★★★★
The real star of Separate Tables isn’t Burt Lancaster or Deborah
Kerr. Director Delbert Mann and
cinematographer Charles Lang show their stuff here. Tables is beautiful to look at, and its
beauty is an integral part of the action and emotion of the scene. At one point, for example, John enters a
hotel corridor with an agitated stride while the camera watches him from the
opposite end. As John hurries down the
hall toward the camera, we watch him turn to the right abruptly and stop at Ann’s
door, where he stands, head bowed. The
time we spend watching in this tracking shot builds our anxiety about his
coming confrontation with Ann, and when Ann opens the door for him, the editing
continues to increase the tension by shifting to a very long shot during which
Ann talks to him while turning off several lights and John, in turn, begins to
voice his anger while walking around and turning them back on. The two long speeches during the long shot
fragment when the two start a bitter argument and the editing launches into
rapid shot/reverse shot pacing as the argument gets hotter and hotter. The elegant camera work and editing here
magnify their confrontation, tying their fight to the anger we’ve seen as John
enters the building our dread in the long take that opens the bedroom scene,
and making the intensity of their argument more gripping by quickly cutting
from one face to another. Mann’s elegant
direction here intensifies our experience of the moment.
The lighting of this scene is also an example of how Mann
and Lang use their rich black-and-white cinematography to focus on the content. The scene starts with John standing by the
bed, head down and the lighting making his face hard to see, a reflection of
the emotional uncertainty he is experiencing.
The scene progresses with Ann turning off the lights and John sinking
more and more into darkness, eventually becoming only a silhouette while her
face remains clear. After the lights are
off, the couple moves to the center of the screen with him completely dark and
only the outline of her face visible. At
this point, John begins to argue angrily with her, breaks away, and starts to
turn the lights on. The clearer he becomes about his feelings, the more light
he receives. And the dialog in the scene
even becomes a self-reflective gesture with John saying that people who don’t
like light have something to hide. It’s
an outstanding sequence in the film that shows how Mann uses light to
underscore the emotion and thought of the characters.
Mann also opens up the script, transforming this
stage-derived screenplay into an authentic film. Rather than the rigid, dialog-bound filming
of a theatrical stage, Mann uses a set with windows that the camera can peer
into and move around in. Big windows let
us look into and out of the dining room, and we look up to see Jean looking out
her window on the second floor. Mann’s
editing creates rooms on the second floor, too.
The editing also creates this larger space by cutting between different
conversations in different parts of the hotel so we don’t have the sense of
spending the entire film in one or two rooms.
And Mann’s fluid camera makes the space of the movie feel big.
Separate Tables is not without its problems, though, and
they mostly derive from the script. The
noble Miss Cooper is willing to give up John for Anne’s sake, straining our
credulity with a stock character that rings hollow in a film of personal
psychology in the leads. Kerr’s Sibyl is
always strung tight, but this tension becomes monotonous by the time Sibyl
breaks. Mrs. Railton-Bell is a
one-dimensional stereotypical highbrow, and the professor is just as
predictable and flat. And Charles and
Jean have no real role in the film at all; they retire at the beginning and
reappear at the end. It’s possible that,
as the trailer suggests, Separate Tables is about various aspects of sex, in
which case the liberal attitudes of Charles and Jean would have a place. However, we’d then have to figure out why we
have the professor or Lady Matheson, who don’t have much to contribute on the
subject. In all, the script of Separate
Tables picks up too many characters and is therefore unable to do much with any
of them.
In a related issue, Burt Lancaster’s John never seems to
settle into a well-rounded character either.
Lancaster is compelling at each moment of his performance, but either he
or the script is unable to create a unified, consistent character. We see what John is doing at each moment, and
there’s some consistency in it, but Separate Tables doesn’t present us with a
character who is fully realized, who we can understand, predict and feel
sympathy for. The core of the character
is oddly missing in this film.
Separate Tables is a fine piece of film-making that is
worthwhile in many of its technical and creative achievements. It’s a pity that the script wasn’t able to
make all this endeavor more compelling.
