SEPARATE TABLES 1983

With major motion pictures looking more like overproduced TV shows—Man of Steel, Star Trek Into Darkness, Fast and Furious: God Only Knows How Many. And binge-watch television programming providing the most satisfying viewing around—Sherlock, Downton Abbey, In Treatment; I suspect it's only a matter of time before I jettison the cinephile conceit of this blog entirely and concentrate exclusively on network television and cable TV. As it's a widely-held belief that today's Golden Age is taking place not on movie screens but on the HD flatscreens in our living rooms, I'll seize upon the current zeitgeist as an opportunity to highlight a 1983 cable-TV adaptation of a play that takes advantage of the intimacy-enhancing attributes of the diminished-screen medium to produce a work that's infinitely more faithful to its source material than the Oscar-winning 1958 motion picture adaptation. 

Separate Tables, Terence Rattigan's two-act play (or two, One-Act plays, if you like), debuted on Broadway in 1956 after having enjoyed a successful run in London's West End since 1954. Four years later, Burt Lancaster, Rita Hayworth, David Niven, and Deborah Kerr starred in a significantly reworked film version that garnered seven Oscar nominations (including Best Picture), with Supporting Actor awards going to Niven and co-star Wendy Hiller. 

Rita Hayworth and Burt Lancaster in the 1958 film adaptation of Separate Tables

Though I was aware of the 1958 film adaptation of Separate Tables by reputation, I only got around to seeing it this month. Alas, despite its pedigree, cast, awards, and overall fine performances, I was underwhelmed. Burt Lancaster, doing all of his acting with his teeth, and Rita Hayworth, going for vulnerable superficiality, but landing at mannered artificiality, make a jarringly ineffectual pair. It's a handsome production, to be sure, but I found it to be strangely inert.

A Pay-TV presentation, Separate Tables premiered on Home Box Office
Monday, March 14, 1983

But to be fair, the true source of my dissatisfaction with the Lancaster movie lies in my having seen, just two weeks prior, the vastly superior 1983 HBO television adaptation of Separate Tables directed by John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy, The Day of the Locust, Sunday, Bloody Sunday). Produced by Ely and Edie Landau, the pair responsible for that fabulous collection of filmed plays under the banner of the American Film Theater (1973 -1975), this videotape production starred—be still my heart—Julie Christie and Alan Bates. Heretofore unknown by me (how was THAT possible?), this movie is an extraordinary acting showcase for all concerned and comes off as something of a minor theatrical miracle: the filmed play that satisfies as a film. It's such a feast of stunning performances and heart-wrenching emotion that the rather cool 1958 film version can't help but pale in comparison.

Julie Christie as Anne Shankland

Alan Bates as John Malcolm Ramsden

Julie Christie as Sybil Railton-Bell

Alan Bates as Major David Angus Pollock

As director John Schlesinger's first project following the mega-flop of his $24 million American comedy Honky Tonk Freeway (1981), the modest Separate Tables, filmed in Bristol, England, feels like something of a return to his origins as a TV series director for the BBC in the 1950s. 

With his glory days as the Academy Award-winning, go-to expatriate director of big-budget hits behind him, the excellence of Separate Tables as a TV film suggests a career resurgence for Schlesinger. But instead, it represented the last glimmer of brilliance in a period of steady professional decline for the director. One that extended from his last profitable release—the 1976 thriller Marathon Man—to his death in 2003.

Irene Worth as Mrs. Maud Railton-Bell

It's anybody's guess why the director's post-1983 film is distinguished by its utter lack of distinction. But in bringing Rattigan's Separate Tables to television, something in the Schlesinger of old seems to have been reawakened. Maybe it was returning to his homeland, working with a nearly all-British cast, or reuniting with the two actors with whom he's done his best work (and whose careers he's primarily responsible for having ignited: Julie Christie, Darling - 1965, Alan Bates, A Kind of Loving - 1962).

Whatever the reason, Schlesinger, a former actor and always a gifted actors' director, gets compelling performances out of his cast, displaying a keen eye for shining a light on the wounded spirit behind the facade of control. Separate Tables is top-form John Schlesinger and a triumph on every level. When I settled in to watch it for the first time, I, of course, hoped I would enjoy the film. What I didn't expect was that a TV movie I hadn't even known existed before this year would turn out to be one of the finest works of John Schlesinger's career.

