SunnyHello Nice effects though.

Brightlyme i know i wasted 90 mins of my life.

Lumsdal Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

Nessieldwi Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

marcslope She plays a shy virgin saddled with an awful mother (Gladys Cooper, essentially reprising her turn in "Now, Voyager") and obsessed with the glad-handing, deceiving military man living in the same residential hotel (David Niven, who deserved his Oscar), and she drives me nuts. It's like Deborah Kerr playing Carol Burnett playing Deborah Kerr, so overplaying the shyness and awkwardness and terror over sex that it crosses over into parody. The rest of this opus, cooked up from some short Terence Rattigan plays, is quite good. It's a starry hotel, with Burt Lancaster planning to marry hotel manager Wendy Hiller (another deserved Oscar) but distracted by the return of ex-wife Rita Hayworth, and a young Rod Taylor as a medical student we tend to forget about, and Cathleen Nesbitt as an old biddy a good deal more sympathetic than Ms. Cooper. The short stories are skillfully interwoven, and it's franker about sex than much 1958 product. But just as you're settling into it, along comes Deb stammering and gurgling and getting hysterical over nothing. She's such a brilliant actress, I don't know who steered her wrong on this one.

rpvanderlinden I was attracted to this movie by the actors, most of whom invoke fond memories and iconic performances. Deborah Kerr and David Niven, in particular, go out on a limb and play against type. The motley collection of thespians in this film are cocooned mostly in the interior of a little seaside hotel, mostly in the drawing and dining rooms and performing an adaptation of Terence Rattigan plays. It has been said that no man - or woman - is an island, but in this movie all the characters are islands, sitting, as they do, at separate tables in the dining room. It's a safe and non-intrusive arrangement - or is it? Join someone else at their table and the bees start buzzing. (I have also just seen another movie with a similar set-up - the main story in the enjoyable British drama "Trio").Deborah Kerr is barely recognizable as a mousy, neurotic wallflower who fades into the scenery pretty quickly and stays there. She is attracted to David Niven's bombastic ex-military type with the preened moustache who ends his conversations with "cheery-bye". He hides a secret - he's really a repressed nobody. Rita Hayworth is a shrew. She's either really nice or really awful - when she's really awful her speech becomes clipped. Burt Lancaster is her ex, an alcoholic writer who has a thing for the hotel's owner (Wendy Hiller). Rod Taylor is on hand in a sub-plot that barely registers. Gladys Cooper, as Kerr's mom, a pinched old prude, is the most fun. All of the characters elicit some sympathy and all of the acting is perfectly respectable, yet even with so much talent on hand, the movie seems rather ordinary. There are only intermittent sparks, even in the Hayworth/Lancaster rocky love story. It has little vigour and the melodrama seems subdued. When Kerr finally defies her mother the earth should have shook; instead there was a momentary blip on the dramatic scale."Separate Tables" suffers badly from "television-itis". It looks and feels like a well-dressed television studio production from the 1950's. Even some of the camera and dolly movements and Delbert Mann's awkward transitions between scenes reek of television (was the movie originally intended for the tube?). Had the original material been opened up and filmed on location with real exteriors maybe the fresh morning breeze would have cleared the air. As it is, the movie feels a little muffled and quaint.

ackstasis It sometimes seems as though most of Hollywood's 1950s stage adaptations were either based on a Tennessee Williams play, or directed by Elia Kazan, or both. 'Separate Tables (1958)' belongs to neither category, but nevertheless deserves to stand alongside the likes of 'A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)' or 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958).' Headlining the very distinguished cast are Burt Lancaster, David Niven, Rita Hayworth, Deborah Kerr, and Wendy Hiller, playing residents at a British country motel, each concealing secrets and hidden motives that don't remain hidden for long before the prying eyes of the house's gossipy old women. Though the entire story unfolds in the one location, the film's extensive motel set is nevertheless an impressive stage for the actors' talents, with Mann's versatile camera effortlessly switching between rooms and angles. The film takes in awkward conversations and intimate exchanges from all corners of the motel, weaving a tapestry of small, parallel stories (indeed, the screenplay was drafted by combining two related one-act plays by Terrence Ratigan). Some of the subject matter is fairly bold for its time, with sex and perversion playing important roles.'Separate Tables' is truly an actors' picture. The film is a Powell/Pressburger reunion of sorts. Kerr ('The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1945))' pulls off a difficult role as a mousy, painfully- shy young woman, her timidity so utterly complete that I could scarcely watch her out of pity. The performance highlights Kerr's wonderful versatility; she could alternate with ease between portraying introverts and extroverts (and even both within the same character, as in 'Perfect Strangers (1945)'). Burt Lancaster enters the film with a rather peculiar accent, but soon settles into his usual acting groove. Opposite him, Rita Hayworth is as beautiful as ever, with a tinge of the insecurity that comes with middle-age. David Niven ('A Matter of Life and Death (1946)') won an Oscar for his bumbling, Latin-mangling WWII Major, an amusing yet poignant depiction of a social outcast. According to Niven's biography "The Moon's A Balloon (1972)," a prominent rival- studio producer tried to sabotage the actor's Oscars campaign by spreading a false rumour that he had attended the stage-show dozens of times, and had directly copied Eric Portman's stage performance.

jc-osms About as far removed from his American playwright contemporary Tennessee Williams as you could get, yet there's a place in my heart for English dramatist Terence Rattigan and his perhaps subtler expositions of motive, need, weakness and ultimately dignity in the human condition.Interestingly, this movie adaptation of his mid 50's play, slightly improbably makes prominent use of American actors, although fortuitously possibly, this helps to elevates its status to a wider and higher level and almost certainly helped it to get noticed by the Academy at the awards round.Director Mann doesn't try too hard to "open out" the play for the cinema, realising its strength lies in depicting the enclosed stultifying world of the not-quite "Grand Hotel", it acting as a metaphor for the trapped existences of its various inhabitants. That said, none of the main characters hardly seem drawn from reality, but once you concede the writer's dramatic licence, you have to admire his skill in their interplay and the well-managed conclusion which works too as an indictment against narrow-minded intolerance as the fellow-guests at last react against flinty old Lady Matheson (Cathleen Nesbitt) and her petty-minded outrage at and desired expulsion of David Niven's disgraced "Major" character. Niven won the Oscar for his performance and you can see why, moving from blustery, caddish bonhomie (his "what what" refrain really gets on your nerves as he himself honestly admits) to his awkward embarrassed demeanour at the end. In support, I also enjoyed the playing of Wendy Hiller as the school-marmy hotelier, Deborah Kerr as Nesbitt's sexually repressed daughter and Gladys Cooper as her put-upon friend who like the daughter rises up but gently to overturn the Major's victimisation and rehabilitate him.It doesn't all work, Lancaster and Hayworth's story seems to belong in a different play / film and the minor parts are too sketchily drawn (Rod Taylor and his randy girlfriend too obviously counterpointing the sexual gaucheness of Kerr's Sibyl) and a too obvious Margaret Rutherford type inserted no doubt to add some humour.I'm pretty sure it would have made for a better night out at the theatre than the cinema, but I wouldn't deny the play's elevation to a wider audience and certainly didn't regret checking in on this occasion.