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“Boarding House Blues”

By Raymond Benson

Having never heard of this British production prior to the release of Kino Lorber’s new high definition transfer of the picture, this reviewer approached it with caution. It was much better than expected. Luckily, there is much to be said about Connecting Rooms.

Based on a stage play called The Cellist by Marion Hart, the screenplay was written by director Franklin Gollings. It’s a low-budget affair that was shot in London in 1969, and there is a decidedly TV-movie feel about it. The picture was first released in 1970 in the United States, of all places, and didn’t receive a U.K. release until 1972.

What Connecting Rooms has going for it is the presence of the remarkable Bette Davis, who delivers a note-perfect late career performance as Wanda, an aging cellist who lives in a seedy boarding house in London.

For his one and only directorial effort, Franklin Gollings managed to finagle an impressive cast with 1970’s Connecting Rooms, based on the play The Cellist by Marion Hart. Bette Davis and Michael Redgrave play down-and-out lodgers in run-down boarding house manned by an onerous Kay Walsh in what plays like a riff on Separate Tables. Gollings does his best to expand the material’s staginess, but a variety of long-winded monologues tend to undo the cinematic good will of various London exterior shots.

Disgraced school teacher James Wallraven (Redgrave) has recently lost his position, forced to move into a ramshackle boarding house in London.…...

Miriam Hopkins, Bette Davis, The Old Maid Bette Davis, Warner Bros.' top female box-office attraction from the mid-'30s to the late '40s, is Turner Classic Movies' "Summer Under the Stars" performer-of-the-day this Wednesday, August 3. TCM will be presenting 12 Bette Davis movies, in addition to the 2005 documentary Stardust: The Bette Davis Story. [Bette Davis Movie Schedule.] Unfortunately, none of TCM's Bette Davis movies is a local premiere. So, don't expect anything rare like The Bad Sister, Seed, The Menace, or Way Back Home. Or, for that matter, Connecting Rooms, Bunny O'Hare, The Scientific Cardplayer, or Wicked Stepmother. (Luigi Comencini's The Scientific Cardplayer, co-starring Alberto Sordi, Joseph Cotten, and Silvana Mangano, is an interesting film; hopefully TCM will get a hold of it one of these days.) Anyhow, at least there's the little-known The Working Man (1933), a perfectly enjoyable Depression Era comedy-drama starring a surprisingly effective George Arliss as a big businessman who,...