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!

So after about 35 years reading about this film in the book "The Films of W.C. Fields", I finally watched Tales of Manhattan on YouTube. It has several short films connected together by a black coat. First segment stars Charles Boyer as an actor in love with Rita Hayworth who is married to Thomas Mitchell. Yes, you read that right. Second segment has Ginger Rogers finding what her fiancée Cesar Romero does when she's not around so the latter tries to pawn his coat with the incriminating evidence to future best man Henry Fonda. Third segment has Charles Laughton leaving his honky tonk playing days behind when he gets his dream job of conducting a symphony though he has to find a coat first of which one is given by his real-life spouse Elsa Lanchester. Fourth segment has Edward G. Robinson down on his luck when his friend James Gleason offers a formal suit so he can attend his 25th college reunion at the Waldolf Astoria where everyone except George Sanders seems glad to see him. What was supposed to be the fifth segment-cut from original release supposedly because it overextended the length-had W.C. Fields buying the coat from Phil Silvers-the only time two lovable con men met on film-before lecturing a hoity toity crowd-of which Margaret Dumont is among them-on the evils of alcohol. But nobody saw what happened before the meeting. Final segment takes place on a poor farm where the coat falls "from Heaven" in front of Paul Robeson and Ethel Waters. They give it to Eddie "Rochester" Anderson who tries to take the money found in it but ends up sharing it with his congregation. Also appearing are Clarence Muse and Cordell Hickman who is one of the kids. He plays Nicodemus. I first remembered him from the last "Our Gang" short ever made-Tale of a Dog. Oh, and Robeson and the Hall Johnson Choir sing their hearts out. Just about all of these sequences have some entertainment in them with the most hilarious one being the Rogers/Romero/Fonda one and the Robinson one being the most touching. About the last sequence: Robeson had returned to Hollywood after years of making films in England and this was only his second-after Universal's Show Boat from 1936-major studio appearance, that studio being 20th Century-Fox. If you know about him and his previous films, you know he would usually play dignified characters without stereotypical characteristics as well as present fine messages. While something of his point of view is here (that of openly sharing the wealth), he felt the entire sequence did a poor job of representing his race as being childlike hobos speaking in almost unintelligible dialect and spontaneously singing "Halleujah!" when a windfall go their way. At least, I think that may have been his problem with it. He was appalled by it so much, he tried to buy all prints of that sequence and destroy it. Anyway, the end result was he held a press conference and said he'd no longer appear in films because of the way his race was depicted then and to his dying day in 1976, he never did. A shame, really. Still, all his films are now available on DVD (well, except for Show Boat though there may still be some VHS copies around) so if anyone wants to be a Robeson completest, be my guest. So on that note, Tales of Manhattan is very much worth a look.

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.

I think it's fairly safe to say that this is the finest film that Julien Duvivier made outside France, let alone made in America; Anna Karenina which he made in England doesn't really compete with the Don Camillo films he shot in Italy - in fact on reflection The Little World Of Don Camillo may tie Tales Of Manhattan for Best-Duvivier-Made-Outside-France. He was a master of the 'anthology' movie and both Un Carnet de bal and Sous le ciel de Paris are outstanding examples that had the advantage of tighter scripting - in Tales Of Manhattan the roster of credited writers threatens to outnumber the cast and Duvivier deserves a small accolade for unifying so many diverse styles into a cohesive whole. Others have provided details of the several episodes as well as pointing out that not Every sequence takes place in Manhattan, notably the final sequence which is set in the Deep South and provides a perfect coda when the tuxedo in question finds a final resting place on a scarecrow. It feels as if every Hollywood actor who wasn't on active service in 1942 was on Duvivier's set standing up to be counted and Phil Silvers is brilliant in an all-too-brief segment working a pre-Bilko scam on W.C. Fields. A delight.