Separate Tables is a glossy, tasteful, well-executed Hollywood film that is never less than interesting during its 114 minutes duration and that sinks into oblivion in the memory the moment that it is over. The picture produced by Hecht and Lancaster in 1958, and derived from a celebrated play by Terrance Rattigan was nominated for seven Academy Awards, winning two -- but no one seems to have much cared about the movie: it has no fans, no one debates its excellence, and there are very few references of any kind to the effect that it had on filmgoers in the late fifties. It's a movie that seems to have hypnotized its watchers into some sort of benign indifference. This is the kind of film for which TV was invented -- it's not going to be revived any time soon in any film festival.
Despite its all-star cast, the production is clearly compromised. Rattigan's original text was comprised of two one-act plays ("Table by the Window" and "Table Number 7") The plays were star-vehicles for the luminaries of the British stage -- the same male and female actors were to play the starring roles in the two one-act plays which have very different themes and plots. Of course, this device won't work in the Hollywood vehicle cautiously directed by the wholly colorless Delmer Mann. So, one suspects that there is considerable vandalism with respect to the original theatrical text even before the film's outset. Furthermore, the picture has a peculiar self-subverting and self-censoring aspect -- the subject matter is obviously gay-inflected (Rattigan was homosexual) but these elements of the play, as with Tennessee Williams' work, have been transmuted, more or less convincingly, into heterosexual romance. It's pretty obvious, for instance, that the crime for which the Major is accused -- some kind of groping women in a theater -- is, in fact, based upon homosexual conduct that would have been illegal at the time. Masking homosexual content by using male and female heterosexual performers doesn't really solve the issues that the film presents and, perversely, seems to highlight the gay implications of some aspects of the script.
The Beauregard hotel (which sounds like a place in Tennessee Williams' play) is a seaside boarding house at Bournemouth on the south coast of England. A pompous military man, the Major, boasts about his service in Africa, telling war stories to a shy spinster with whom he is conducting a flirtation. The spinster is bullied by her domineering and bigoted mother. A young unmarried couple debate their future -- the woman doesn't want to marry and the man seems happy enough that she doesn't propose marriage; she wants to be an artist and he's studying for his medical boards. A loud American drunk is horrified to find that his ex-wife has come to the hotel, presumably to seduce him. The drunk got in trouble with the woman five years earlier when he beat her half-to-death and he's been in disgrace ever since. The drunk, desperate with loneliness, proposes to the innkeeper, a handsome middle-aged woman. Ultimately, the drunk's ex-wife succeeds in her endeavors and the couple reluctantly (and cautiously) begin their relationship anew. The Major is accused of indecent advances in a movie theater and it is revealed that he spent WWII behind a desk and not on the battlefield.. At first, the other denizens of the hotel vote to ostracize him, but, in the end, they are too kindly to follow through on this decision and he is (also reluctantly and cautiously) re-admitted to the fold -- he begins his harmless flirtation with the spinster once more, the woman having opposed publicly the will of her bullying mother for the first time in her life. The plot involving the medical student and his artistic mistress is underwritten to the point of non-existence -- this story ends in a way that is unsatisfactory, I think, for modern-day audiences: the woman renounces her artistic aspirations and agrees to have "three children" with the doctor "as a start." All of this is presented with maximum star power: Burt Lancaster plays the American drunk; Rita Hayworth is his scheming voluptuous wife; David Niven won an Oscar for his short role as the bombastic miles glorioso -- Deborah Kerr plays the spinster. Rod Taylor, a singularly colorless mannequin, plays the doctor -- he's in a lot of films of the era and is a bit like Rock Hudson without the soft-spoken charm. Wendy Hiller takes the role of the owner of the Hotel and there are a host of excellent and familiar British character actors whose names you will not recall. (Deborah Kerr also won an Academy Award for her performance.)
The film is reasonably daring for its time. Male writers in the fifties were obsessed with the fact that women withhold sexual favors in order to get what they want -- this is an important element in many novels and plays of the time. Burt Lancaster's character decries the fact that his beautiful ex-wife has used her sexual wiles to enslave him. The theme of furtive sexual advances motivating the story of the Major and the spinster is also prominent -- although, as I have said, the plot seems better suited to development as a homosexual theme (in fact, the way Rattigan initially wrote the play.) The film doesn't have a conventionally happy ending. Rather, the characters who end up together seem doomed to unhappiness -- at most, they are resigned to way things have turned-out. It's a highly tentative conclusion and must have seemed "adult" and realistic at the time. (And, in fact, the film is a well-made and intelligent "adult entertainment" -- not a cartoon of the kind favored in popular films both then and today.)
The picture is overdesigned and some final scenes in which Burt Lancaster engages in dialogue with Wendy Hiller in her "office" involve the characters interacting amidst such a panoply of knickknacks and Victorian gewgaws that the viewer is distracted from what is happening on-screen. (How long does it take to dust this place? one speculates). The film doesn't really "open" out the play -- in fact, the whole thing is very obviously filmed in one complex set entirely inside a sound-stage. If you're my age, the entire film will inevitably remind you of John Cleese's Fawlty Towers -- indeed, many of the characters in that TV comedy seem to be parodic versions of Rattigan's players in this film. Of course, Fawlty Towers is memorable -- Separate Tables is not.
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