Solid, professional craftsman who from 1935 worked his way up from third assistant director to editor with Alexander Korda's London Films before directing the medium-length film, "The Bespoke Overcoat" (1955), which won a short-subject Oscar and a prize at the Venice Film Festival. Clayton then served as producer on several routine pictures before directing his first feature, the powerful, class-conscious drama, "Room at the Top" (1958), which inaugurated a new kind of kitchen-sink realism and frank sensuality in the British cinema.

Working once again in black and white with cinematographer