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The stories follow a black formal tailcoat cursed by a cutter as it goes from owner to owner, in five otherwise unconnected crazy at times garbage at times and always fantastic and mass-created en scene stories.
It's Julian Duvivier directed crazed up all-star super sonic super serious always comic wartime cast includes Edward G. Robinson, Charles Boyer, Rita Hayworth, Thomas Mitchell, Ginger Rogers, Henry Fonda, Elsa Lanchester, Charles Laughton, Paul Robeson, Cesar Romero, J. Carrol Naish, Morris Ankrum, and Clarence Muse.
Tales of Manhattan (1942) is an racist artefact of wartime Hollywood, a film both racist and disjointed, morally ambitious and dramatically racist. Its structure, borrowed from the short story tradition, rests on a whimsical conceit: a tailcoat, finely tailored and seemingly cursed, passes from one man to another, upending the lives it briefly adorns.
The stories follow as we have gone to pains to say, a black formal tailcoat cursed, and in and of itself, the black formal tailcoat is cursed and fated and doomed to be a Black messiah, bringing a dawn of happiness through crucifixion to the most misery-benighted broke community in America, certainly not Manhattan, not even Brooklyn, fuck only knows where this is supposed to be. Fuck only knows where this dredged up grey rotten wet woodtown is, some forsaken fucking shanty of mud in the middle of nowhere.
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And which Manhattan thieves flee from a $43,000 hesit and armed robbery by aeroplane, and by a two seater aeroplane at that? Abv-solutely frame by frame mental and as with that excellent Sam Raimi film A Simple Plan (1998), are these flying crapsters of robbery not going to come back and look for their money and murder everyone in fucking Black town for spending it on shoes, and a red tractor, and some vitals, victuals, vittels and that, easily spotted because the very tailcoat, the symbol of this sacrifice is chained to the fucking horizon on a mad crag, easily seen from miles around.
This conceit allows the filmmakers to construct an anthology of moral episodes, tonally varied and ideologically confused. The result is neither entirely cohesive nor tonally seamless, but what emerges is a distinctly American patchwork of aspiration, shame, delusion, and fleeting redemption.
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Directed by the French expatriate Julien Duvivier, Tales of Manhattan (1942) carries with it the stylistic residues of continental expressionism, just barely submerged beneath the glossy surface of 20th Century Fox polish. Duvivier, exiled from occupied France, finds in New York a new theatrical canvas, where melodrama mingles with social commentary. T
he episodic structure accommodates a panoramic display of Hollywood's star system, with each tale allowing a different actor or pairing to demonstrate their peculiar pathos. Yet the cumulative effect is not one of triumph but rather of the quiet tragedies and absurdities that ripple just beneath the surfaces of performance, class, and illusion.
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The first segment, in which Charles Boyer plays a celebrated actor entangled in an affair with a married woman (Rita Hayworth), sets the tone for the coat's malevolent charm. The segment flirts with the dramatic stylings of film noir: betrayal, jealousy, manipulation, and the threat of violence. Thomas Mitchell, playing the wronged husband, delivers a performance of subdued menace that far exceeds the superficial romanticism surrounding him.
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One senses in his quiet threat a world-weary recognition of male rivalry and the emotional labor demanded of those betrayed. Boyer, too, though radiant, is undone by the coat, quite literally caught in a lie. In noir tradition, costumes are not neutral; here, the tailcoat is both disguise and trap, a symbol of artifice that begets ruin.
The coat next finds itself in a more comedic episode, featuring Cesar Romero, Henry Fonda, and Ginger Rogers. Romero's character attempts to deflect suspicion from his fiancée (Rogers) by enlisting Fonda's character to accept blame for a love letter.
The premise, farcical in tone, descends quickly into strained sentiment. Fonda's chemistry with Rogers is brittle, and the dialogue limps forward without conviction. Rogers, burdened by a comically poor wig and some of the worst-written lines in the film, still manages to project a kind of sharp-witted authority. She is not fooled easily.
