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the audience applauded

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Blistering performances.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

If you like vignettes like O. Henry's Full House or the game "Six Degrees of Separation"-or if you like the connection of clues between movie stars on Hot Toasty Rag-you'll probably like Tales of Manhattan. It's the story of a tuxedo coat that gets passed down to five different owners, and each vignette shows how the coat changes the owner's situation. The biggest criticism of the film is the title. It's so obvious! It should have been called Tails of Manhattan. What were they thinking?Anyway, the coat is first given to Charles Boyer, an actor who's having an affair with a married Rita Hayworth. His segment is interesting, but it goes on a little too long. Next up is the worst vignette, despite the very promising premise. Cesar Romero is about to marry Ginger Rogers, but when she finds an incriminating love letter in his coat pocket, he panics and begs his best man Henry Fonda to pretend that the coat and note are his. Sounds good, right? Then it goes downhill. Cesar disappears and takes the good comic timing with him. Henry and Ginger have zero chemistry together, and the dialogue is beyond stupid. Plus, her terrible wig makes her look homely.Next up is the lovable Charles Laughton. He's a struggling musician who wears the coat when he's finally given the opportunity to perform at Carnegie Hall. As you might expect from anything starring Charles Laughton, his segment is sad and touching. As I always do, I wanted to reach into the screen and give him a big hug. After that, the even more lovable Edward G. Robinson is given the best vignette. Had a different actor been cast, the entire Tales of Manhattan would have infinitely less class and heart. He's going to a college reunion and wants to impress all his old friends, but in reality he's homeless and an alcoholic. He borrows the topcoat from the Salvation Army in an effort to look presentable.Last but not least-that award goes to Ginger Rogers's wig-the story gets taken to a poor farming village. Paul Robeson and Ethel Waters find the coat, which by now has thousands of dollars in its pockets, and they take it to the town minister, Eddie "Rochester" Anderson. What will happen? Well, just as I haven't told you the endings to the other four tales, I won't tell you about this one. You'll just have to watch this entertaining little classic to find out!

TALES OF MANHATTAN (20th Century-Fox, 1942), directed by Julien Duvivier, is not so much a documentary on the first settlement of New York by the Dutch and the buying of the island from the Manhattan Indians for $24, but an episodic story revolving around an evening dinner coat and what takes place when acquired by numerous individuals. SEQUENCE A: ("The Final Curtain") Paul Orman (Charles Boyer), a Broadway stage actor, purchases an tail coat in spite of "cursed" rumor. He wears it for his premiere performance which proves successful. After the play, Luther, his chauffeur (Eugene Palette) drives him to the residence of Ethel (Rita Hayworth), the wife of a noted hunter, John Halloway (Thomas Mitchell) with whom he's been secretly having an affair. The drunken Halloway suspects something between them, and confronts the couple with a hunting rifle. SEQUENCE B: ("The Letter") Luther (Eugene Palette) is introduced passing off the coat to his friend, Edgar (Roland Young). Edgar, a valet, works for Harry Wilson (Cesar Romero), a playboy engaged to Diana (Ginger Rogers). Because her friend, Ellen (Gail Patrick) has found a love letter in her husband's coat pocket, she encourages Diana to do the same with Harry's. To prove Harry not to be the man her husband to be, Diana goes through the pockets and finds a love letter. To clear himself, Harry telephones his friend, George (Henry Fonda) to come with his own a tail coat explaining he took the wrong one by mistake, so to make it believed the coat with love letter is his. George goes along with the plan, but situations become more complex than anticipated. SEQUENCE C: ("The Musician") Placed in a pawn shop, the "jinxed" coat is now purchased by Mrs. Smith (Elsa Lanchester) to give to her husband, Charles (Charles Laughton), a barroom pianist, to wear at the concert hall where he is to conduct his latest symphony. During the concert, Charles becomes confused as to why the people in the audience are all laughing. SEQUENCE D: ("The Reunion of Truth") Following the concert, Charles donates his coat to a Bowery mission worker (Mae Marsh), who in turn offers it to her employer, "Father" Joe (James Gleason). Acquiring a letter addressed to his friend, Larry Brown (Edward G. Robinson), Joe goes out and locates him sleeping in the gutter covered with newspapers. Brown, a down-and-out attorney, finds the letter to be an invitation to his college reunion that's to take place at the Waldorf Astoria. He attends the function, Class of 1917, and nearly gets away revealing his true past until he finds himself accused by Williams (George Sanders) of stealing Henderson's (Don Douglas) pocket book with large sum of money. A trial ensues. SEQUENCE E ("An Answer to a Prayer"): Costello (J. Carroll Naish), a thief, acquires the coat from pawn shop, commits his latest robbery, stuffing $43,000 into one of its pockets. He heads to the airport, makes his getaway on private airplane bound for Mexico City. While in flight, the coat catches fire, forcing Costello to toss it, forgetting the money inside. The coat lands in a poverty-stricken Negro community and picked up by sharecroppers, Luke (Paul Robeson) and wife, Esther (Ethel Waters). Finding the large sum, they go to the Reverend Lazarus (Eddie "Rochester" Anderson) for advise on what to do with the money. For this segment, Robeson and the Hall Johnson Choir sing "Glory Day."Regardless of individual stories scripted by various writers, many of them are no doubt patterned by those written by William Sydney Porter ("O. Henry") and the style of his concluding elements. Most of them, quite lengthy, leading to 118 minutes, are not quite original in concept considering the idea of separate stories with an all star cast has already been done in Paramount's IF I HAD A MILLION (1932) with one of its eight individual stories featuring the one and only W.C. Fields. Interestingly, TALES OF MANHATTAN did include a sequence prior to SEQUENCE E featuring W.C. Fields that was deleted prior to its theatrical release. Fortunately this cut sequence has survived and restored in 1996. The Fields segment was profiled in an American Movie Classics documentary,"Hidden Hollywood: From the Vaults of 20th Century-Fox" (1997) followed by a presentation of the movie itself that continued broadcast on AMC until 2001. TALES OF MANHATTAN distribution to home video, does include the now sought-after Fields sequence, which I'll title, "The Lecture on Liquor." In it, Fields plays Professor Diogenes Pothlewhistle who acquires the coat in question from a tailor (Phil Silvers) of Santelli Brothers second hand clothing store to wear for his lecture sponsored by Mrs. Clyborn Langahankie (Margaret Dumont). An amusing nine minutes with Fields in rare form that can be also be seen and appreciated in 125 minute format on the Fox Movie Channel. Theatrical 118 minute release broadcast on Turner Classic Movies (TCM premiere: April 10, 2017) minus the Fields segment.With a movie proposed in chaptered form, there's a chance of a mix of good and not so good stories. The Fonda-Rogers segment is often singled out as the weakest. My take on the good are ones with Boyer, Laughton and Robinson. The climatic finish, set in a Negro community rather than Manhattan, has its share of great leads (Ethel Waters and Paul Robeson), but slightly handicapped by Communistic ideas within their speeches. In general, TALES OF MANHATTAN, with its assortment of stars, with the leading character being the tail coat, is an interesting idea that gets by on its own merits. (***)

