Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Day 142: I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside

Recently on this blog I seem to have been doing a lot of moaning about the adaptation of plays into films as they almost always are restricted by the amount of interior scenes they have to have. However this didn't seem to bother me with Separate Tables which was based on a Terrence Rattigan and was set entirely in the Beauregard Hotel in Bournemouth. Like Grand Hotel, which won the Best Picture Oscar in the 1930s, it features various interweving plots in the same establishment and features an ensemble class which includes David Niven, Deborah Kerr, Rita Hayworth and Burt Lancaster. However Separate Tables is extremely British as most of the inhabitants are long-term residents of the Guest House and are mostly there to escape life. Niven, who won Best Actor for his performance there, plays a character known as the Major and strikes up a friendship with Kerr's Sibyl something her overbearing mother doesn't agree with. When the mother finds out that Niven isn't a Major and that he has indecently exposed himself at a cinema she rallies the residents to get him out of the Beauregard. Running alongside this is Lancaster's drunk former soldier having a secret relationship with Hotel Manager Miss Cooper, played by Best Supporting Actress winner Wendy Hiller, which  is complicated when Hayworth's model turns up who just happens to be Lancaster's ex-wife. The two stories then unravel with Miss Cooper deciding that Lancaster is better off with Hayworth and Sybil standing up to her mother by getting all of the other long term residents to stick up for the Major.

Although earlier I made a comparison to Grand Hotel, Separate Tables has a lot of similarities to our own Fawlty Towers. It is a seaside hotel with several longterm residents one of whom is a Major, or at least says he is, and most of the others are marture women apart from Kerr, Lancaster and a Professor type character. The whole ensemble nature of the film means that you never get bored of one story for too long and the fact that the entire piece is set within the Beauregard didn't bother me either. I thought all of the actors did really well I especially thought Kerr was brilliant as the somewhat mental agitated Sybil who's relationship with her bullying mother changes at the end of the film, Kerr was in fact nominated for Best Actress here but was the only cast member not to win. Although I did love David Niven here I feel that he wasn't in the film long enough to get the Best Actor prize and maybe he should've been entered into the Supporting one instead. Hayworth just exudes glamour and she has some great on screen chemistry with Lancaster here but the best performance comes from Wendy Hiller as Miss Cooper stoic yet passionate when she wants to be she is the archetypal owner who keeps things ticking over for her long-serving residents. Witty, warm with well drawn characters I feel this is a film that deserves a lot more recognition because if wasn't doing this challenge I don't think I'd ever have watched it.