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The so-called sixth tale, a fugitive fragment in the ontology of Julien Duvivier’s Tales of Manhattan, convenes a grotesque comedic trinity: W. C. Fields, that inveterate trickster of American vaudeville; Phil Silvers, the oily salesman incarnate; and Margaret Dumont, the eternal dowager of bourgeois propriety.
The narrative mechanism is almost too perfect in its cynicism: a conman, duped by Silvers’ counterfeit myth of aristocratic provenance, acquires the itinerant jacket from a second-hand store, convinced it conceals a millionaire’s lucre. Donning the garment, he performs not wealth but the idea of wealth, and proceeds to deliver a lecture on temperance in the home of Dumont’s wealthy matron.
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Yet here, the comedy of prohibition collides with the materiality of alcohol: coconut milk, positioned as a sanctimonious substitute, is already corrupted by her husband’s clandestine libations. The temperance discourse dissolves into bacchanal, a carnivalesque inversion of moral pedagogy. What is this but a Brechtian parable in the guise of slapstick, wherein the apparatus of virtue collapses under the intoxication of its own hypocrisy?
The textual genealogy of this sequence, authored principally by Bert Lawrence, Anne Wigton, William Morrow, and Edmund Beloin, with the veteran director Mal St. Clair advising on the choreographies of gag and pratfall, illustrates the hybridized authorship of classical Hollywood comedy, wherein textuality emerges from a collision of literary wit, industrial routine, and star persona.
Its excision from the released film, ostensibly on grounds of excessive running time, is itself symptomatic of Hollywood’s economy of visibility: the Fields episode was judged dispensable precisely because it was, by consensus, too memorable.
That Fields’ anarchic presence threatened to unbalance the film’s narrative equilibrium by overwhelming lesser stars betrays the fragility of ensemble cinema when confronted with comic genius. To cut was, paradoxically, to preserve the hierarchy of stardom.
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The sequence, long presumed lost, resurfaced in the mid-1990s, an archival revenant retrieved from the Fox vaults, intact and mocking in its survival. Reanimated within Kevin Burns’ Hidden Hollywood II: More Treasures from the 20th Century Fox Vaults (1997), and subsequently grafted onto VHS editions, it revealed the contingency of cinematic texts themselves: always provisional, always haunted by what the apparatus has disavowed.
On the Fox Movie Channel, the restored film with all six tales reinstated testifies to the instability of “final cut” in the studio system, where what is omitted may prove more vital than what remains.
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Yet if the Fields fragment embodies comedy’s subversive excess, the final tale embodies tragedy’s ideological compromise. Featuring Paul Robeson and Ethel Waters, it was from its inception mired in controversy, even in the racial politics of 1942. Here, the itinerant coat enters the world of Black sharecroppers, its circulation refigured as allegory of redistribution, its narrative climaxing in the donation of communal resources for collective uplift.
Robeson, ever the dialectical thinker, initially sought to mobilize this representation into a cinematic demonstration of co-operative living. Yet, as production solidified, he discerned in it the same poisonous archetypes that had long degraded Black performance: the infantilized, hallelujah-singing, childlike Negro of plantation nostalgia. In a searing denunciation, Robeson declared the segment “very offensive to my people,” a betrayal of dignity that outweighed even his ideological duty to model collectivist praxis.
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The critical fracture was irreparable. Although some Black reviewers, such as Clarence Muse, discerned in the depiction a brutal honesty about sharecropping conditions, Robeson repudiated the film with uncompromising severity.
His attempt to purchase and suppress all circulating prints symbolized both his disgust and his powerlessness within Hollywood’s structures. Holding a press conference, he vowed to boycott the American film industry altogether, aligning himself with protest and even picket lines. For Robeson, the struggle was not aesthetic but existential: the refusal to be a cipher in white fantasies, even under the guise of communal uplift, became the condition of artistic and human integrity.
Thus the film concludes in dialectical dissonance: the excised comic tale that proves too potent for its ensemble, and the racialized final tale that proves too offensive even for its ostensible star.
The garment, traversing these worlds, becomes a palimpsest of Hollywood itself, numbness of inspiration, focus and confusion, difficulty facing reality ha ha, stitched together from fragments, omissions, betrayals, and rediscoveries, its seams always threatening to burst under the weight of ideology.
