Separate Tables
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Movie Reviews of Separate Tables
Movie Review: Rita Acts!
Summary: 4 Stars
Rita Hayworth, unexpectedly, shows great sensitivity in this role. David Niven is a 5 star hit
in his part.
Movie Review: Classy but rather stolid theatrical adaptation redeemed by some fine acting
Summary: 3 Stars
** Minor spoilers ahead **
I knew that this was an adaptation of a play (by Terence Rattigan) going in, and seeing director Delbert Mann's name made it all the clearer that this was going go be one of those "classy" American films of the 50s about a "serious" subject that got a bunch of award nominations - something in the same category roughly as the DRIVING MISS DAISY a generation later, or perhaps A BEAUTIFUL MIND from this era. Typically, not the kind of film that I find myself enthralled in, though just as typically watchable enough. And I was more or less right in my assumption.
The characters for the most part struck me as one-note. It doesn't surprise me really that Deborah Kerr was nominated for playing the repressed, borderline hysterical, browbeaten spinster daughter who forms a devotion to the (Oscar-winning) David Niven's exaggerated British military character - Kerr's role is the flashiest, along with Niven's, and the least interesting I think. I really did like Wendy Hiller as the hotel's manager - she brought real warmth and empathy to this rather understated role and she, too, won an Oscar for it - this one well-deserved. There's so much emotion there in the scene where she's telling the American writer who she loves (Burt Lancaster) that he needs to go to his ex-wife (Rita Hayworth, in maybe the best performance I've seen from her) because she needs him, needs him far more than the lonely but basically accepting hotelier.
Delbert Mann was one of the many directors of that period who specialized in such work - Joshua Logan was another - but though he was quite successful both commercially and critically (his MARTY won him a Best Director Oscar and Best Picture 2 years earlier), many of his films seem rather stodgy and un-cinematic now; a director like Vincente Minnelli or Richard Brooks, both of whom made excellent dramatic adaptations in the same year (SOME CAME RUNNING and CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, respectively), might have brought this some needed energy and panache. Then again, it's fairly low-key stuff and those flashier filmmakers might have overplayed it. In any case, it feels to me overall a bit static and lachrymose.
But Hayworth and Hiller bring this up to some extent from the tepid and stagy camerawork and the rather obvious and predictable direction the characters are moving in, and the last scene with all the main characters gathered in the dining room as Kerr finally breaks (if only for a moment) from her domineering mother is also fairly powerful, so on the whole I can recommend this though I think you'd probably have to be a fan of some of the actors here to really get into it. Perhaps I'll get more out of it too when I've gotten closer to the ages of most of the characters (and I'm not far off now); this really is a story that will work best, I think, for those who have lived a lot - and have filled up with regrets that make looking forward almost impossible.
Movie Review: Peyton Place in a Boarding House
Summary: 3 Stars
A varied assortment of guests sling gossip, secrets and loads of melodrama liberally around the rooms and grounds of an English boarding house. Profound? No. Entertaining? For the most part."Separate Tables" is what results when you mix "Peyton Place" and "Clue." Everyone's a suspect for Most Noble Sufferer, and mostly the cast does well with the material given, even if in many cases the material doesn't deserve the quality of the actors delivering it.
Inevitably, some of the stories are more interesting than the others. The Burt Lancaster/Rita Hayworth love-hate plotline grew tiresome in record pace---and too bad, since obviously this is the story the screenwriter and director were most taken with. It definitely dominates.
I wanted more of the Deborah Kerr/Gladys Cooper storyline. Deborah Kerr is a bizarre woman-child, unrecognizable in frump garb, dominated by her overbearing mother, Gladys Cooper doing her withering old biddie routine for the umpteenth time. Cooper is a riot, an old lady with WAY too much time on her hands, eager to go witch-hunting at every available opportunity.
Poor David Niven is saddled with the role of a lonely British man pretending to be something he's not and trying to hide an embarrassing secret from the group. He wanders around in a smoking jacket doing his best Colonel Mustard impersonation, saying things like "Wot, wot" and mumbling lines to the point of unintelligibility. He inexplicably won a Best Actor Oscar for his performance (must have been a weak year), no doubt more for his body of work up to that point than for this performance specifically. He has maybe 20 minutes of screen time altogether and for most of them is required to do nothing more than look uncomfortable.
