Tales of Manhattan follows the story of a formal cutaway coat as it passes from owner to owner and the consequences to all that come into possession. The original owner, Charles Boyer, is an actor having an affair with Rita Hayworth and husband Thomas Mitchell finds out about it with some dire consequences for Boyer.
Is it cursed, well the stories of the various owners would range the gamut of circumstances. All the episodes are pretty good quality although if Tales of Manhattan were made today the last one about the southern sharecroppers with Paul Robeson and Ethel Waters and a whole bunch of black players would be done a lot different now.
For years a story with W.C. Fields and Margaret Dumont with Phil Silvers in it was cut from the original release. It's now restored to Tales of Manhattan and I'm not sure why it was done. It's a very funny episode in which Fields gets the cutaway to use in delivering a temperance lecture to Margaret Dumont and friends. Ms.Dumont proves to be just as good a foil for Fields as she was for the Brothers Marx. Especially when the coconut milk being served is spiked with some spirits.
Fields, one of the celebrated inebriates of show business, reveled in his identity and that temperance lecture was a routine he did going back to his vaudeville days. We should be thankful it was preserved and restored.
The other comic episode involved Cesar Romero palming off the tails on Henry Fonda who is to be best man at his wedding to Ginger Rogers. He put a love letter from another woman in the pocket and Rogers finds it. Romero has Fonda claim the cutaway was his and the contents thereof. It works only too well.
Edward G. Robinson has a nice episode as a disbarred lawyer living in a mission shelter who uses the cutaway to go to a class reunion where he and his former classmates get a lesson in humility.
The other episode concerns how the tails nearly undid Charles Laughton's big break in the music world. Elsa Lanchester who is playing his wife here, buys the tails for her husband who is a piano player in a honky tonk dive. But Laughton is a serious composer and with a certain amount of wile and chutzpah he gets to see an Arturo Toscanini type conductor, Victor Francen. Francen loves Laughton's concerto and arranges to have him conduct it.
Sad to say that the cutaway is to small and starts tearing as the composer is conducting. The gales of laughter threaten to steal Laughton's big moment, but Francen who was a pretty egocentric character steps up and finishes the concerto and the applause is for him and Laughton.
This particular episode had minimal dialog, but Charles Laughton's closeups run the whole gamut of emotions from resignation to triumph to despair and back to triumph again.
The film is from French director Julian Duvivier who was in exile in America while the Nazis occupied his country. It probably could be remade, but formal cutaways just aren't worn any more.
Is it cursed, well the stories of the various owners would range the gamut of circumstances. All the episodes are pretty good quality although if Tales of Manhattan were made today the last one about the southern sharecroppers with Paul Robeson and Ethel Waters and a whole bunch of black players would be done a lot different now.
For years a story with W.C. Fields and Margaret Dumont with Phil Silvers in it was cut from the original release. It's now restored to Tales of Manhattan and I'm not sure why it was done. It's a very funny episode in which Fields gets the cutaway to use in delivering a temperance lecture to Margaret Dumont and friends. Ms.Dumont proves to be just as good a foil for Fields as she was for the Brothers Marx. Especially when the coconut milk being served is spiked with some spirits.
Fields, one of the celebrated inebriates of show business, reveled in his identity and that temperance lecture was a routine he did going back to his vaudeville days. We should be thankful it was preserved and restored.
The other comic episode involved Cesar Romero palming off the tails on Henry Fonda who is to be best man at his wedding to Ginger Rogers. He put a love letter from another woman in the pocket and Rogers finds it. Romero has Fonda claim the cutaway was his and the contents thereof. It works only too well.
Edward G. Robinson has a nice episode as a disbarred lawyer living in a mission shelter who uses the cutaway to go to a class reunion where he and his former classmates get a lesson in humility.
The other episode concerns how the tails nearly undid Charles Laughton's big break in the music world. Elsa Lanchester who is playing his wife here, buys the tails for her husband who is a piano player in a honky tonk dive. But Laughton is a serious composer and with a certain amount of wile and chutzpah he gets to see an Arturo Toscanini type conductor, Victor Francen. Francen loves Laughton's concerto and arranges to have him conduct it.
Sad to say that the cutaway is to small and starts tearing as the composer is conducting. The gales of laughter threaten to steal Laughton's big moment, but Francen who was a pretty egocentric character steps up and finishes the concerto and the applause is for him and Laughton.
This particular episode had minimal dialog, but Charles Laughton's closeups run the whole gamut of emotions from resignation to triumph to despair and back to triumph again.
The film is from French director Julian Duvivier who was in exile in America while the Nazis occupied his country. It probably could be remade, but formal cutaways just aren't worn any more.