Odd this day
Ah, yes — of course: the 69th birthday of a… er, legendary piece of American television.
Yes, indeed: suave, sophisticated David Niven. We must be in for a classy —
Ah.
It was 1955, and ‘Niv’, despite appearing in A Matter of Life and Death nine years before, was experiencing a career slump. To put it mildly. It can happen to anyone, but you’d think playing the lead in a solid gold masterpiece would protect you from falling this far.
It didn’t. This episode of US television’s wildly misnamed Four Star Playhouse concerns a New York psychiatrist (Niven) who falls in love with a medical student and visits her family’s ranch with her to announce that they’re engaged.
Her father, hoping she would marry a Man Of The Land and take over the farm is not impressed, and challenges Henry to ride an unbroken stallion with a reputation as a killer. So Henry uses his psychoanalytical skills to win over the horse. Obviously.
Luckily for Niven, he turned things around the following year.
To put it mildly.
Two years after that, he became the first, and so far only, person to win an Oscar at an Academy Awards he was also hosting — for playing dodgy pervert Major Pollock in Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables
It’s still, fact fans, the shortest performance to win Best Actor. He’s only on screen for 15 minutes and 38 seconds of the 1 hour 40 minutes running time — a crucial 22 seconds less than Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs.
Wendy Hiller, playing his landlady, got her only Oscar (Supporting Actress) for the same film — and was a fellow alumna of the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, in whose I Know Where I’m Going she had appeared in 1945.
If you ever get the chance to see that, I urge you to take it. Visit the Internet Archive, and you can see Henry and the Psychopathic Horse, but — having done so myself — this is not an experience I can recommend with quite so much gusto.
Separate Tables itself hasn’t aged badly, and contains, in particular, one line which isn’t getting old any time soon:
The trouble about being on the side of right, as one sees it, is that one often finds oneself in the company of such very questionable allies.