Claire Bloom as Miss Cooper

The entirety of Separate Tables occurs within the dining room and lounge of The Beauregard Hotel, a modest residence hotel in the resort town of Bournemouth, on the south coast of England. Concerning itself with the lives and interactions of the hotel's sundry inhabitants—most of them elderly, nearly all of them alone—Act I: "Table by the Window" takes place in December 1954; Act II: "Table Number Seven" occurs some 18 months later. As is the custom with most theatrical productions of Separate Tables, the lead roles in Acts I & II, while different characters, are played by the same actors. Thus in this instance, not only was I blessed with the reteaming of frequent movie co-stars Julie Christie and Alan Bates (Far from the Madding Crowd, The Go-Between, Return of the Soldier), but granted the exceptionally rare treat of seeing these two exceptional talents in dual roles. (This device was abandoned in the film version, which cast different actors in each part and compresses a year and a half's worth of drama into two somewhat overwrought days.)

 "Table by the Window" 

In "Table by the Window," Julie Christie plays an aging fashion model who "accidentally" reunites with ex-husband Alan Bates, a disgraced Labor politician drowning his regrets in drink and a one-sided love affair with the hotel's compassionate proprietress Claire Bloom. Seeing these actors handling Rattigan's humor and pathos with such engaging ease is wonderful. Julie Christie, in particular, looks quite the stunner in an elaborate '50s hairdo that succeeds where several of her high-profile period dramas of the '60s hadn't: getting her to abandon her trademark bangs). "Table Number Seven" has Christie as a childlike, repressed spinster dominated by her mother (the splendid Irene Worth) and infatuated with a posturing military Major (Bates) harboring a dark secret.

"Table Number Seven" 

All of these characters share the common, pitiable trait of fighting to maintain a sense of dignity while struggling to cope with regret, loss, disillusionment, aging, fear, and, most acutely, loneliness. Within the crippling confines of staid, British social conventions—such as the doggedly adhered-to tradition of hotel guests dining at separate tables despite sometimes years-long associations—Separate Tables provides a most moving dramatization of the contradictious nature (frail, yet resilient) of the human soul.

Sylvia Barter as Lady Matheson

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I'm showing my age when I say I feel the same about good acting as young audiences today feel about noise, explosions, stunts, and special effects: I don't require much else from a movie. Separate Tables is pretty much a filmed play. It all takes place in what is essentially one big set, with no superfluous "opening up" scenes or cutaways. And if there's any kind of cinematic dexterity on display at all, it's Schlesinger's ability to come up with so many interesting angles in such cramped quarters (although a pesky boom mic shadow makes an appearance in one scene). But with a cast as talented as the one assembled for this TV movie, all you can wish for is that the director keeps the filmmaking gimmicks to a minimum and just lets the actors do their stuff. And, happily, that is precisely what Schlesinger does. The performances in Separate Tables are the main attraction and let me tell you, there's not an IMAX CGI experience that can match the thrill of watching gifted actors at the top of their game.

Brian Deacon and Susannah Fellows
Young unmarried couple Charles Stratton and Jean Tanner ruffle the feathers
of tradition with their casual dress and (gasp!) smoking in the dining room

PERFORMANCES

A welcome problem that comes with having a favorite actor about whose work I've written enthusiastically repeatedly is the worry that I'll one day run out of superlatives. Well, in the case of Julie Christie, I think I've hit it. Having already written essays on no less than six Julie Christie films to date, I think I've used up my entire thesaurus of Christie-related accolades. More's the pity because, in a long career of noteworthy performances that have never failed to leave me thoroughly impressed with her beauty, talent, and screen presence, her dual performances in Separate Tables had me floored. Christie's not just good in Separate Tables; she's phenomenal. For me, she gives what I think is the absolute best performance of her career. And given how over the moon I am about her already, that's really saying a mouthful.

Having carved an early career out of playing shallow, self-involved characters, Christie is in fine form and in well-trod territory as the vainglorious Anne in "Table by the Window." But what I love is how, after playing variations of this type for years now, she's still able to mine bits of genius in her characterization that makes this woman infinitely more dimensional and complicated than I think she appears on the printed page. A favorite: in a moment of defensive desperation when her character confesses to her accusing husband, "You see, I've still got a little pride left." Christie conveys in a split second, with just vocal emphasis and the look in her eyes, the kind of wounded dignity a person clings to moments before relinquishing everything to the fear of being alone. It's an isolated moment of brilliance in a ceaselessly pleasing performance. 

Liz Smith as Miss Meacham

But without a doubt, my highest praise is reserved for Julie Christie in "Table Number Seven." I've never seen her in the role of the mousy underdog before, and witnessing a severely deglamorized Christie - who always registers such strength and intelligence - losing herself within a character of tissue-thin self-esteem and naked vulnerability, is rather glorious. Watching Christie in this was like discovering her anew. The double-barreled impact of her performance in both roles is sensational.    

Bernard Archer as Mr. Fowler

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Say what you will about "English Reserve," but a culture rooted in formality and rituals designed to conceal emotion and ensure personal distance makes for some seriously fascinating drama. What makes Separate Tables so profoundly affecting for me (and where this particular cast most notably excels) is that the characters so often speak to each other in ways so obviously antithetical to how they genuinely feel.  

