When I was a kid, I loved
watching the Oscar broadcast, even when I was too young to have seen all the
big films of the year. That’s why I remember David Niven (whom I’d loved as the
veddy British Phileas Fogg in Around the World in Eighty Days) looking
very pleased indeed when picking up his Oscar for Separate Tables. That
1958 film would have been far too serious for someone of my tender years—but
I’ve long since overcome that hurdle. Watching Separate Tables recently,
I was impressed by its theatricality, by its marvelous ensemble acting, and by
the grown-up way it looks at human behavior. (No superheroes and supervillains
here.) At the same time, I was struck by the ways its view of male/female
relationships diverges from the attitudes of the #MeToo era.
Part of why Separate
Tables originally intrigued me was its mysterious title: where were these
tables, and why were they separate? The title refers to a residence hotel whose
long-term occupants take all their meals in a common dining room, but are assigned
their own permanent seats at individual tables. The arrangement—so very
formal—seems distinctively British to me. Americans, I suspect, would just sit
anywhere, changing their seats at whim. But the rigidity of expectations and
social manners is, in a way, what Separate Tables is all about.
It started out as a hit play
by British author Terence Rattigan. Opening in London in 1954, it was actually two
one-act playlets, both set in the same modest hotel in Bournemouth, on the
English coast. “Table by the Window” detailed the awkward encounter of a
disgraced British politician with his ex-wife. “Table Number Seven” explored
the relationship of a repressed spinster and an older man posing as Major
Pollock, a decorated war hero. Artfully, the film version (directed by Delbert
Mann) combines the two stories, which both unfold during a few tense days amid
the ebb-and-flow of life in the hotel’s public and private rooms. Burt
Lancaster’s production company, known for taking artistic chances, assembled a
cast of British stage and screen stalwarts, but also made room for two Hollywood
stars, Lancaster himself and the still-beautiful Rita Hayworth. They play the
divorced couple, now convincingly transformed into Americans abroad, whose
tragedy is that, despite a still-flaming passion, they bring out the worst in
one another. Niven is marvelous as the well-meaning but deeply flawed little
man who pretends to be heroic, and Deborah Kerr proves almost unrecognizable as
a drab young woman still under her mother’s thumb. Others in the ensemble
include Wendy Hiller (she too won an Oscar) as the brisk hotel manager who is
forced to keep her own needs under wraps. [The film’s seven Oscar nominations,
including Best Picture, also rightly saluted Charles Lang’s moody black-and-white
cinematography and David Raksin’s evocative score.]
Lancaster and Hayworth are
convincing in their mutual lust, and in the powerful emotional connection that
sometimes tips over into violence. But it’s shocking to see Lancaster strike
Hayworth, causing her to tumble down a staircase. After this powerfully-staged
scene, a modern viewer would find it unthinkable that these two would end up
together. There’s also (spoiler alert) the discovery that David Niven’s
character has fled his home town after an arrest prompted by a physical assault
on a woman in a darkened movie house. Most of his fellow boarders easily
forgive this behavior, which in any case seems totally out of character for
him. In an early draft, Major Pollock’s misdeed was a homosexual advance, which
seems—to a modern sensibility—vastly more convincing.
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