SEPARATE TABLES opens and closes with the barred gates of the Hotel Beauregard, a Bournemouth hostel for the 'respectable' but impoverished. The metaphorical title refers to an item of decor, tables. Although this film purports to be a heightened study of character, the true hero is the setting, the cramped interiors through which all the people pass, the bars that trap them not only in place, but in the lies and pretensions that help them struggle through life.
We are introduced to a number of characters - Major Pollock, a retired officer full of military bluff (what what), whose 'shocking' behaviour at a cinema brings all the tensions at the Hotel to a head, as some of the boarders try to get him thrown out. Sibyl is the young hysteric who loves him from afar, but who cows to her imperious mother, Mrs Railton-Bell, whose stifling respectability is the main agent of repression in the hotel. John Malcolm is the whiskey-guzzling writer secretly in love with the hotel's owner, Pat Cooper, and whose ex-wife Ann Shankland comes to the hotel, a beautiful but aging model, still bearing the scars of Malcolm's jealous violence. Mr. Fowler is a retired, implicitly homosexual classics master waiting Godot-like for an ex-pupil to visit.
The film is based on two playlets by the master of the middle-class well-made play, Terrence Rattigan, and this is clearly evident not only in the claustrophobic single set, but in the emphasis on onion-like dialogue to reveal character and prompt action. The theatrical form is apparent in the manner ensemble business gives way to a series of lengthy set-pieces, where two characters thrash out whatever has to be said; there is also an obvious three-act structure.
Rattigan's style, considered old-fashioned today, determines a number of the film's features. The characters all talk in clipped, stiff upper lip, plummy tones. The single-set with all these emotionally traumatised characters is like a pressure cooker waiting to boil over, but when violence does eventually erupt, it is predictably the American who prompts it - such catharsis would simply not be British.
More telling still is how Rattigan contains all these traumas in the way the house does. Godlike, he is able to bring about resolution and reconciliation, strip away humbug and hypocrisy, let essentially decent people begin again. Unlike many Hollywood films, or British well-made plays, mistakes are not fatal, they can be forgiven. The neatness of the form accomodates this - once the central crises have been outlined, events proceed predictably, because these are predictable lives.
It would be an injustice to Rattigan to deny his anger, and from his own position as a repressed homosexual (still illegal in Britain at the time the film was made), he can portray lives paralysed by the need to live up to certain (usually self-generated) expectations. The use of the hotel to dramatise different types might lead one to suspect the film is a kind of allegory, that the hotel is England, but it's not an England many people in 1958 would have recognised - we really are watching relics in a museum. Even the daring young couple seem very quaint.
In a film where the director goes out of his way to serve the static material, the burden of interest must fall on the cast. And what an amazing cast it is - Burt Lancaster, Rita Hayworth, Deborah Kerr, Wendy Hiller, Gladys Cooper, David Niven. It's not that they do anything wrong, but they are hampered by the fact that their parts are both hackneyed and unrealistic; they play them well, but to see emotion bubbling in a rigid surface, there are better films elsewhere. Niven is one of my beloved actors, and he's very good here, but, Oscar or not, he fudges his big scene with Kerr by rattling off his lines mechanically. His closing scene at breakfast is much better.
It's hard to fault a film that does what it sets out to achieve with thorough success, it's just the kind of respectable, bourgeois, evasive entertainment that makes me want to, if I may say so under IMDb guidelines, SCREAM.
We are introduced to a number of characters - Major Pollock, a retired officer full of military bluff (what what), whose 'shocking' behaviour at a cinema brings all the tensions at the Hotel to a head, as some of the boarders try to get him thrown out. Sibyl is the young hysteric who loves him from afar, but who cows to her imperious mother, Mrs Railton-Bell, whose stifling respectability is the main agent of repression in the hotel. John Malcolm is the whiskey-guzzling writer secretly in love with the hotel's owner, Pat Cooper, and whose ex-wife Ann Shankland comes to the hotel, a beautiful but aging model, still bearing the scars of Malcolm's jealous violence. Mr. Fowler is a retired, implicitly homosexual classics master waiting Godot-like for an ex-pupil to visit.
The film is based on two playlets by the master of the middle-class well-made play, Terrence Rattigan, and this is clearly evident not only in the claustrophobic single set, but in the emphasis on onion-like dialogue to reveal character and prompt action. The theatrical form is apparent in the manner ensemble business gives way to a series of lengthy set-pieces, where two characters thrash out whatever has to be said; there is also an obvious three-act structure.
Rattigan's style, considered old-fashioned today, determines a number of the film's features. The characters all talk in clipped, stiff upper lip, plummy tones. The single-set with all these emotionally traumatised characters is like a pressure cooker waiting to boil over, but when violence does eventually erupt, it is predictably the American who prompts it - such catharsis would simply not be British.
More telling still is how Rattigan contains all these traumas in the way the house does. Godlike, he is able to bring about resolution and reconciliation, strip away humbug and hypocrisy, let essentially decent people begin again. Unlike many Hollywood films, or British well-made plays, mistakes are not fatal, they can be forgiven. The neatness of the form accomodates this - once the central crises have been outlined, events proceed predictably, because these are predictable lives.
It would be an injustice to Rattigan to deny his anger, and from his own position as a repressed homosexual (still illegal in Britain at the time the film was made), he can portray lives paralysed by the need to live up to certain (usually self-generated) expectations. The use of the hotel to dramatise different types might lead one to suspect the film is a kind of allegory, that the hotel is England, but it's not an England many people in 1958 would have recognised - we really are watching relics in a museum. Even the daring young couple seem very quaint.
In a film where the director goes out of his way to serve the static material, the burden of interest must fall on the cast. And what an amazing cast it is - Burt Lancaster, Rita Hayworth, Deborah Kerr, Wendy Hiller, Gladys Cooper, David Niven. It's not that they do anything wrong, but they are hampered by the fact that their parts are both hackneyed and unrealistic; they play them well, but to see emotion bubbling in a rigid surface, there are better films elsewhere. Niven is one of my beloved actors, and he's very good here, but, Oscar or not, he fudges his big scene with Kerr by rattling off his lines mechanically. His closing scene at breakfast is much better.
It's hard to fault a film that does what it sets out to achieve with thorough success, it's just the kind of respectable, bourgeois, evasive entertainment that makes me want to, if I may say so under IMDb guidelines, SCREAM.