New Picture

Separate Tables (Clifton Productions; United Artists) is about as skillful a job as could possibly be done of turning a well-made play into a well-made movie.

It was not an easy bit of rewriting. For one thing, Playwright Terence Rattigan's well-made play is actually two well-made plays, each one about an hour long; and Scriptwriter Terence Rattigan, with the collaboration of John Gay, had no real choice but to combine them by a sort of gambler's shuffle--first a scene from one, then a scene from the other--that could scarcely fail to provide some notable examples of non sequitur. Fortunately, the method has also encouraged a good deal of suspense, and introduced a few fetchingly ironic parallels.

Then there was the problem of casting. Rattigan's writing, clever as it was, seemed to Broadway audiences no more than piquant sauce at a histrionic banquet for two of the theater's most exquisitely mannered scenery chewers: Margaret Leighton and Eric Portman, who played all four of the show's principal parts (TIME, Nov. 5, 1956). Obviously, the movie people could not hope to match that, so they set out to do better--by providing their picture with one of the screen's most gifted young directors, Delbert (Bachelor Party) Mann, and with what is surely the year's most brilliantly glittering cast. For the main roles they hired Rita Hayworth, Deborah Kerr, Burt Lancaster and David Niven. And for the supporting parts they got four of Britain's most distinguished performers: Wendy Killer, Gladys Cooper, Cathleen Nesbitt and Felix Aylmer.

The marvel is that this pride of cinema lions could be confined in one cage without roaring each other down. Director Mann has obviously cracked the whip, but some of the credit also belongs to Author Rattigan, whose script is the very model of a lion act--the exits and entrances precisely timed, the terrors tactfully spaced, the total effect not seriously disturbing but guaranteed to make the customers forget their troubles in the simple animal pleasure of watching someone else's.

The scene is set in a proper little horror of a boardinghouse in a glum old watering place on the Channel coast of England. The proprietor (Wendy Hiller) is a sensible, good-tempered spinster, but she has her hands full. She has developed a personal complication with the star boarder (Burt Lancaster), a writer fellow from America who is bound he will make an honest woman of her--until one day his ex-wife (Rita Hayworth) comes slinking in the front door.

Then there is The Major (David Niven), a potty old military party who never lets up about the good old days in North Africa--until one day he is charged with molesting a woman in a local cinema, and the newspaper reports that he was not a major at all but only a lieutenant, and that he spent the war in a supply depot. This makes for several other complications because the resident battle-ax (Gladys Cooper) soon starts swinging for The Major's head. She demands that he be forced to leave the hotel, even though--or perhaps because--she knows that her shy, hysterical daughter (Deborah Kerr) is in love with the old fraud.

The situation is one that Chekhov might have admired. It has the mysterious opacity of real life. It cannot be understood; it cannot be judged; it cannot be solved. It can only be experienced. But Rattigan, alas, is no Chekhov. As time runs out, he quite shamelessly gives the public what it wants, and begs the vital questions at the heart of the drama: Why do men sit down to the feast of life at separate tables? What is the meaning of the fatal separateness of human lives? And yet, the film will probably be received by millions of moviegoers as an unusually thoughtful and mature examination of these questions.

The illusion is ably fostered by the actors. Niven is excellent, and Kerr and Hiller at times are inspired. But the master illusionist is Rattigan, and his illusion is based on the sly discovery that in an age of changing values, if one wishes to seem mature in emotional matters, it is not really necessary to see people as they are, but only to accept people as they seem. The fact is that Playwright Rattigan does not appear to care very much about human beings; he cares about theatrical effects. Nevertheless, his effects are far more subtly effective than those of a mere external showman. He is the Barnum of the inner life, one of the few living writers who can convince an intelligent audience that a platitude is an attitude.

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