After one seeing, this movie is one of my top favorites.It's six or seven short stories with perhaps the most astounding cast in history.I loved Charles Laughton as an impoverished composer getting his big chance from a Toscanini-type martinet conductor. I loved Edward G. Robinson as a Bowery drunk sent to his Harvard(like) reunion by a doting Bowery reverend. I loved the plot twists in the first two stories. Anyhow, I LOVE it. We see familiar actors in unfamiliar roles: Thomas Mitchell, a great actor, usually plays character parts, Irish or sailors or Uncle Billy in "Wonderful Life"-- here we see him as the real sophisticate he was. Rita Hayworth as jealous and uncertain as well as gorgeous. Henry Fonda, very young and playing very dumb. Ginger Rogers as a spitfire jealous fiancée. And on and on.And best of all-- The final sequence is incredible, politically incorrect in every possible way. It stars Paul Robeson, Ethel Waters and Rochester (the comedy black guy from the Jack Benny radio show). It alone is worth the rental, combining the worst of sharecropper-Rastus-Here-Come-de-Lawd ethnic parody with a chance for Robeson to speak the Communist ideal at its highest and most hopeful, never more to be heard and powerful to hear from someone who believed it. Probably this was the only condition under which Robeson would consent to appear in an appalling stereotype skit.The photography is great. THE LIGHTING is worth a year of film school. (Too bad the director went back to France after the war.) This movie has everything. As Hollywood Nostalgia, it's the tops.

We think of Jean Renoir's, Rene Clair's and Julien Duvivier's sojourns in Hollywood during the war as difficult times for these creators, and certainly Renoir's experience with the studio system was not a happy one. But I find Tales of Manhattan to be a light frolic that betrays little of the cultural confusion that these transplanted Frenchmen must have felt.It's by no means a delight from beginning to end: the W. C. Fields episode is not funny at all, and the finale with Paul Robeson and Ethel Waters as sharecroppers drowns in bathos. There is enough fun from Henry Fonda and Ginger Rogers as tentative lovers to compensate, and Edward G. Robinson as the disgraced lawyer is worth the effort to find this film.NOTE: How did Charles Laughton get so shapely? He can't be called slender here, but he is far from the obese hulk that we remember from his later years.