In less capable hands, such emotional restraint can result in characters we can't feel anything for and a film that keeps us at a remove. But when you have a cast of actors capable of showing the concealed layers of emotion and sensitivity behind the stiff-upper-lip posturing and dialogue, they create the necessary underlying tension that brings a chamber piece like this to life. 

The resident busybodies of The Beauregard Hotel unearth
some unpleasant news about one of the hotel guests.

It's unexpectedly touching to see such frosty characters fighting to maintain appearances while, deep inside, they struggle to cope with the need to be loved, accepted, and understood. Alan Bates is quite astounding and is particularly heartbreaking as Major Pollock in "Table Number Seven." If I'm less enthusiastic about Bates' heartsore Mr. Martin in "Table by the Window," it's only marginally so. It's a marvelously versatile turn on his part; no shade of either of his performances rings false. I just tend to harbor an antipathy toward male alcoholics in drama. Which is to say, how they're written. They're often so self-pitying that they leave the viewer with none of their own to contribute. Bates' performance in each play, however, is unquestionably solid.

The always-enchanting Claire Bloom is extremely well-cast as the hotel proprietress, a classified "alone type," but not necessarily by choice. I've always found Bloom to be an actor possessed of a kind of grounded warmth and dignity, two qualities she draws upon in each playlet to poignant effect. Never sentimental, she radiates a womanly resilience that makes her sympathetic character a realist and survivor. As she comes to assist so many in ways where she must sometimes sacrifice her own wants, her openness inspires empathy but never pity. 

The "modern," anti-marriage" couple of Act I return to the hotel 18 months later in Act II.
Married, with an infant, and the seeds of narrow-minded conservatism already taking root. 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Gay playwright Terence Rattigan often wrote works that subtly critiqued the cold rigidity of the upper classes. In dramatizing the crippling effects of sensitive people forced to live lives of suppression and isolation, in Separate Tables, Rattigan (author of The Sleeping Prince, which was made into the Marilyn Monroe film, The Prince and the Showgirl) makes a deliberate plea for the acceptance and tolerance of those who are "different"; those don't easily fit into the narrow confines of what is socially perceived as normal or conventional.

Sibyl: "What's the matter with me? There must be something
 the matter with me... I'd so like to be ordinary."
Miss. Cooper: "I've never met an ordinary person. The one thing I've learned in five years
is that the word 'normal' applied to any human creature is utterly meaningless."

There are other equally insightful and moving entreaties in the play for the abidance of compassionate humanity towards those we don't understand, each capable of inducing a major case of waterworks when delivered by actors who inhabit their characters so completely.  

Note: Those interested can research Separate Tables online to read more about the gay subplot of ACT II that was considered for the Broadway production, but ultimately jettisoned by Rattison before opening. But truthfully, one need only listen to the dialogue as is to grasp specifically that the Major is '50s coded gay, and that his being charged with "indecent behavior in a Bournemouth cinema towards women" refers to a different gender. 

I love Separate Tables as it is. It's really quite a lovely play. The language is so beautiful, the characters are so rich, and the overall theme is so loving and humane. But this play written by a gay man, and, in this instance, interpreted by a gay director and brought to life by a bisexual actor--could only be improved upon if one day the second ACT/ second PLAY were allowed to convey Rattigan's true message with the forthright authenticity originally intended. 

BONUS MATERIAL

A big shout out of thanks to my good friends Jeff Marquis and Chris Tassin, two faithful readers of this blog who, upon learning of my obsession with all things Julie Christie, graciously and very generously sent me a copy of Separate Tables. This particular film has only ever had a VHS release, never seems to pop up on television, and is as rare as hen's teeth on eBay. So you might well imagine that I flipped my graying wig when I received it, and as I had such a delicious time crying my eyes out watching it, I will forever be in their debt.

Jeff and Chris are the comic geniuses behind Punchy Players, a series of hilariously loopy viral videos that have made a smash on YouTube. If you're a classic film fan (and what would you be doing here if you weren't?), you owe it to yourself to check out these great videos HERE.  

Lastly, I have to give a big hug and kiss of thanks to my sweetheart (whom I'll spare by not mentioning his name). Without him, I would never have seen the long-out-of-print 1958 version of Separate Tables. After watching the Schlesinger version, he knew the film geek in me was chomping at the bit to see how it compared to the award-winning original. I was nevertheless content to wait and see if it would turn up on TCM sometime, when, out of the blue, my hon dug up a rare DVD copy online and surprised me with it! That just about knocked me out.

As Separate Tables is a film about the importance of friendship and the indispensability of love, I dedicate this post to my good friends and my life partner. Thanks, guys!

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2013