Rod Taylor – 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.

Tippi Hedron has a bad day at the birdcage in The Birds

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Cast: Tippi Hedron (Melanie Daniels), Rod Taylor (Mitch Brenner), Jessica Tandy (Lydia Brenner), Suzanne Pleshette (Annie Hayworth), Veronica Cartwright (Cathy Brenner), Charles McGraw (Sebastian Sholes), Lonny Chapman (Deke Carter), Joe Mantell (Cynical Businessman)

Alfred Hitchcock is often seen as the master of technique, the doyen of suspense, the master of the shock twist. Perhaps it was his love of this sort of material that led him to this radical reworking of Daphne du Maurier’s short story The Birds. After all Hitch had already directed the greatest ever du Maurier adaptation (Rebecca), so working with du Maurier was hardly new and turning this English suspense story into a sort of post-apocalyptic, tension-filled plot-boiler was right up his street. The Birds is a master-class in the director’s craft, and a curiously empty experience with barely a human heart in sight.

Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedron), a slightly spoiled heiress, arrives in a small coastal town in California in order to play a practical trick on lawyer Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor). Deciding to stay the night, she quickly realises that she has chosen the wrong weekend to get away as, while sparks grow between her and Rod, they also grow between humanity and the birds, as our feathered friends (enemies?) begin a series of escalating attacks on the population of the town that eventually lead to multiple deaths and destruction.

Hitchcock’s film is as masterclass in the slow-burn, deliberately the slowest film the director perhaps ever made. Hitchcock prided himself on his films in suspense being the awaiting of an event to happen. The bomb you know will go off on the bus. The plane circling Cary Grant that seems ripe to attack. The Birds takes this to the nth degree. The film’s very title all but tells you that the birds are going to attack, so Hitchcock takes it nice and slow, letting scenes play out with a breezy lack of pace, almost like a low-rent romantic comedy. But somehow this long unwinding of not a lot happening works well, because every scene somehow becomes a corkscrew as tension as every single bird in shot becomes suspicious.

This atmosphere is increased by the wide open locations and remote locale the film is set in, with these all-American small town sites seeming to stretch on forever around the characters only serving to stress their isolation and vulnerability in the middle of all this deadly nature. Hitchcock also carefully stripped out all musical score from the film, instead providing a sound track of natural noise complemented by slightly exaggerated bird noise (created by use of a Trautonium, supervised by master composer Bernard Herrmann). The often makes the film eerily and unsettlingly quiet, with the soundtrack only punctured by the frequently (perhaps deliberately) mundane dialogue. Suddenly with this brilliant combination game, the entire film becomes a tense waiting game for the unleashing of avian attacks, every frame a tense waiting for the bang you all know is coming. It’s Hitchcock using every aspect of his reputation, and the film’s promise of violence, to create an overwhelming effect that is deeply unsettling no matter how many times you see the movie.

Hitchcock also gives a slow build to the bird violence. Events escalate quickly, from the unsettling gathering of the birds in several places (most notably along telephone lines and outside a school playground) to subtle messages about chicken’s refusing food, to first Melanie and the other characters colliding with or being bitten by birds. It all builds to a grim reveal of a local farmer who has been attacked over-night, with Rod’s mother stumbling across the mutilated old man, Hitchcock’s camera delightedly cross cutting onto the man’s pecked out eyes. It’s the most grotesque shot of the film – and coming before we’ve seen our first mass bird attack, leaves us in no doubt as to the danger of these animals.

And when those bird effects come they have a real unsettling violence to them. In a blur of both real birds and super-imposed images (I will admit that the special effects of this film do now look a little dated, with the mixture of real, model and photo trickery birds rather jarring) the birds fly with an almost unimaginable aggression at the human beings. Flocks descend, pecking, biting and clawing, leaving human bodies maimed, blinded and bloodied. Crowds of school children are attacked while fleeing their school. A gas attendant is brutally set upon leading to a firey conflagration. Passers-by and those unable to get refuge are beaten to the ground under a flood of winged assailants.

The film changes tack in its final sequence into a tense series of sieges as Melanie, Rod and his family hole up in Rod’s house by the lake, barricading doors and windows as the birds peck relentlessly at doors and windows, slowly forcing their way in. Rooms that fall to the birds become whirlpools of deadly flying creatures, a tornado of wings and pecks that few can stand against. Hitchcock’s camera cuts rapidly from the flood of birds, to ever increasing pecks at hands and arms, to hands thrown up to protect eyes – a brilliant call back to the eye horror shown earlier in the film that immediately inspires. The birds attack in unpredictable waves, their attacks dying down at moments as the sit calmly and placidly only to expectantly burst back into violence.

It’s just a shame that Hitchcock’s film is so enamoured with its undeniable technique that it neglects to feature any heart or soul at all. The characters are a stock collection of forgettable tropes, most played by forgettable actors, or mute ciphers. The film almost deliberately throws together a truly trivial collection of stories and character motivations to pepper the centre (perhaps this bland self-interest is what pisses the birds off so much) of the film, that frankly are not that interesting. Rod Taylor is a solid but uninspiring performer, Jessica Tandy is saddled with a truly pathetically weak role. So many of the other characters such little impact that they barely warrant names. Rarely in Hitchcock films have the human characters felt so much like devices, square pegs in square holes, totally subservient to the Master’s whims. Put frankly, for all the tension of when the birds will turn, you’ll care very little for any of their victims.

A lot of focus on the film has been on Tippi Hedron, in particular her accusations of ill-treatment (routed in frustrated sexual obsession) from Hitchcock. These stories – and Hitchcock’s subsequent description of her as little more than an attractive prop (a feeling he tended to have for lots of actors) – have drawn attention away from the fact that she is actually very effective in The Birds, and that her brightness and intelligence makes her the only person who feels real in the whole film. It makes it all the more sad that the final sequence renders her into a mute, shell-shocked victim – but Hedron’s promise (never fulfilled due to Hitchcock’s sabotage of her career) is clear here.

Hitchcock’s film finally ends on a truly nihilistic, Armageddon tinged ending that speaks volumes for the post-apocalyptic nuclear anxiety prevalent in the West in the 1960s. The birds rest, triumphant, over the chilling silence of the world as what remains of our heroes beat a retreat. It’s a chilling flourish in a film that is a stylist’s triumph but lacks any real heart. It’s a film that haunts the memory but it doesn’t win the heart. If Hitchcock really did hate actors and most people, this film makes a good case for arguing that’s a pretty honest insight.