Actress Profile: Maggie McNamara in The Moon is Blue (1953)

When I caught Otto Preminger's The Moon is Blue last month on Youtube it was mainly for Maggie McNamara, who managed a Best Actress nomination in 1953 and who I really didn't know much about, having not seen her in anything else. She actually only did four films after The Moon is Blue (her debut) and sadly overdosed at the relatively young age of 49.

This stagy comedy sees McNamara pursued by a devilishly handsome William Holden and his would-be father-in-law David Niven, one of which wants to bed her, the other to marry her. She is required to dash off some cracking dialogue in which she's very candid about sex and foreplay while simultaneously declaring her unwillingness to engage in both. Contradictory perhaps, but McNamara juggles the character's complexities with ease, and for a debut it's a remarkably assured turn, laden with some wonderful comic timing and truly inspired acting decisions.

McNamara is a tiny girl, inoffensive, not particularly pretty, but she has an undeniable presence in the film and a warm demeanor, even when she's dashing off cutting quips and generally slapping down the lapdog-style attentions of her two suitors. As the piece was originally a play (penned and adapted by F. Hugh Herbert) Maggie isn't always framed like a leading lady and lingers in the background for pockets of the action, so it's kind of surprising that she managed to emerge as such an awards favourite. The role is cute but that particular feat was definitely garnered by the performance.

Personal Canon: 90. Separate Tables (1958)

Directed by Delbert Mann
Starring: David Niven, Deborah Kerr, Burt Lancaster, Rita Hayworth, Wendy Hiller, Gladys Cooper

Bournemouth hotels should be serene during the off-season; a time where the long-term residents can relish the lack of drunken tourists and screaming kids. The host of characters that inhabit the Bournemouth hotel featured in Delbert Mann's Separate Tables, however, seemingly don't want the drama of the holidays to end, and backstab, bitch, and conduct affairs with barely a second thought. This film isn't so much like Edmund Goulding's delightfully trashy 1932 Best Picture winner though, bleakly satirising its inhabitants to enlighten ever-present social divides and exercising a crisp, cut-throat humour.

Almost vehement that we consign the wild bunch to an array of archetypes (the old maid, the glamourpuss, the stubborn elite, the dirty old man) Separate Tables encourages us to evaluate these assumptions and their easily-concluded nature, and does so by distributing its characters in a thoroughly interesting political spectrum, which helps to highlight the internal struggles of these people to simply move with the times. The middle portion of the film, in which Dame Gladys Cooper's utterly immovable Mrs. Railton-Bell confronts the private life of David Niven's Major, is incredibly telling. Her desire to include everything and everyone in his business, as an act of morally-ingrained manipulation, emphasises the old-guard ethics and hypocritical etiquette of a generation in fear of its place in the world. With war long gone, and marooned in an age of consumerism, the teenager, rock n'roll, Mrs. Railton-Bell exhibits the still-prevalent desperation to live up to perceived class-driven archetypes, and typifies the confusion of Table's erratic, aging community.

A further salute to this is Burt Lancaster's reverence and hatred of the glamorous, man-eating Rita Hayworth, whom he truly loves but views as a riskier prospect than the matronly, traditional Wendy Hiller. When a man's doubting Rita Hayworth as a romantic option, you have to reckon he's got hangups, right? Deborah Kerr's Sibyl is the centre of the film, and the political spectrum, as she's been denied the freedom of thought by her restrictive mother. So too the major: the 'tentative' romance that he and Sibyl engage in culminating in a tremendous, wrenchingly half-spoken scene towards the end, which provides the most genuine and capping element of Mann's rich endeavour. As a term, 'separate tables' may appear harmless enough, but its mild-mannered etiquette is a mask for more insidious insecurities, fears, motivations; seeing yourself through other people is hard to take.