FOR INTERNATIONAL young men and women participating in the intellectual adventure and pleasure of modern life, certain cinematic actors can be a valuable model and guide.
Laurence Harvey, who died of cancer at the age of 45 in 1973, was one of the most gripping and exciting to watch actors who personified the modern male in an outstanding succession of screen roles spanning the late 1950s to the end of the 60s.
Probably many of Harvey’s fans, hooked on that suave, erudite and sophisticated Anglo accent of his, never knew he was born in Lithuania (a fairly obscure Baltic state only recently independent of Russia) of Jewish parents, grew up in South Africa, and coming over to study (and conquer) the Dramatic Arts in London, earned his transition to the American stage, and ended up starring in outstanding films spanning Europe and America. Early along the way, he also shed his original Lithuanian name which was nowhere near Laurence Harvey.
But what exactly is the modern temperament? And why is it relevant beyond Western  metropolitan societies?  Its foremost quality is the human engagement with human changes in our social environment, in contrast to living in a physical and mental environment where values, attitudes, and especially the Arts are rigidly predetermined and staidly traditional or unchanging.
What the modern temperament is comprised of, or defined by, is particularly the absorption of literature, films, drama, visual art, music, and even fashion which reflect evolving, rather than predetermined or dogmatic values.
Such an evolving, exploratory creative vision is what constructs the modern temperament within individuals and groups; and of course such a vision in the Arts, often self-critical, can come from within any social environment free to develop such evolving qualities.
Laurence Harvey consistently acted roles where the social conditions and material values of a changing society affect the relations between individuals and society, between women and men. Harvey probably appeared in about 16 British films in fairly minor roles before 1958. I do not recall seeing any of these early films, though I might have seen one or two without recognizing him, since he had not as yet appeared in the 1958 British film, ‘ROOM AT THE TOP’, directed by the individualistic and sharply perceptive British director, Jack Clayton, which catapulted Harvey to international praise and stardom.
It was a seminal role for the tall, lanky, taciturn and passionate Harvey, because it demonstrated in a vivid and effective manner one of the catalytic attitudes of modern life, which is the acknowledged difference, yet interaction and friendship possible between members of the proletarian, bourgeois, and upper classes.
How is such a radical transition truly accommodated? Not really by political decisions apparently, but by the human absorption of the pros and cons of such a transition demonstrated within the format of the Arts, especially creative literature and film. The very benevolence of the modern temperament, culture, and lifestyle, hinges on the possession of literacy, and therefore its pursuit is linked to the pursuit of a liberal education in the values of humanity.
Harvey’s role in ‘ROOM AT THE TOP’ is a brilliantly accurate rendition of John Braine’s superb first-person first novel of the same title, narrated by Joe Lumpton (Harvey), the ambitious accountant of  British working-class background who leaves his poor district for a job in a huge firm owned by a wealthy industrialist whose influence dominates a small British township. Harvey, as Lumpton, abandons the first mature woman, well-known actress, Simone Signoret, who befriends his lonely beginning there for the boss’s privileged and pretty, but open-minded young adult daughter.
The result is not a fairytale of bliss, of course, but something else which oozes from the text of Braine’s masterpiece novel, and Clayton’s cinematic visualization of it; that something else is the scooped up totality of art’s ability to question and formulate, in which the modern temperament and its cultural influence are communicated.
Harvey’s passionate, sometimes sneeringly reactive or charmingly cool style of speech, and his ambitious working class chip-on-the-shoulder insecurities in ‘ROOM AT THE TOP’ are only a fraction of the overall values linked to the modern temperament in John Braine’s exciting and juicy first novel, like all the other vibrant British novels of his peers published in the 1950s and 60s, most of them made into equally first-class films, novels like: ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ by Alan Sillitoe, ‘A Kind of Loving’ by David Storey, ‘The Servant’ by Robin Maugham, ‘Hurry On Down’ by John Wain, ‘Poor Cow’ by Nell Dunn, ‘The L-Shaped Room’ by Lynn Reid-Banks, and ‘To Sir With Love’ by E.R. Braithwaite, among others.
Their contents constitute the actual ingredients of a modern temperament and culture. ‘Room at the Top’ shows how social interaction within an artistic context sets in motion the egalitarian sentiments possible in a modern lifestyle. When Harvey joins the small drama group of his firm, he meets the boss’s attractive daughter, whom he does like romantically, but he also wants to rise in social status and wealth by marrying into her family.
She, on the other hand, is no naïve glorifying idealist attracted to him because of his idolized working-class background; she likes his personality which, like hers, is educated enough to veto class consciousness as a barrier to love. It is education and an egalitarian modern culture which equalizes them, and this is set in motion by their mutual involvement with modern drama, which, like the novel and film themselves, is the realistic ticket to a true possession of a modern temperament.