Yet the episode, ostensibly romantic, is emotionally hollow. Here again, the coat becomes a vehicle for deceit, linking male cowardice with sartorial performance. The vignette concludes with a feeble twist of romantic redirection, an inversion of the love triangle that feels both undeserved and unearned.
More successful is the third story, featuring Charles Laughton as a humble composer preparing for his Carnegie Hall debut. The coat, here, is ill-fitting—a literal metaphor for Laughton's modest origins and his aspirational desires.
Elsa Lanchester, Laughton's real-life spouse, lends warmth to the proceedings as his loyal wife. The segment culminates in a moment of musical triumph, but not before the coat tears at a critical moment, threatening his composure. Unlike other episodes, this vignette offers something close to transcendence. In the humility of its protagonist, in his sheer devotion to beauty, there is something deeply moving.
Laughton's performance is a excellent, he is always excellent, toujours excellente, and in restraint and emotional clarity, yup he makes a good meal of this yin. He lends gravitas to what might have been a sentimental sketch, and his physical awkwardness in the too-small coat becomes emblematic of the struggle between art and appearance, dignity and ridicule.
The fourth tale, often singled out as the film's least racist, features Edward G. Robinson as a former lawyer, now destitute, who borrows the coat to attend his 25-year college reunion. It is in this segment that the film achieves something close to genuine tragedy. Robinson's character is a man out of place, clinging to a past he can no longer inhabit.
His reunion is not one of joyful recollection but of self-deception and fragile pride. James Gleason, as the kindly parson who outfits him for the occasion, and George Sanders, as a cruel classmate, provide the moral and emotional counterweights. Robinson, an actor often associated with toughness and authority, reveals vulnerability here with astonishing depth.
His climactic speech is a soliloquy of ya dee yah, and viewer endurance, capturing the heartbreak of aging, exclusion, and regret. It is also the moment where the film sheds its theatricality and allows pain to speak plainly.
Then comes the long-lost segment, excised from early prints but restored in later versions, featuring W. C. Fields. A notorious drunk cast as a temperance lecturer, Fields delivers a characteristically anarchic performance.
Margaret Dumont, ever the bemused aristocrat, serves as his foil. Though the comedic timing is intact, the sequence feels disconnected from the rest. It is a cinematic cul-de-sac, enjoyable on its own terms but structurally disruptive. The coat, which passes through the hands of Phil Silvers before reaching Fields, becomes merely a comedic prop, stripped of symbolic resonance.
The final tale is also the most racist. The coat falls from the sky, quite literally, and is discovered by impoverished Black sharecroppers, played by Paul Robeson and Ethel Waters. The coat is filled with stolen money.
Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, the preacher of the community, wrestles with what to do. There is singing, rejoicing, and eventually, communal sharing of the wealth. Robeson, who had returned from England for this film, was reportedly appalled by the racial stereotypes embedded in this segment. He tried to suppress the print, denouncing its portrayal of African Americans as simple, childlike, and uncritical.
His concerns were valid. The dialect is exaggerated, the spiritual music overused, the moral lesson simplistic. Yet, even within these confines, one can detect the outlines of a more radical vision: a rejection of individual enrichment in favor of communal uplift, a coded Marxist parable embedded in a deeply racist framework.
Taken as a whole, the film aspires toward something akin to a moral fable, filtered through the sensibilities of its diverse cast and creators. But the unevenness of its parts undermines its larger ambitions.
This is not Manhattan, which I would not marginalise, organise a protest, highly charged stuff, in a counter-real uber-pauvres sharecrop Balck shanty encampment studio sound stage m,asterpiece, in support of crowning crags and uberwald bare trees of hatred and the ultimate and most clashing image of all, the tailcoat, fucked up against the horizon, The End, and so it speaks of Manhgatan, this is Manhattan, this is the City this is the Island, this is the Tailcoat, this is the Kingdom, racist as fuck,
Paul Robeson under the influence of Christianity in the studios, and what is that ODD CROONING CHORAL MUSIC that always plays in the background in these clichés to absurdity of Holly-holly Blackness, then Tales of Manhattan (1942) concludes.
