Rita Hayworth – Movie Musings

Guilt and shame under the politeness in this stagy and almost-very-brave Rattigan adaptation

Director: Delbert Mann

Cast: Rita Hayworth (Anne Shankland), Deborah Kerr (Sibyl Railton-Bell), David Niven (Major David Angus Pollock), Burt Lancaster (John Malcolm), Wendy Hiller (Pat Cooper), Gladys Cooper (Mrs Maud Railton-Bell), Cathleen Nesbitt (Lady Gladys Matheson), Felix Aylmer (Mr Fowler), Rod Taylor (Charles), Audrey Dalton (Jean), May Hallett (Miss Meacham), Priscilla Morgan (Doreen)

Bournemouth’s Hotel Beauregard offers comfortable rooms and separate tables for dining. No wonder it’s popular with a host of regulars and out-of-town guests. But at each of those separate tables, drama lurks. Unflappable Pat Cooper (Wendy Hiller) manages the hotel and is secretly engaged to John Malcolm (Burt Lancaster), a down-on-his luck writer a little too fond of a pint in The Feathers. Their secret relationship is thrown into jeopardy when John’s ex-wife Anne (Rita Hayworth) arrives from New York, keen to get John back. Meanwhile, Major Pollock (David Niven) hides a secret behind his “hail-fellow-well-met” exterior, one which will threaten his place in the hotel and friendship with mousey Sibyl (Deborah Kerr) – a woman firmly under the thumb of her domineering mother (and resident bully) Mrs Railton-Bell (Gladys Cooper).

Delbert Mann’s film merges two Terence Rattigan one-act plays into a single, respectable piece of middle-brow Masterpiece Theatre viewing, which Mann subsequently effectively disowned (even after its seven Oscar nominations) after losing control of both editing and scoring to producer Lancaster. (Mann, quite rightly, loathed the hilariously out-of-place Vic Damone crooner number “Separate Tables” that opened the film.) Mann had already replaced Laurence Olivier, who dropped out after Lancaster’s company felt the film needed two American stars to make it box-office (handily they chose Lancaster himself and his business partner’s fiancée Rita Hayworth).

Lancaster and Hayworth are incidentally the weak points in the cast, their Americanness hopelessly out of step with Rattigan’s extremely English style and setting. Both actors are all too clearly straining to “stretch themselves” in unlikely roles, giving the film a slight air of self-indulgence. (Hillier later archly stated her best scene from the original was handed to Hayworth, while Lancaster recut the film to move up his first entrance.) The will-they-won’t-they tug-of-war between the two of them is Separate Tables’ least interesting beat and it’s to the film’s detriment that it, and these two awkwardly miscast actors, dominate so much of the film’s middle section.

They were already playing the dullest half of Rattigan’s double bill. Rattigan’s passion, and by far the film’s most electric moments – even if they only really constitute just under a half the runtime – revolve around the scandal of Major Pollock. Pollock, it is swiftly revealed, is not only prone to exaggerate his class, schooling and military career (his knowledge of alleged alma mata Sandhurst and the classics is revealed to be sketchy at best) but also carries a secret criminal conviction for harassing young women in a cinema.

While such harassment is of course recognised as beyond the pale today, it’s very clear in Separate Tables that Pollock’s misdeeds are standing in for a crime that literally “dare not speak its name”. Rattigan was one of Britain’s most prominent closeted homosexuals and his original intention had been for the Major’s crime to be fumbled cottaging. In the 50s it was unspeakable for the lead to be a sympathetic frightened homosexual so, in what looks bizarre today, it was far more acceptable to make him a timid sexual molester. However, the subtext is very clear, unspoken but obvious. One only has to hear the tragic Major sadly say “I’m made in a certain way and I can’t change it” and talk about his shame and loneliness to hear all too clearly what’s really being talked about here. Isn’t the Major’s pretence about being “the Major” just another expression of the double life a gay man had to lead in 1950s Britain?

This sensitive and daring plot is blessed with a wonderfully judged, Oscar-winning performance by David Niven (dominating the film, despite being on screen for a little over 20 minutes – the shortest Best Actor winning performance on record). Niven had made a career of playing the sort of suave, debonair military-types Pollock dreams of being – so there might not have been an actor alive more ready to puncture that persona. Recognising a role tailor-made for him, Niven peels away the Major’s layers to reveal a shy, sensitive, frightened man, desperate for friendship and acceptance. His heart-breaking confession scene (clearly a coded coming out) is beautifully played, while the closing scene with its hope of acceptance gains hugely from Niven’s stiff-upper-lip trembling with concealed emotion.

Niven’s performance – (Oscar-in-hand he rarely felt the need to stretch himself as an actor again) – centres the film’s most dramatic and engaging content. The campaign against the Major is led by Mrs Railton-Bell, superbly played by Gladys Cooper as the sort of moral-crusader who needs to cast out others to maintain her own ram-rod self-perception of virtue. Cooper uses icy contempt and overwhelming moral conviction to browbeat the rest of the guests in a sort of kangaroo court into blackballing the Major, a neat encapsulation not only of the power of the loudest voice but how readily decent people reluctantly acquiesce to it to avoid trouble.

Her control has also crushed her daughter’s spirit. Deborah Kerr’s performance is a little mannered: Kerr works very hard to embody a mousey, dumpy, frumpy spinster and make sure we can see she’s doing it. But she works beautifully with Niven and her meekness means there is real impact when the mouse finally (inevitably) roars. The rest of the guests are a fine parade of reliable British character actors: Felix Aylmer reassuringly fair and May Hallett particularly delightful as a no-nonsense woman who doesn’t give a damn what people think and trusts her own judgement.

