Room 36

The press notes for Room 36 – a low-budget British noir started in 1994 but not completed until last year – lead actor Paul Herzberg writes an impassioned ode to director Jim Groom’s perseverance in seeing this ‘(potential) little classic’ to the screen. Explaining how Groom determinedly returned to his credit-card-funded labour of love in 2002, Herzberg refers to the director’s ‘Orson Welles moment’. But while Room 36 exudes undoubted film-making zest this is unfortunately besmirched by a proclivity for crudity and misogyny.

The eponymous room is in the seedy Hotel Midlothian, the west London establishment where Richard Armstrong, a repulsive lingerie salesman of Jabba the Hutt amplitude and lasciviousness, awaits hired companionship, while Connor, a ruthless hitman in an adjacent room, prepares for the arrival of the defecting MP he has been assigned to kill. The Midlothian, run by Brian Murphy (a familiar face from TV’s Man about the House and George and Mildred), seems intended almost as a character in its own right, but is rendered in only the broadest strokes – an inventory of clichés typified by the perpetual flicker of the hotel sign. Early establishing shots in the streets around Paddington Station achieve an effective workaday naturalism, so it’s a pity to see this undone by the Midlothian’s hackneyed composite of eerie bed-and-board antecedents.

Groom’s second feature (following 1992’s Revenge of Billy the Kid) undermines quirky Z-grade charm with grubbiness. It aims for the bargain-basement atmospherics of something like Detour (1946), but warps noir misanthropy into smutty English salaciousness. The dearth of likeable characters was never a hindrance for Detour and its ilk, because even the most twisted of protagonists had emotional depth. In Room 36 the repellent Midlothian guests are only ciphers. At the film’s heart is a depressing abhorrence of women, which manifests itself in violent repetition of the words ‘bitch’ and ‘whore’. The authentically noirish black-and-white camerawork, enriched by imaginative framing, seems superficial without complex psychologies.

This slavish mimesis of noir tropes, and the uncanny effect of watching scenes filmed years apart, is reminiscent of Carl Reiner’s noir spoof Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, in which Steve Martin was intercut with vintage genre clips (Herzberg even resembles Martin on the Room 36 poster). But if Reiner’s movie provided witty interplay with the past, Groom’s is merely anachronistic, apparently oblivious to the neo-noirs of Altman, John Dahl and the Coens that make it so redundant.

This review features in the November 2005 issue of Sight & Sound.