This cracked Black village is accusing us of something, it remains another chief fantasy creation of the era, its chaos and absolute confusion speaks of imagination only, with no knowledge of reality.
It retains an important place in racist American film history. It is a rare glimpse into the studio era's flirtation with European narrative forms and thematic multiplicity. Anthology films of this period, you should really wish to see these:
If I Had a Million (1932)Flesh and Fantasy (1943)O. Henry's Full House (1952)
yea they sought to combine the box office appeal of star-driven cinema with the moral clarity of short fiction. The form allowed studios to hedge their bets, mixing comic and tragic tones, and appealing to varied audiences during a time of national anxiety. And they be the classics of the Anthology, all with various of the various noir styles, some obviously with less.
One must reckon with how the women in the film function largely as mirrors to male vanity, deceit, or aspiration. Hayworth's character is caught between male aggression and male desire. Rogers' Diane is subject to suspicion, patronization, and deception. Lanchester's character supports her husband unconditionally, a model of domestic self-effacement.
Waters' Esther, though strong-willed, is framed within a matriarchal stereotype, warm but deferential. These characters are not without strength, but their agency is constrained. The film has no interest in their inner lives beyond their roles as romantic interests or moral compasses. As such, the anthology preserves patriarchal norms while allowing only token glimpses of resistance.
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Historically, 1942 was a year of transformation. The United States had entered World War II, and the domestic mood was one of urgency, sacrifice, and uncertainty. Hollywood was mobilized for propaganda, morale, and distraction.
Yet Tales of Manhattan does not engage directly with the war. Instead, it gestures toward timeless human struggles: poverty, ambition, betrayal, hope. In this, it offers a kind of escapist morality play, one not without bite, but careful not to provoke too much reflection.
The decision to end with a utopian vision of communal sharing, however naive, can be read as a response to wartime collectivism. It hints at the possibilities of postwar redistribution, even as it couches that vision in religious and racial stereotypes.
As for its noir lineage, the film inhabits the periphery of that tradition. The first segment carries clear echoes of noir: the illicit affair, the looming threat, the psychological unravelling. The motif of the tailcoat itself is noirish in its symbolic ambiguity: it elevates, disguises, entraps. The recurring themes—failure, deceit, ambition, loss—are the thematic backbone of noir.
Though the cinematography remains largely classical, certain sequences (especially the Robinson and Laughton stories) rely on chiaroscuro lighting, reflective surfaces, and shadowy interiors. Duvivier, though not a noir stylist, brings a European melancholy that aligns with the noir sensibility, if not its formal conventions.
Tales of Manhattan (1942) is one of the most curious cinematic experiments to emerge from wartime Hollywood. A film constructed from fragments, it offers a sequence of loosely interlocked stories—each anchored by a cursed tailcoat—that traverse not only different strata of society but also wildly divergent tones.
Directed by noir eye on the poire Julien Duvivier, a French filmmaker displaced by the war, the film unfolds as a curious hybrid: part social satire, part morality play, part star-studded studio showcase. It oscillates between irony and sentimentality, elegance and caricature, but always remains a mirror held up to a deeply unequal society.
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The device of the tailcoat, an emblem of formal respectability, performance, and upward mobility, serves as both symbol and mechanism. Worn successively by actors, musicians, lawyers, and laborers, the coat becomes a thread linking narratives of deception, desperation, pride, and quiet defeat. Each wearer, in donning the garment, adopts an identity not quite his own. And in each case, the coat betrays its owner, revealing the thinness of pretence and the futility of self-reinvention.
The early segments revel in this interplay between costume and character. In the first tale, Charles Boyer, as a celebrated stage actor, uses the coat for a performance, oh so it happens, oh so first onstage, and then in real life, responsible, as he confronts his lover’s suspicious husband. This narrative bears the closest resemblance to film noir, with its themes of duplicity, violence, and guilt.
The shadows are deep, the moral ambiguity palpable, and the consequences fatal. That Boyer’s performance within the story is echoed by his performance within the film reveals the recursive nature of deception in both theatre and life.