Linking all plots together, Wendy Hiller won the film’s other Oscar as the hotel manager. Hiller was born to play decent matrons, bastions of respectable fair play who reluctantly but stoically bear personal sacrifices as their own crosses. She’s a natural with Rattigan’s dialogue and brings the best out of Lancaster, as well as providing all the drama (and sympathy) in the film’s other plotline as a surprisingly noble “other woman”.

Separate Tables is a middle-brow slice of theatre filmed with assurance. But when it focuses on Major Pollock it touches on something far more daring and much more moving than anything else it reaches for. Here is true low-key, English tragedy: under a clear subtext, we see the horror of a man who pretends all his life to be something he is not and the terrible judgements from others when he is exposed. It’s that which gives Separate Tables its true impact.

Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth in hall of mirror mystery The Lady from Shanghai

Director: Orson Welles

Cast: Rita Hayworth (Elsa Bannister), Orson Welles (Michael O’Hara), Everett Sloane (Arthur Bannister), Glenn Anders (George Grisby), Ted de Corsia (Sidney Broome), Erskine Schilling (“Goldie” Goldfish), Carl Frank (DA Galloway)

Orson Welles’ career is littered with coulda, woulda, shoulda moments. The Lady from Shanghai is perhaps the most telling lost opportunity in all his extensive CV of recut products and studio interference. Unlike Touch of Evil, there remains no trace of the footage removed from the film by the studio – instead we are left with the remains of the picture that escaped rejigging.

Michael O’Hara (Orson Welles) is an Irish drifter, who saves the glamourous Elsa Bannister (Rita Hayworth) from muggers in a park. Attracted to him (perhaps), as he is to her, she hires him to work on a yacht she and her husband, famed lawyer Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloane), are sailing around the coast. During the voyage, O’Hara is approached by Bannister’s business partner George Grisby (Glenn Anders) with a deadly proposition – and is sucked into a web of cross and double cross.

The Lady from Shanghai is an odd curiosity. At the time it was condemned by critics as a scarcely coherent film noir, struggling to involve the audience in its ins and outs. Today it’s seen more as a missed opportunity classic, which Welles nearly managed to turn into a landmark film before the studio heads recut the entire thing over his head. The reality is probably somewhere in between.

Welles agreed to do the movie for nothing, in return for funding for his stage production of a Cole Porter musical based on Around the World in 80 Days. Stories change depend on who you talk to, but essentially Welles agreed to do the first piece of work that was chucked his way – which happened to be this moderate plot-boiler. Welles shot a lot of the film with an imaginative eye and provided several fascinating set-pieces. But was he really that interested in the film?

It’s hard to say. Certainly it makes you wonder when you look at his rather disengaged performance. Welles (unwisely) takes on an Irish accent and basically feels distracted and bored throughout – as if he felt the whole thing was beneath him. O’Hara becomes a pretty bland character whom it’s impossible to really develop an affinity for. Welles hardly looks cut out for the fighting he’s called on to do – has an actor in a good movie thrown a less convincing punches in a scuffle before?

Because the rest of the film is fairly good, by and large. The plot is almost impossible to follow, but that is partly the point – the growing number of double crosses are designed to feel like we are spiralling down a rabbit hole with O’Hara. But it’s the style it’s told with – brash and exciting camera shots, and an edgy jaggedness in performance and storytelling that alternates with a dreamy sense of unreality. Welles throws this all the wall, but somehow manages to hold it more or less together – perhaps helped by the fact that he treated it like a slightly disposable piece of pulp.

The film’s final act culminates in an extraordinary shoot-out in a hall of mirrors, with characters replicated over and over again in reflection, lines of them appearing as if from nowhere. There is a quirky surrealness about this, with reflections superimposed over each other, or armies of a single character marching towards the camera. Bannister’s walking stick movement, stiff and awkward, also really helps here as he starts to look like a pack of spiders.

Of course Welles intended this sequence to be almost twice the length, but it was cut down by a bewildered studio. They also insisted that Welles insert a parade of close-ups of characters, in particular of Rita Hayworth, which was exactly contrary to Welles’ intention to use as many distancing long and medium shots. Welles’ original plan for the score was also ditched in favour of a rather flat, dull, traditional score.

But then there are the moments of exotic, heated sex that Welles managed to leave in. As our heroes sail off into the tropics, the bubbling sexual tension between O’Hara and Elsa boils over. It bubbles over into other relationships as well – does every man desire Elsa? Or are there other elements at play? The final offers for murder and money are almost deliberately hard to follow – is it all a summertime madness? As the plot becomes more and more odd, so the film begins to become more bizarre in its setting, finally heading into Chinatown and then an abandoned funfair.

Away from Welles’ weaker turn in the lead, there are some strong performances. Everett Sloane is fantastic as the sinister lawyer, propelling himself forward with walking sticks, his motives impossible to read. Glenn Anders is wonderfully slimy as a creepy lawyer, whose every line has some sort of cackling insinuation. Rita Hayworth brings a sexual charge to the film, mixing manipulation and genuine feeling.

These performances fit neatly into the film, which continues forward with its bamboozling plot. This story never quite engages the audience – and there isn’t quite enough in the film itself that has been left us to be sure that, even with the cut material put back in, it could have been a classic. But there are enough interesting notes in there to keep you watching – and the final sequence is extraordinary and haunting in its extravagant oddness. But I’m still not sure this is a major work – rather it seems to be a curiosity from a great director.