In pictures: Vivid behind-the-scenes shots from the jazz club in The L-shaped Room
These rarely seen colour photos – likely taken by director Bryan Forbes himself during the filming of the nightclub scene in his 1962 drama The L-shaped Room – offer a beautifully detailed glimpse of early 60s fashions and dancing among the beatnik crowd.
Lynne Reid Banks’s debut novel The L-shaped Room was an instant bestseller when published in 1960. The work of one of ITN’s first female news reporters, it captured a society on the cusp of radical change. Six years after the end of rationing and three years before The Beatles’ first number one, it vividly evokes transient post-war, pre-swinging London through the inhabitants of a Fulham boarding house, as encountered by 27-year-old protagonist, Jane. Jane is in a predicament no unattached career girl would envy as the 1960s began: seven years before abortion became legal and a year before the pill arrived in Britain, she is a month pregnant.
When Bryan Forbes adapted the novel for the big screen in 1962, he made a few key character changes and one crucial location shift. As played by Leslie Caron, Jane becomes a Frenchwoman who pitches up at the peeling doorway of a property in Ladbroke Grove – precisely where you would have found a West Indian jazz musician (Brock Peters as Johnny), an angry young novelist (Tom Bell as Toby), an elderly thespian (Cicely Courtneidge as Mavis) and a couple of working girls (including Pat Phoenix, relocated from Coronation Street) under the roof of formidable landlady Doris (Avis Bunnage).
Relocating to the Grove allowed Forbes to set the pivotal scene where Jane falls in love with Toby at John’s jazz club – the sort of shebeen described by local writers Samuel Selvon in The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Colin MacInnes’s City of Spades (1957). There was just such a place at 207 Westbourne Park Road, a few streets away from the central location of Doris’s house at 34 Moorhouse Road. In 1962 it was Joe Cannon’s Jazz Club, one of those Wild West 11 places where Mod youth got down with the Rude Boys, the friends of infamous landlord Peter Rachman entertained slumming aristos, and ladies of the night went to let their beehives down.
It was closed in 1964 after the Profumo scandal triggered a ‘vice purge’ of the area. Doris’s house and surrounding area were demolished in 1973 to make way for a new council estate. But these stills, found in the BFI National Archive and believed to have been taken by Forbes himself on location, give us a wonderful glimpse into that lost world, made vivid by their Kodachrome brightness.
Ace face: Johnny (Brock Peters) blows his horn to a soundtrack written by John Barry. “I can claim to have discovered John Barry,” said Forbes, “for I believe I gave him his first chance on a full-length feature film.” The Bond soundtrack maestro had first appeared on the big screen with his John Barry Seven in Edmond T. Gréville’s 1960 teensploitation movie Beat Girl, starring Adam Faith, whose pop hits had also been arranged by Barry. Forbes commissioned his first complete score for Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964).
Hot date: Jane (Leslie Caron) and Toby (Tom Bell) getting into a twist. Note the albums arranged on the wall behind them and the spiral staircase. Both the interiors and the extras in these scenes have the authenticity of a vérité location, and demonstrate the fast fashion progression of the early 1960s, which suggest this is a much more Mod than Trad hangout, as was the case at Joe Cannon’s Jazz Club.
Beat generation: Johnny’s drummer’s-eye view of the crowd takes in some fine examples of the Mod threads of the day. The hipster to Johnny’s left is a dead ringer for Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ Kevin Rowland when he was Searching for the Young Soul Rebels and recreating this exact period some 20 years later. And dig that pork pie hat on the hepcat to the right!
Hair today: to Johnny’s right, these three women’s hairstyles trace the transition of the now collapsing beehive (middle) into a sleek Vidal Sassoon-style bob (left) and all-important white Alice band and dead straight fringe (right). Sitting behind Johnny, the drummer looks sharp in shades and skinny tie.
Rebel threads: a closer look at some of the club’s groovers. The two lads in suits are sporting the Italian-inspired look of the Mods – shorter cut jackets with three buttons, slim-fitting trousers, and for the daddio on the left, the all-important sunglasses after dark. The woman in the middle is also caught between changing styles with her semi-beehive rocker hair teamed with proto-Mod polo neck and large medallion.
The in-crowd: the players in Johnny’s band are all professional musicians uncredited on the cast-list, though in an interview for the National Jazz Archives, the Storyville Jazz Band’s John Rainey remembers recording some of John Barry’s music for these scenes. Sadly, the soundtrack was never released.
Shades of a scandal: the well-groomed woman in her pearls recalls Christine Keeler, who in 1962 was about to become a household name thanks to her connections to minister for war John Profumo, celebrity osteopath Steven Ward, Soviet spy Yevgeny Ivanov and the recently-deceased slum landlord Peter Rachman, whose property empire was situated smack bang in the middle of The L-shaped Room’s shady milieu.
In the mood for love: Jane and Toby out on the floor. For this blissful moment they can forget their secrets and find solace from the loneliness of their furnished rooms together.
The centenary of director Bryan Forbes is being celebrated with a series of Projecting the Archive screenings at BFI Southbank in September.