I knew that this was an adaptation of a play going in, and seeing Delbert Mann's name made it all the clearer that this was going go be one of those "classy" American films of the 50s about a "serious" subject that got a bunch of award nominations but appears stodgy and dull now. And I was more or less right in my assumption.
The characters for the most part struck me as one-note. It doesn't surprise me really that Deborah Kerr was nominated for playing the repressed, borderline hysterical browbeaten spinster daughter who forms a devotion to the (Oscar-winning) David Niven's exaggerated British military character - Kerr's role is the flashiest, along with Niven's, and the least interesting I think. I really did like Wendy Hiller as the hotel's manager - she brought real warmth and empathy to this rather understated role and she, too, won an Oscar for it - this one well-deserved I think. There's so much emotion there in the scene where she's telling the American writer who she loves (Burt Lancaster) that he needs to go to his ex-wife (Rita Hayworth, in maybe the best performance I've seen from her) because she needs him, needs him far more than the lonely but basically accepting hotelier.
Hayworth and Hiller bring this up to some extent from its dull, stagy direction and the rather obvious and predictable direction the characters are moving in, and the last scene with all the main characters gathered in the dining room as Kerr finally breaks (if only for a moment) from her domineering mother is also fairly powerful, so on the whole I can recommend this though I think you'd probably have to be a fan of some of the actors here to really get into it.
The characters for the most part struck me as one-note. It doesn't surprise me really that Deborah Kerr was nominated for playing the repressed, borderline hysterical browbeaten spinster daughter who forms a devotion to the (Oscar-winning) David Niven's exaggerated British military character - Kerr's role is the flashiest, along with Niven's, and the least interesting I think. I really did like Wendy Hiller as the hotel's manager - she brought real warmth and empathy to this rather understated role and she, too, won an Oscar for it - this one well-deserved I think. There's so much emotion there in the scene where she's telling the American writer who she loves (Burt Lancaster) that he needs to go to his ex-wife (Rita Hayworth, in maybe the best performance I've seen from her) because she needs him, needs him far more than the lonely but basically accepting hotelier.
Hayworth and Hiller bring this up to some extent from its dull, stagy direction and the rather obvious and predictable direction the characters are moving in, and the last scene with all the main characters gathered in the dining room as Kerr finally breaks (if only for a moment) from her domineering mother is also fairly powerful, so on the whole I can recommend this though I think you'd probably have to be a fan of some of the actors here to really get into it.