Change Your Image
ACarringford
Reviews
Separate Tables (1958)
The Key -- Different Era
So many reviewers of this film profess to admire it without any knowledge of what it is about that it seems necessary to provide some background because its meaning is only clear as a product of its time, about which knowledge appears to have been completely lost.
This ought to be a case study for film students to expose how a successful stage play cannot be made into a successful movie. There are elements in a play that have to do with things communicated in a human context that cannot be conveyed with images on a screen.
The film, Separate Tables, was released in December of 1958 from a play that had premiered in London in September of 1954. This was at the tail end of what can only be called the Witch Hunt era. This was a time when the Second World War had ended and the search for traitors had continued past its usefulness. There were communists hiding it the closet and Nazis had just changed their clothes. Most viewers in the late 1950's would have seen this as a metaphor that exposed the damage on individuals wrought by this continuing paranoia infecting the public sphere and making the point that the protections of a "right to privacy" is something that served almost everyone.
The trouble is, that is the wrong metaphor. The playwright, Terrance Rattigan was a homosexual and this was a time when being exposed as a homosexual ruined lives, careers and families. In fact, most of Terrance Rattigan's plays are about individuals dealing with social persecution of gays. In the play we are to understand that being arrested for the indistinct charge of lewd behavior was a euphemism for homosexuality. It has been reported that in the first draft of the play, the Major, David Niven's character, is specifically gay which was replaced with the vague generalization by the time of the opening.
For a mainstream motion picture, that was changed to what was presumed to be the more comprehensible actions of what was called a "masher," someone who gropes women. The trouble is that change does not work. Gay sex takes place between consenting adults, there is no victim, the police would rarely see it if they were not looking for it, and therefore there is no reason for it to enter the public sphere. It is just that individual's business, even in the 1950's. On the other hand, the act of groping strange women is assaultive, intrusive and there is plenty of reason for it to be publicly censured.
We are expected to understand that the Gladys Cooper character is a harpy and a martinet who has ruined her daughter's life and has no compunction about inflicting her paranoia on those around her to the detriment of everyone. In fact her paranoia is a social evil that degrades the tolerance on which everyone depends. It is interesting that in our time, post-Weinstein era, when lives and careers are destroyed over a stray comment or incidental gesture, the Gladys Cooper character would be the hero for being the leader of the feminist wrath. It should not be lost on us that our era is a time when intolerance has regained its preeminence.
We are also supposed to understand that the Burt Lancaster's character's battle between the proper companion he has gravitated towards and the true sexual passion he left behind is actually between "going straight" and going back to his gay lover.
Of course, none of this works in a movie that we understand as Burt Lancaster having to choose between Rita Hayworth and Wendy Hiller, while David Niven has a platonic friendship with the wounded Deborah Kerr. It is not just because they are "stars" who bring with them Elmer Gantry and From Here to Eternity. It has more to do with the fact that the camera lens gives us only one perspective and one image at a time that we put together with analysis no matter how good the performances are and something of the empathy of the theater is lost.
Just as a postscript, if we are talking about acting, it was Deborah Kerr's sensitive victim that deserved the Academy Award.
A Dancer's World (1957)
The Dance As Art
If you have a chance to see this short documentary you should do so. Agnes De Mille is considered one of the masters and innovators of American choreography. Primarily devoted to ballet, she is also known as a choreographer in musical theater, beginning with Oklahoma in 1943 and more than a dozen other Broadway shows including, Carousel, Brigadoon, Paint Your Wagon, so when she tries to explain a dancer's world to us, we are wise to listen.
She is seen preparing her makeup and costume for a performance and with this beginning she explains the role of preparation in the creation of art. She is already 63 years old by this time so she is not really going out to dance, but she looks good enough that she might have. She is primarily trying to make the case that ballet truly is an art. Her point is that art requires tremendous preparation and discipline but that sufficient preparation and discipline leads to "freedom" because the personality finally merges with the art.
She ends with a quotation from Saint-John Perse, the winner of the 1960 Noble Prize for Literature, that, "(art is) the privilege of the instant, but you have so little time to be born to the instant."
This takes place against the backdrop of her dancers performing in a practice studio and the dancers drive the point home by being disciplined, graceful and sublime. I thought it was inspirational.
Stone (2010)
Should Have Been Great -- But . . .
Since no one got it, let me explain this to you. This is an attempt to adapt the theme of a 1966 movie that Ingmar Bergman made called, Persona. In that movie, a prominent actress has had some sort of mental breakdown, becomes unfeeling and has retreated from communication with the world. A maid is hired to take care of her who is healthy, vibrant, carefree. As the two characters develop a connection they start to rely on each other for validation and emotional support, eventually the characters reverse roles. The actress returns to the top of her professional and it is clear that she has drawn energy and emotional power from the maid. At the same time the maid has been left an enervated mass of self-doubt and paranoia. The artist transformed herself by art, but accomplished that by sucking the life out of the original youth and vitality of her companion.
The same thing happens in this interaction between a prisoner (Ed Norton) and his case officer (Robert De Niro), or at least that is the idea. In the beginning, the prisoner is vengeful, paranoid and self-destructive. At the same time, the case officer is a religious man with a settled working class existence, apparently respected in his job and a tranquil, picturesque family life.
The scenes of interaction between Ed Norton and Robert De Niro are of the essence because we see the case officer slowly become more manipulative and hostile, at the same time that the prisoner becomes more natural and willing to let go to the extent of acceptance if he is denied parole.
The problem is that beginning with what must have been a masterful script, somehow the director, and most especially the film editor, never got the message and apparently never knew what their own movie was about. As a consequence they tried to twist into a straight thriller with ambiguous motives, artificial tension as we follow closeups of the officer's gun and phone calls to the officer's home that might or might not be threatening.
Both of the characters have a guilty secret from their pasts that they are attempting to deal with. The prisoner finally recognizes his guilt and puts it in perspective, and at the same time he derives a sort of spiritual sustenance by a direct connection to the sound current of the yogis. The case officer never deals with his guilty and it isolates him from his wife and the religious aspects of his life that ultimately give him no spiritual sustenance.
In the end the two characters have reverse positions. The prisoner is both free and healthy. The case officer is trapped in own sickness of guilt and paranoia. The final confrontation that takes place in an alley does not work because, apparently for Hollywood purposes, the case officer has a gun in his hand. You now understand this movie better than the director did. Too bad, because it could have been great. Can you imagine, Persona accessible to American audiences? It could have been a classic.