Seen in the context of a developing ex-colonized nation, where both the material inventions and cultural manifestations of modernity do not originate but nevertheless find necessary and stimulating creative relevance, Laurence Harvey’s film roles came to express the still inarticulate inner feelings and dreams of a new generation of educated male Guyanese in pre and post-Independent 1960s Guyana.
Harvey’s female co-stars also had relevance for a growing group of educated female Guyanese, who were graduates of the nation’s colleges and high schools before becoming civil servants, various professionals, and self-employed creative people. Such female roles, by no means totally exemplary yet often self-critical and realistic, occur in Harvey films like ‘EXPRESSO BONGO’ (1959); ‘BUTTERFIELD 8’ (1960); ‘SUMMER AND SMOKE’ (1961); ‘WALK ON THE WILD SIDE’ (1962); ‘THE RUNNING MAN’ (1963); ‘OF HUMAN BONDAGE’ (1964); ‘DARLING’ (1965); and ‘A DANDY IN ASPIC’ (1968).
Except for the Guyanese novels of Edgar Mittelholtzer, certainly the first truly great modernist novelist to emerge from the region, and specific novels like ‘THE WAITING ROOM’ and ‘TUMATUMARI’ by Wilson Harris, ‘OTHER LEOPARDS’, a brilliant first-person novel by Denis Williams, and ‘TO SIR WITH LOVE’ by Braithwaite, a new generation of Guyanese who came of age in the 1960s could find very little local encouragement, apart from these novels, and poems by Martin Carter and A.J. Seymour,  to represent and explore the nascent educated modern temperament naturally forming within themselves.
How did Harvey’s and numerous other actors’ films find popular integration within Georgetown society at least, which, regardless of how it sounds, was the central location from which the radii of Guyanese modernity was issued? In the early 1960s, at the beginning of my teenage years, Harvey’s film, ‘EXPRESSO BONGO’, opened at Georgetown’s best cinema palace, Empire, on Middle Street, and became such a hit that 1pm shows of it were flocked to by college and high school truants, who were nevertheless mostly quite ‘bright’.
In it, Harvey is the suave and slick manager of a pop group, and demonstrates some exuberant chorography with a beatnik female dance troupe. The film gave legitimacy and inspiration to the ambition of local creative modernist pleasures, one of which was the spawning of beautiful local instrumental pop bands with a distinctly fluent steely poetic big-band sound, the best of which were ‘The Telstars’, ‘The Rhythmaires’, and ‘Combo 7’.
Harvey’s roles also brought young males face-to-face with the seductive power of women and the weakness of men, especially in films like ‘Butterfield 8’, ‘Summer and Smoke’, ‘Walk On The Wild Side’, ‘Of Human Bondage’ and ‘Darling’. What he achieves is a catharsis, a purging of the male ego of its angry humiliation, so that the male viewer understands the condition of desire and often its painful fruits, and learns to continue living in a wiser heterosexual state.
Harvey’s screen roles initiate us into the modern temperament by exposing us to the most painful personal experiences which accompany the unusual and jolting transition from a safe familiar traditional lifestyle towards one that is at first unknown and insecure, because it is the same as learning via individual and social growth.
Of all his films, the most touching and uninhibited is ‘Walk On The Wild Side’, a film that was fiercely restricted to adults, where his pursuit of a girl he loves leads him to witness the loss of his romantic ideals to the power of women and their tactful management of a brothel.
The presence of films like Laurence Harvey’s coincided with the rise of modern life in pre and post-Independent 1960s and 70s Guyana. The evidence existed in the very presence of films like his in the civic modern development of the city. In 1968, I saw one of Harvey’s best films, ‘DARLING’, by the superb British director of working-class origin, John Schlesinger. It portrays the creativity, the innovation, the swinging parties, lifestyle, and pleasures of the modern temperament. I saw ‘DARLING’ at Globe, one of the best Georgetown cinemas, with the best balcony, like a Greek amphitheater. This is the film in which Harvey, I think, not his co-star, Dirk Bogarde, performs cunnilingus on Julie Christie (who received an Academy Award for her role) whom they both love, as she reclines in an easy chair, expressing his emotionally intuitive sense of having shared her sexually.
I saw the film with my beautiful mod local mestizo girlfriend who hailed from the North West District, and we were in the emotional stress of breaking up as well. One entered Globe’s beautifully unique circular lobby, climbed the stone stairway to balcony, and could peer through circular perforations in the architecture down to the traffic and green canal of Church Street below. Around the hectic pave of nearby Waterloo Street, where three other bustling cinemas stood, were popular first-class restaurants like ‘Europa’, ‘Farm Fresh’, ‘Rendezvous’, ‘Oasis’, ‘Diabolique’, also five exciting bookstores, and fashionably dressed cinema crowds day and night on the perfect clean paves of the vicinity.
But it was really the presence of films like Laurence Harvey’s in all the cinemas which represented the truth of Guyanese modernity, not the outward presence of cars, vehicles, clothing stores etc. or oblivious people left only with a mere outward material ‘modern’ façade, but bearing little true educational and cultural substance within.