Delbert Mann directed best picture winner Marty in 1955, a movie about the loneliness of one man. It was a small film that became a sensation, it was unlike most Hollywood films of its day by trying to show “real life” with actors who looked like “real people”. Mann returns to this theme with 1958’s Separate Tables, except this time it’s a collection of individuals struggling against human loneliness and we get to see that even people who look like Burt Lancaster and Rita Hayworth can suffer just as easily as our Bronx butcher Marty did. The story comes from a stage play so it is left to Charles Lang Jr., the cinematographer, as well as the movie star actors to elevate this story of sexual repression and human connection above its theatre origins.
The characters inhabit a seaside resort which boasts the advantage of separate tables during their shared meal times. These intimate strangers who see and eat with each other every day also closely follow the rules of public decorum by interacting without any attempt to form a real human connection between each other. Ritual, manners, class distinction and old world concerns dominate the outward appearance they were forced to cultivate within the worlds they were brought up in. Lang Jr. creates a world of isolation by constructing each frame of the film very carefully. Pillars within the resort separate actors, bars on wrought iron fences echo their inward imprisonment, windows show faces peering at their neighbors; they are all so close yet continually cutoff from one another. The dining room, which contains our separate tables, positions the actors facing different directions within the frame. Some face the camera and some away, this physical display drives home the lack of communication between people who yearn for contact and yet can’t get close to one another. Mann chooses dissolves when cutting between the actors at dinner, a technique that makes the viewer feel as if these diners don’t even occupy the same space.
The characters all represent a different version of loneliness, sexual repression and societal status. The British version of these characteristics are played by David Niven and Deborah Kerr. He is the blustering, boasting, stiff upper lip ex-officer and she the repressed, hysterical daughter of a domineering mother from a wealthy background. The American version is played by Burt Lancaster and Rita Hayworth, former man and wife whose marriage ended with sexual violence and prison. He down on his luck and still filled with passion and acceptance for human desires and faults where as she is the ex temptress/manipulator of men now coming to turns with aging and loneliness. While one pairing are timid and shy and the other brazen and sexually forward, they both adhere to the overall subject matter within this story. These are broken people with broken lives unable to act on their urges for fear of being ostracized from a group they don’t really want to belong to in the first place. Lancaster’s character having served a prison sentence for letting his desire get the better of him is the only one willing to accept what everyone is underneath these well crafted personas, vulnerability and longing are virtues in his mind.
Separate Tables subtly deals with a subject matter that was still taboo in film as the 1950’s came to a close. It wants to break the notion that destroying ones character because of want of companionship or lust is the duty of the group to maintain proper societal etiquette. Standing up for one’s feelings, accepting our neighbors when they need compassion can be acts of bravery. The film is bookended by a young couple, in the opening they retire to their private rooms to find refuge from their stuffy co-guests only to return in the finale to speak of upcoming visions of marital/family bliss. It seems life and romance can truly be allowed to flourish outside of the view of prying eyes. When we can take off our masks, when we can act on desire, when we can be honest with someone other than our selves then maybe we can sit down together at a table and not feel so alone.
The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of 