Terence Rattigan's play was turned into a melodrama of manners and repression.
Set in a dowdy seaside guest house in Bournemouth. The Hotel Beauregard is facing scandal with one of its guests. Major David Angus Pollock (David Niven) has been named in the local newspaper for his unsavoury behaviour towards some ladies in the cinema.
The allegations reduce the bluster from the Major and make him face some truths and his inadequacies to the meek spinster Sibyl (Deborah Kerr) whose mother wants him out of the guest house and is hell bent on turning the other guests against him.
Pat Cooper (Wendy Hiller) who runs the Hotel Beauregard is having an affair with another guest. John Malcolm (Burt Lancaster) is a drunk who has fled the United States and his ex wife Ann Shankland (Rita Hayworth.) Now she has turned up to reconcile with him and Pat quitely wants to give John the chance.
The drama works as a story of misfits in a post war Britain. The theatrical roots are hard to get away from this small scale drama. If the movie came out a few years later with the new wave of British cinema and the angry young men of British theatre. Separate Tables would had displayed more thunder and drama.
It is hard to believe that this rather staid British film was filmed in America and is all but an American film. Lancaster was one of the producers.
The best part of the movie is regarding Pollock and his scenes with Sibyl. Niven won an Oscar and would later play another charming but fraudulent soldier in Paper Tiger. I do think what Pollock is accused of is rather confusing. Rattigan might have been better to keep his original intentions of Polock being arrested for homosexual importuning.
Kerr so tempestuous with Burt Lancaster in the movie, From Here to Eternity glams herself down considerably here as the shy and dram Sibyl.
The John Malcolm story did not work for me as the American in England. Maybe he should had remained as an ex Labour politician and played by a British actor. Poor Wendy Hiller. Her character Pat had no chance with Rita Hayworth.
Kerr
Set in a dowdy seaside guest house in Bournemouth. The Hotel Beauregard is facing scandal with one of its guests. Major David Angus Pollock (David Niven) has been named in the local newspaper for his unsavoury behaviour towards some ladies in the cinema.
The allegations reduce the bluster from the Major and make him face some truths and his inadequacies to the meek spinster Sibyl (Deborah Kerr) whose mother wants him out of the guest house and is hell bent on turning the other guests against him.
Pat Cooper (Wendy Hiller) who runs the Hotel Beauregard is having an affair with another guest. John Malcolm (Burt Lancaster) is a drunk who has fled the United States and his ex wife Ann Shankland (Rita Hayworth.) Now she has turned up to reconcile with him and Pat quitely wants to give John the chance.
The drama works as a story of misfits in a post war Britain. The theatrical roots are hard to get away from this small scale drama. If the movie came out a few years later with the new wave of British cinema and the angry young men of British theatre. Separate Tables would had displayed more thunder and drama.
It is hard to believe that this rather staid British film was filmed in America and is all but an American film. Lancaster was one of the producers.
The best part of the movie is regarding Pollock and his scenes with Sibyl. Niven won an Oscar and would later play another charming but fraudulent soldier in Paper Tiger. I do think what Pollock is accused of is rather confusing. Rattigan might have been better to keep his original intentions of Polock being arrested for homosexual importuning.
Kerr so tempestuous with Burt Lancaster in the movie, From Here to Eternity glams herself down considerably here as the shy and dram Sibyl.
The John Malcolm story did not work for me as the American in England. Maybe he should had remained as an ex Labour politician and played by a British actor. Poor Wendy Hiller. Her character Pat had no chance with Rita Hayworth.
Kerr