The best cast member is Wendy Hiller, playing the proprietress of the hotel. Her acting is natural and low-key, and she gets the chance to play a fully rounded character, one with some implied history, and not merely an assemblage of mannerisms.
The end of the film is a like a stuffy version of "Dead Poets Society." I would have given anything to see Deborah Kerr jump onto a table and start clapping, but I guess these guests are a bit too reserved for that sort of thing, wot, wot.
Grade: C+
Movie Review: All the hotel's a stage
Summary: 3 Stars
Delbert Mann did some very ingenious things in turning Terrence Rattigan's famous pair of one-act plays into a film: he combined them into one continuous work, and he also retained the plays' sense of confinement by refusing to let the camera leave the setting of an English seaside hotel and its terrace for the entire film (until the film's lovely final shot, a crane shot that zooms back from a shot of the proprietress, Wendy Hiller, through the window of the dining room). Instead of allowing this confinement to be too visually deadening, he makes beautiful use of mise-en-scene to keep the viewers' interest in the action of the work. Although it does seem stagebound, the film seems purposefully so: this is a film, after all, about the kinds of roles people play for one another when they know they're on display.
Mann's unwise decisions were not to take a stronger hand in the performances of several of the film's stars, particularly those usually excellent actors Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr who both here seem berserk. Lancaster is given the very stagey role of the character who rips others' illusions from them, telling them hideous truths while he clings to his own illusions, and he hams it up quite a bit, though not to the extent of Kerr. Although she made a career of superlative performances as hysterics (particularly in BLACK NARCISSUS and THE INNOCENTS), she shows none of the restraint an actress needs, and which she has elsewhere shown, to play a histrionic character effectively and believably. Surprisingly, Rita Hayworth, an almost staggeringly inferior actress to the other two usually, is much more effective as a sexually predatory and deceitful woman who can be capable of human decency; unsurprisingly, Wendy Hiller outshines everyone, in a thoughtful and beautifully modulated performance, as Lancaster's rock-steady fiancée. She won the Oscar for her work here, as did (less deservedly) David Niven, as Kerr's would-be suitor, a military man who secretly molests women at movie theaters.
Movie Review: An Uninteresting Star-Studded Movie
Summary: 2 Stars
This is Terrence Rattigan's character study of five individuals staying at a resort British town of Bournemouth. The setting of this motel is a symbol of a refuge for these five desperate characters trying to make their lives better, and staying out of troubles. The movie, directed by Delbert Mann, casts some of the best actors in Hollywood. David Niven won an Oscar award for his role as a retired Major (Angus Pollack). Mann is known for great comedic movies such as, Lover Come Back, and That Touch of Mink. His modest directorial role in this film is insufficient to make this movie interesting.
Ann Shankland (Rita Hayworth), a former model comes in search of her ex-husband John Malcolm (Burt Lancaster), who is currently engaged to Pat Cooper (Wendy Hiller), the manager of the motel. Other residents of the motel include, Sybil Railton (Deborah Kerr) an unassertive and frightfully repressed young lady living with her wealthy mother Mrs. Railton Bell (Gladys Cooper). She is casually befriended by Angus Pollack (David Niven) who has been charged with a minor sexual infraction in a public theater. As the lives intersect, emotions grow tense, providing all of the characters with their big dramatic moments. While David Niven offers a fine performance in this otherwise boring film, the viewers are some what bored by the role of Ms. Kerr who is known to have made some of the best movies Hollywood could offer. This movie is far from the magic of "Here to Eternity" that showed Deborah Kerr's love-making scene with Burt Lancaster on the Hawaiian beach.
Rita Hayworth and Burt Lancaster shine as ex-lovers forced to examine their pasts. Hayworth plays a passive woman in a reconciliatory mode who has not lost love for her ex-husband in spite of the fact she is engaged to be married again. Gladys Cooper is interesting to watch as she uses her status as a wealthy woman to control the opinion of the rest of the residents of the motel to throw Major Pollack out of the motel because of his run in with the law. The movie moves slowly in spite of some penetrating character study of the five individuals.
1. From Here to Eternity (Superbit Collection)
2. The King and I (50th Anniversary Edition)
3. An Affair to Remember