Separate Tables

A small seaside hotel on the south coast of England. A handful of permanent guests live there: a retired major, a domineering mother and her cowed daughter, a writer who has given himself to drink, and the woman who runs the place. When the writer's ex-wife arrives, and a newspaper item about the major surfaces, everybody's lies land on the table at once. The subject is not romance but shame. Everyone is hiding something and the hotel is what makes the hiding possible; eating at separate tables is the film's title and also its thesis. The form comes from the stage and does not disguise it: lounge, dining room, corridor. The camera stays put, the actors talk, and the tension accumulates in glances. It is adapted from two one-act plays by Terence Rattigan. On stage the same actor played the lead in both halves; the film broke that up and distributed the parts. David Niven won the Oscar for Best Actor and Wendy Hiller took Best Supporting Actress. The nature of the major's secret, meanwhile, is softened here relative to the play, thanks to censorship. Delbert Mann directs, with Deborah Kerr, Rita Hayworth and Burt Lancaster completing the cast. Who it is for: viewers who like play adaptations and films where characters open up by talking. Who it is not for: anyone after pace; this is deliberately slow and almost entirely conversation.