Review: Man at the Top

Kenneth Haigh plays Joe Lampton, who moves up in the world to take on an executive position working for Harry Andrews’ pharmaceutical company. He even manages to bed the boss’ wife (Nanette Newman) while he’s at it- and is he ever at it! (Had to go there). However, something starts to feel not right with all of this. You see, Joe got the job after his predecessor committed suicide, and it appears that the company’s new wonder drug might not be all it’s cracked up to be. So Joe starts to look into it, well in between boinking Newman and shacking up with a runaway (British TV veteran Angela Bruce) and her friend (Margaret Heald). Clive Swift and John Quentin play a couple of executives, whilst comedian/former soccer play Charlie Williams has a nice (but irrelevant to the plot) cameo as Bruce’s dad.

 

I’ve not seen any of the previous films in this series (“Room at the Top”, “Life at the Top”), read the books, or seen the TV series (also starring Kenneth Haigh) that this 1973 film is related to. I’m also not English, and didn’t grow up at the time this film was made or set, so I’m really not the right audience for this film. So when I tell you that this seemed like much ado about nothing, bear all of this in mind. Directed by Mike Vardy (who directed for the same-named series) and scripted by John Junkin (an actor/TV writer) and Hugh Whitemore (Franco Zeffirelli’s “Jane Eyre”), you might get a whole lot more out of this than I did. I only watched the thing because it was a Hammer release. It's absolutely not typical Hammer fodder, and contained little of interest for me.

 

Kenneth Haigh isn’t bad in the lead, though I’m not sure why he’s been painted as a pants man, that’s a little bit of a stretch. He’s got a face like a busted arse (takes one to know one), and isn’t that charming. What doesn’t help is that the film has a bit of a made-for-TV attitude towards sexual content (Also, Nanette Newman apparently uses a body double for her very brief nude scene, so it’s even more useless). Veteran character actor Harry Andrews is rock-solid, but underused (Clive Swift even more poorly used). He and Haigh are too good for this.

 

Every once in a while I’ll come across a film that makes perfect narrative sense, but I still can’t make heads or tails of it. This is one such film. I couldn’t work out why I was supposed to care about any of it. The drug/suicide thing feels like it should be the important thing here, but if it is, the film takes forever to get around to really dealing with it and what we get instead just isn’t compelling. Americans would take the same basic plot and turn it into an industrial thriller, but because it’s British…we mostly get stuffy class bullshit and fox hunting. And John Quentin, who I’m pretty sure is Benedict Cumberbatch’s dad. Or not. I might be joking about that.

Presumably popular in England at the time, but so was the “Carry On” series. There’s no accounting for taste. This one did very little for me. Well-acted, but who cares? Not me. Much ado about less than nothing.

 

Rating: C-