| Tales of Manhattan | |
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Theatrical release poster |
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| Directed by | Julien Duvivier |
| Produced by | Boris Morros Sam Spiegel |
| Starring | Charles Boyer Rita Hayworth Ginger Rogers Henry Fonda Charles Laughton Edward G. Robinson Ethel Waters Paul Robeson W. C. Fields |
| Music by | Sol Kaplan |
| Distributed by | 20th Century Fox |
| Release date(s) | August 5, 1942 |
| Running time | 118 minutes 127 minutes (restored version) |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
Tales of Manhattan is a 1942 American anthology film directed by Julien Duvivier. Thirteen writers, including Ben Hecht, Alan Campbell, Ferenc Molnár, Samuel Hoffenstein, and Donald Ogden Stewart worked on the six stories in this film.
Contents |
The stories follow a black formal tailcoat as it goes from owner to owner, in five otherwise unconnected stories.
The first is a love triangle between Charles Boyer, Thomas Mitchell, and Rita Hayworth. Boyer plays an actor who gives his finest performance when he's shot while wearing the jacket.
The second tale is a comic story featuring Ginger Rogers who finds a romantic love letter in her future husband's jacket. Her boyfriend (Cesar Romero) enlists his best man (Henry Fonda) to help bail him out. Things don't go as expected when Rogers falls in love with Fonda and dumps her boyfriend.
The third tale stars Charles Laughton. He plays a poor but brilliant musician, composer and conductor whose one big chance at fame and recognition is in jeopardy. While he attempts to conduct, the small jacket rips and the audience erupts with laughter. In a poignant moment the audience emphathises with him by removing their own coats and he triumphs.
The fourth story stars Edward G. Robinson as an alcoholic derelict who takes a last shot at life by borrowing the tailcoat to attend his 25th college reunion. The lawyer tries to convince his former classmates that he is successful, but one of his fellow classmates George Sanders knew Robinson was disbarred for unethical behaviour as a lawyer. When one of the guests loses his wallet the group hold a mock trial where Robinson ultimately decides to admit that he is a derelict. The next morning his classmates come to his mission where he is offered a good job, and is back on the road to respectability.
A fifth story involves a thief J. Carroll Naish stealing the coat from a second-hand store and then committing a robbery at an illegal casino where no one is admitted unless wearing evening dress. When he attempts to escape by plane in an open cockpit, the jacket catches fire from sparks from the engine with a panicked Naish removing his burning jacket with the money still in the pockets and throwing it out of the plane. A poor African-American couple (Paul Robeson and Ethel Waters) in a deep South shanty community finds the jacket along with over $40,000. They take it to their minister (Eddie Anderson) who gives out the "money from heaven" to people so that they can buy what they prayed for. After distributing the cash, the minister asks loner Christopher (George Reed) what his wish was. He says he prayed for a scarecrow for the fields. They take the now practically shredded jacket and make a scarecrow out of it. The sequence features musical numbers by Paul Robeson and the Hall Johnson choir.
A sixth story starred W.C. Fields, with Phil Silvers and Margaret Dumont. A conman (Fields) buys the jacket, thinking that it is stuffed with money from its fomer owner, who, according to a crooked clothing store salesman (Silvers), was "a millionaire." The conman wears the jacket to a lecture he is to give on abstinence from alcohol at the home of a wealthy woman (Dumont), where the cocoanut milk served as an alcohol alternative has been spiked with booze by her husband - turning the lecture into a drunken party.
This story would have been fifth in the sequence and was cut when the film was released to reduce running time. It was the easiest tale to cut without losing continuity, and, ironically, it was by far the funniest. Some sources indicate the "running time" was a convenient excuse; others among the cast were not too crazy about the Fields sequence stealing more than its fair share of thunder.
This sequence was discovered in the Fox vaults in the mid-1990s seemingly intact and used in Kevin Burns' Hidden Hollywood II: More Treasures from the 20th Century Fox Vaults, a 1997 television documentary spotlighting cut sequences from the studio's films.[2] It was later included as a supplement on the VHS release of the Tales of Manhattan. The Fox Movie Channel runs the film in its entirety, with all six stories intact and in their intended sequence.
The restored cut sequence as it appears in these releases is apparently incomplete as it does not reveal why Fields is in Dumont's limousine at the beginning, nor how the tailcoat gets back to Silvers' store in the ending (in order for it to be stolen by the thief in the last story).
The story starring Paul Robeson, which featured what were considered black stereotypes even in 1942, came under severe criticism from both Edward G. Robinson, and especially, Robeson, a champion of good film roles for blacks. After a career of only 12 movies and refusing lucrative film offers for over three years, Tales of Manhattan was Robeson’s final attempt to work within Hollywood, yet Robeson was deeply disappointed with the film. He initially thought the depiction of the plight of the rural black poor - shown in the film as investing the bulk of their windfall in communal land and tools - would demonstrate a share-and-share-alike way of life. Although he attempted to change some of the film’s content during production, in the end he found it "very offensive to my people. It makes the Negro childlike and innocent and is in the old plantation hallelujah shouter tradition ... the same old story, the negro singing his way to glory".[3]
Some reviewers and black entertainers (including Clarence Muse), noted that the film exposed blacks’ living conditions under the sharecropping system, but Robeson was so dissatisfied that he attempted to buy up all the prints and take the film out of distribution. Following its release, he held a press conference, announcing that he would no longer act in Hollywood films because of the demeaning roles available to black actors. Robeson also said he'd gladly picket the film along with others who had found the film offensive.[3]
The sequence was, in the past, sometimes cut from television showings, giving the film a very abrupt ending.
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