Dreams Are What Le Cinema Is For: Separate Tables -1983 by Dreams Are What Le Cinema Is For

SEPARATE TABLES 1983 lecinemadreams.blogspot.com/2013/06/separate-tables-1983.html

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 completely jettison the cinephile conceit of this blog 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 (a great article on the topic can be found here at Joe’s View); I’ll seize upon the current zeitgeist as an opportunity to highlight a 1983 cable-TV adaptation of a play which takes advantage of the intimacy-enhancing attributes of the diminished-screen medium to produce a work a great deal truer to its source material than the Oscar-winning 1958 motion picture adaptation. Terence Rattigan’s two-act play, Separate Tables 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 awards going to Niven and co-star, Wendy Hiller.

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

Though aware of the 1958 film adaptation of Separate Tables by reputation, I only just this month got around to actually seeing it. Alas, in spite of its pedigree, cast, awards, and overall fine performances (excluding the jarringly ineffectual duo of Burt Lancaster and Rita Hayworth. He, doing all of his acting with his teeth; she, going for superficial but merely coming off as artificial), I was underwhelmed. A handsome production to be sure, but strangely inert. But to be fair, I suppose the true source of my dissatisfaction with the Lancaster movie lies in my having been exposed, just two weeks prior, to the vastly superior 1983 HBO television adaptation of Separate Tables directed by John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy, The Day of the Locust, Sunday, Bloody Sunday) and starring—be still my heart —Julie Christie and Alan Bates. Heretofore unknown by me (how was THAT possible?), this film is simply 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 (far more faithful to Rattigan's play) that the rather cool film version can't help but pale in comparison.

Julie Christie as Anne Shankland

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Julie Christie as Sibyl Railton-Bell

Alan Bates as John Malcolm Ramsden

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Alan Bates as Major David Angus Pollock

Separate Tables was filmed in Bristol, England following the $24 million dollar mega-flop of Schlesinger's Honky Tonk Freeway (1981), a movie that signaled the end of John Schlesinger's glory days as the go-to expatriate director of big-budget hits. At first glance, the excellence of Separate Tables as a TV-film would appear to signal a kind of career resurgence for John Schlesinger, but instead it represented the last glimmer of brilliance in a steady professional decline for the director that extended from his last hit feature film—the 1976 thriller, Marathon Man—to his death in 2003. There’s no guessing what lay behind the mediocrity of most of Schlesinger's post-1983 films, but something about returning to his homeland, working with a nearly all-British cast, and being reunited with two actors whose careers he's largely responsible for having ignited (Julie Christie: Darling - 1965, Alan Bates: A Kind of Loving - 1962), brings out the Schlesinger of old. Always a gifted actor's director with an eye for the broken spirit behind the artifice of calm, Separate Tables is top-form John Schlesinger and a triumph on every level. I was hoping for a good movie, but I wasn't expecting a TV-film I hadn't even known existed before this year would turn out to be one of the finest films of John Schlesinger’s very distinguished career.

Irene Worth as Mrs. Maud Railton-Bell

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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, not only are we 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 we're granted the exceptionally rare treat of seeing these awe-inspiring actors in dual roles. (This device was abandoned in the film version, which cast different actors in each role and compresses the events of a year and a half into one overwrought couple of days.)

Claire Bloom as Miss Cooper

In “Table by the Window,” Julie Christie (looking quite the stunner in an elaborate 50s hairdo that succeeds where several of her high-proﬁle period dramas of the '60s hadn't: getting Christie to abandon her trademark bangs) plays an aging fashion model “accidentally” reunited 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. “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.

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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, age, 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 in spite of sometimes years-long associations—Separate Tables provides a most moving dramatization of the contradictious nature (frail, yet resilient) of the human soul.

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 need much else. Separate Tables is pretty much a filmed play. There’s essentially one big set, no superfluous “opening up” of the sort engaged in by the 1958 film, 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 keep the filmmaking gimmicks to a minimum and just let the actors do their stuff. And, happily, that is just what Schlesinger does. The

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performances in Separate Tables are the main attraction, and let me tell you, there's not a IMAX CGI experience that can match the thrill of watching gifted actors at the top of their game.

Resident busybodies Miss. Meacham (Sylvia Barter) and Mrs. Railton-Bell (Worth) unearth some unpleasant news about one of the hotel guests.

PERFORMANCES A welcome problem with having a favorite actor about whose work one has written enthusiastically time and time again, is the fear that you’re going to one day run out of superlatives. Well, in the case of Julie Christie, I think I've hit it. In having already written essays on no less than six Julie Christie ﬁlms to date, I think I've used up my entire thesaurus of accolades. Which is a shame, because in a long career of noteworthy performances that never fail to leave me deeply impressed by her beauty, skill, and sheer star quality, her work in the dual roles of Separate Tables left me fairly thunderstruck. Julie Christie's not just good in Separate Tables, she's magniﬁcent. She gives what is for me the absolute best performance of her career. And given how over the moon I am about her already, that's really saying a a mouthful.

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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 on this type for years now, she's still able to mine bits of genius in her characterization that result in making her performance one that feels wholly fresh, wholly astonishing. 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 having to relinquish everything to the fear of being alone. It's a brilliant moment.

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. She floored me completely and the double-barreled impact of both roles is both mesmerizing and unforgettable. THE STUFF OF FANTASY Say what you will about the cultural tradition of “English Reserve,” but a society rooted in formality and rituals designed to conceal emotion and ensure personal distance makes for some seriously fascinating drama. What gives Separate Tables its profound intensity (and where this particular cast most notably excels) is that the characters so often speak to each other in ways antithetical to how they really feel. In less talented hands, such restraint can result in a film that feels remote and formal. But when you have a cast of actors capable of showing the concealed layers of emotion and sensitivity lying behind the stiff-upper-lip dialog, you get characterizations of staggering depth and complexity. It’s very poignant and often heartbreaking to see these flawed characters struggling to maintain their decorum while every fiber of their being is screaming out to be loved, seen, accepted, or understood. As I've indicated, the entire cast is flawless, but special mention has to go to Alan Bates (whose Major Pollock is nothing short of transcendent) and the always-enchanting Claire Bloom. Bloom has always possessed a kind of grounded, worldly quality, and never has it been put to better use. Her character provides the play with a sensitive ballast to whom the more emotionally uncertain guests gravitate.

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THE STUFF OF DREAMS Gay playwright Terence rattigan often wrote works which 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 learnt in ﬁve years is that the word 'normal' applied to any human creature is utterly meaningless."

There are other, equally insightful entreaties in the play for the abidance of a compassionate humanity towards those we don't understand, all of them capable of inducing a major case of waterworks when delivered by such a

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stellar cast. Note: Those interested can research Separate Tables online to read more about a gay subplot that was considered for the Broadway version but ultimately jettisoned before opening.

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. 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 doing here is 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). For 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 awardwinning 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 true love. Thanks so much, guys!

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