Separate Tables

Starring:Deborah Kerr, Rita Hayworth, David Niven, Wendy Hiller, Burt Lancaster, Gladys Cooper, Cathleen Nesbitt, Felix Aylmer, Rod Taylor, Audrey Dalton, May Hallatt, Priscilla Morgan, Hilda Plowright
Director: Delbert Mann
Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
Product Type: DVD

Amazon.com

Terence Rattigan's pair of one-act plays are deftly woven together into this intelligent, handsome drama, a kind of somber Grand Hotel of lonely and repressed lives at a British seaside hotel in the dreary off-season. David Niven and Wendy Hiller earned well-deserved Oscars for their subdued turns, as a blustery old warhorse hiding a guilty secret and the efficient hotel proprietress, respectively. Burt Lancaster is the alcoholic American whose secret affair with Hiller is complicated when his former wife (Rita Hayworth) breezes in and reopens old emotional wounds, and Deborah Kerr is a mousy woman whose secret love for Niven is shattered by scandal. Director Daniel Mann (Marty) remains true to the good manners and quiet desperation that keeps these sad souls isolated at separate tables. He gracefully floats between the two dramas and patiently allows his repressed characters to open up and reveal their true feelings in their own quiet fashion. --Sean Axmaker

Customer Reviews:

Superb drama.......2007-07-04

This is a movie which is a must-see for those of you who like a classic. It is one of Rita Hayworth's best movies, and it was made two years before she contracted Alzheimer's Disease. Deborah Kerr is truly her character and doesn't appear as Deborah Kerr. She utilizes her craft and makes a convincing character. David Niven puts on a very fine bit of acting which reminds me of his superb movie "Enchantment" (1949). Wendy Hiller (who was in the Broadway performance of "Enchantment") is perfectly cast as Burt Lancaster's mistress. Burt Lancaster is Burt Lancaster, but I think he does a pretty good job and is convincing in his character. The way this movie is presented, you'd swear you were watching the play (also written by Terrence Rattigan). This is a movie you should own and watch often.

Seperate Tables.......2007-06-26

What in lesser hands could have been a mucky soap-fest becomes instead a subtle, sensitive, intelligent film thanks to director Delbert Mann's deft handling of Rattigan's Oscar-nominated script. The first-rate group of ensemble players include Niven, Kerr, Lancaster, Hayworth, and the fabulous Wendy Hiller--who (like Niven) won an Oscar for her performance as Pat Cooper, the innkeeper having an affair with Lancaster. "Tables" remains a multi-layered human drama of the highest order.

A Study In Relationships.......2007-03-16

What a splendid story filmed with a beautiful cast doing their best work.

This film can be seen many times for enjoyment and a chance to get away from today's horrible events. It shows once again that people often display kindness when an attack is made on a wounded person. It also depicts various relationships in this small hotel by the sea.

Rita Acts!.......2006-11-10

Rita Hayworth, unexpectedly, shows great sensitivity in this role. David Niven is a 5 star hit
in his part.

All the hotel's a stage.......2006-10-17

Delbert Mann did some very ingenious things in turning Terrence Rattigan's famous pair of one-act plays into a film: he combined them into one continuous work, and he also retained the plays' sense of confinement by refusing to let the camera leave the setting of an English seaside hotel and its terrace for the entire film (until the film's lovely final shot, a crane shot that zooms back from a shot of the proprietress, Wendy Hiller, through the window of the dining room). Instead of allowing this confinement to be too visually deadening, he makes beautiful use of mise-en-scene to keep the viewers' interest in the action of the work. Although it does seem stagebound, the film seems purposefully so: this is a film, after all, about the kinds of roles people play for one another when they know they're on display.

Mann's unwise decisions were not to take a stronger hand in the performances of several of the film's stars, particularly those usually excellent actors Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr who both here seem berserk. Lancaster is given the very stagey role of the character who rips others' illusions from them, telling them hideous truths while he clings to his own illusions, and he hams it up quite a bit, though not to the extent of Kerr. Although she made a career of superlative performances as hysterics (particularly in BLACK NARCISSUS and THE INNOCENTS), she shows none of the restraint an actress needs, and which she has elsewhere shown, to play a histrionic character effectively and believably. Surprisingly, Rita Hayworth, an almost staggeringly inferior actress to the other two usually, is much more effective as a sexually predatory and deceitful woman who can be capable of human decency; unsurprisingly, Wendy Hiller outshines everyone, in a thoughtful and beautifully modulated performance, as Lancaster's rock-steady fiancée. She won the Oscar for her work here, as did (less deservedly) David Niven, as Kerr's would-be suitor, a military man who secretly molests women at movie theaters.

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