, that she imbues a basically threadbare little story with tremendous compassion and charm. The credit, however, is not all Miss Caron's. She must share it with an excellent cast, including Tom Bell, a new actor who plays the writer on a par with her. Particularly she must share it with the remarkable young director Bryan Forbes, who also wrote the screenplay from a novel by Lynne Reid Banks.”
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