I’m not homophobic…

Giles Cole’s play about Rattigan

…or heterophobic, for that matter. But when I encounter an artist whose sexuality seems to actually be a handicap in his work, I see no reason to remain silent. This is as true of Anaïs Nin, Armistead Maupin, and the Marquis de Sade as it is of Sir Terrence Rattigan.

The prolific British playwright kept his homosexuality a secret, as he had to in England until 1967, when it was decriminalized. But his sexuality exhibits itself openly in his work, or so it seems to me. His plays are markedly skewed toward a male point of view (The Browning Version, The Winslow Boy, Adventure Story, etc.), so much so that, ultimately, I don’t believe he understood women any better than he did cats or cows. I don’t think he even realized that women are every bit as complex as men. (He’s not alone. That’s true of a number of writers, including John Updike. And no doubt it’s true of women writers.)

Rattigan & his mum

I’ll get to the most recent film adaptation of his work, which prompted me to write this, after addressing the most famous one, which is undoubtedly Separate Tables (1958). It won two of the seven Oscars for which it was nominated, but today it feels like a museum piece in an exhibit about British repression. It has six or seven female roles, not one of them a credible woman. The cast— David Niven, Deborah Kerr, Wendy Hiller (all Oscar nominees; Niven a winner), Burt Lancaster, Rita Hayworth, Cathleen Nesbitt, Gladys Cooper— is as faultless as the boredom is relentless.

Meek Kerr, decadent Niven

That is largely the fault of the director, Delbert Mann, whose mediocre career is summarized for all in his NYTimes obit, so allow me a paragraph to dismantle him. Mann won an Oscar for directing Marty in 1956, a movie I will see again only if Hell exists. That Paddy Chayevsky melodrama premiered on television, and Mann was a made-for-television director. My favorite review of the film version includes this: “No movie can be entirely worthless, it can always serve as a bad example, and this is the worst example of a Best Picture winner I know of.”  Mann was drawn to stagey dramas (Dear Heart, Desire Under the Elms, etc.) about sentimental characters, often ones who are lonely for good and obvious reasons. Separate Tables is like Marty, but relocated from a Bronx butcher shop to a Bournemouth holiday hotel, and featuring thinner, older, wealthier characters. But enough about the lousy director. Back to the veiled playwright:

Sexual strings attached

Typical of Rattigan, the male characters in Separate Tables are reasonably well-developed, which is not to say that they ring true. Oscar-winner David Niven, for instance, plays Pee Wee Herman — no, that’s not right. But it’s not far off. He plays Major Angus Pollack, who fabricates stories about his military prowess when he isn’t jerking off in movie theaters.  Burt Lancaster, virile and vigorous as ever, plays an alcoholic, divorced writer, and he is given all the witty lines, which are few in number and they dry up early. He is betrothed to hotelier Wendy Hiller, an engagement that hits the skids when Rita Hayworth, as his ex-wife, shows up with strings she plans to re-attach to his limbs…

The triumph of insult

Prof. Higgins and the "incarnate insult to the English language."

When I was still a kid, My Fair Lady won eight Oscars (only seven films have won more), so as far as my generation was concerned, Audrey Hepburn was Eliza Doolittle and Rex Harrison was Henry Higgins. But 25 years earlier, George Bernard Shaw had won an Oscar for the 1938 film version of his stage play, Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts. It was up to me to catch up with the real thing, and I finally have.

Now that I have seen Pygmalion, My Fair Lady feels like burlesque– a marvelous, vigorous burlesque, but a thin reduction of the original literary work. Pygmalion is more substantial in every way: the cruel class prejudices are more heartfelt and searing, not only because the script is superior, but because the dialogue is not sentimentalized into song. Consider the song Without You, taken from a line in Shaw’s script where Liza says to Higgins, “You are a motor bus: all bounce and go, and no consideration for anyone. But I can do without you: don’t think I can’t.” Replacing resoluteness with rhyme and– don’t get me wrong–brilliant inventiveness, Alan Jay Lerner has Liza sing, “There’ll be spring every year without you. England still will be here without you. There’ll be fruit on the tree. And a shore by the sea. There’ll be crumpets and tea without you.”  And I contend that it’s a steep drop from the pith of “Don’t think I can’t” to the pathos of “There’ll be crumpets and tea without you.”

Leslie Howard, full-tilt

There’s little sentimentality of any sort, in fact. One particularly tough-minded incident occurred when Alfred Doolittle (Wilfred Lawson) arrives to shake down Henry Higgins (Leslie Howard) for some cash. In the middle of a lively disagreement, Doolittle flips the British bird (the  V-sign), thrusting his grimy fingers into the air at the fussy professor. It knocked me for such a happy loop I had to rewind to be sure I’d seen right.

The script belongs to Shaw, but the movie belongs to Leslie Howard, who co-directed it with Anthony Asquith (David Lean was the editor). Howard displays all his genius here. I’ve been a fan since I saw The Petrified Forest and Gone with the Wind when I was in high school, but he still surprised me in this role. He charms the audience in spite of his essentially loathsome character (the charm is provided by Shaw’s writing; Rex Harrison benefitted, too). Higgins ruthlessly hurls insults at Eliza– “I shall make a duchess of this draggletailed guttersnipe“–  and some insults aren’t even at her, they’re toward or about her:  “Pickering: shall we ask this baggage to sit down or shall we throw her out of the window?” The script is a compendium of vilification, but so laced with Shavian wit that we can’t help but be entranced and amused, especially with Howard’s enthusiastic, light-as-a-feather delivery.

Top this.

Wendy Hiller creates an intelligent, strong-willed, sympathetic Eliza, but– and I regret admitting this– I could not for the life of me erase Audrey Hepburn’s later Eliza. I don’t even consider Hepburn a formidable actress, but she is so winning in the role of Eliza Doolittle, so dazzlingly beautiful (and costumed), and so sturdily supported by Harrison, Wilfred Hyde-White, and Gladys Cooper, that other Elizas can’t help but pale in comparison. I rush to acknowledge that Hiller is the superior actress– more accomplished, more subtle, more down-to-earth– but Hepburn flat-out owns this role. It makes one wonder what would have happened if a less glamorous actress (read: Julie Andrews) had been cast in the film. Perhaps Lizas past and future wouldn’t suffer the sad fate of inevitably being compared to, and receding before, the pure pulchritude of Audrey Hepburn.

http://www.filmsite.org/oscars2.html#1