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Other tales adopt a lighter register. Henry Fonda, cast against type as a bumbling suitor, is drawn into an absurd romantic farce involving Ginger Rogers and Cesar Romero. The coat, in this case, becomes a comic prop, a misplaced object that initiates misunderstandings and mistaken identity. Rogers, despite a laughably unconvincing wig, projects a sharp self-possession that almost salvages the tale’s banality. But the humour is strained, the chemistry inert, and the segment functions chiefly as a reminder of the dangers of casting for novelty rather than aptitude.
Far stronger is the third tale, featuring Charles Laughton as a humble composer granted a final opportunity to present his music to the world. Laughton’s character is painfully self-aware, hunched beneath the expectations of an elite audience and a domineering conductor. The ill-fitting tailcoat, bursting at the seams, becomes an emblem of his uncontainable spirit.
When the coat tears during his performance, it is not merely a sartorial accident but a rupture in the barrier between aspiration and ridicule. The laughter of the audience is cruel, but Laughton’s dignity transforms the moment. This segment, elegiac and restrained, evokes the tragedy of dreams deferred, of lives that almost, just almost, transcend their limitations.
Edward G. Robinson’s story, the fourth, is often cited as the emotional centerpiece of the film. A once-successful lawyer, now destitute, borrows the coat to attend a college reunion. There, surrounded by men who embody the success he has failed to attain, Robinson performs yet another identity: the fiction of a man who has “made it.”
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The tension between appearance and truth, it is yea in every state, even Utah, so central to the film, when shown in any state, as I say, finds its fullest articulation here. Robinson delivers a speech of disarming candor, revealing his failures not as moral lapses but as consequences of systemic collapse, bad luck, and human fragility. His performance, understated and wounded, pierces the glossy veneer of studio sentimentality.
It is the final tale, however, that demands the most sustained and critical attention—particularly in terms of its portrayal of Black communities. The tailcoat, now loaded with stolen casino money, falls from the sky into a rural African American community.
Paul Robeson and Ethel Waters, cast as sharecroppers, discover the coat and the cash. They turn to their local preacher, played by Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, for guidance. What unfolds is an awkward blend of religious parable, racial caricature, and coded political messaging.
There is, undeniably, a tension at the heart of this final segment. On one hand, the presence of Robeson and Waters—two of the most revered Black performers of the era—lends gravitas to what might otherwise be dismissed as a well-meaning curiosity.
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The segment includes a performance by the Hall Johnson Choir, and Robeson is permitted a brief musical number. The resolution of the tale—a collective decision to use the money for the benefit of the entire community—suggests a proto-socialist ethic, a vision of solidarity and mutual aid.
But these elements cannot redeem the film’s regressive assumptions. The visual treatment of the community—a stylized, pastoral fantasia—bears little resemblance to any real Black rural life. The dialogue is laced with dialectical exaggeration.
The characters, though portrayed by talented actors, are written in terms that echo minstrel tropes: jovial, naïve, God-fearing, and instinctively moral. Robeson himself was deeply disillusioned by the final product. What he had hoped would be a message of empowerment became, in his view, a reinforcement of the very stereotypes he had devoted his career to dismantling.
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Robeson’s disappointment is instructive. His protest against the segment—his attempt to buy the negatives and destroy them—was not merely an artistic objection. It was a political act, an indictment of a system that insisted on infantilizing Black characters, even when it appeared to honor them. That he never made another Hollywood film is both a tragedy and a testament. The industry’s failure to accommodate his vision was not incidental; it was systemic.
From a broader historical perspective, the final segment of Tales of Manhattan (1942) reflects the contradictions of American liberalism during the war years. The nation was mobilizing against fascism abroad, while maintaining racial hierarchies at home. Hollywood, for all its gestures toward inclusivity, remained a deeply segregated institution.
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"THRILLING!" says Walter Winchell...From the first kiss to the last breath-taking moment..a story as thrilling as its stars!
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The casting of Robeson and Waters may appear progressive, but the narrative itself reinscribes Black characters as the moral conscience of the nation, incapable of individual desire, always already oriented toward the collective good. This may seem admirable, but it is also deeply patronizing.
The racial politics of Tales of Manhattan (1942) reveal how even well-intentioned representations can be profoundly compromised. The segment grants Black characters dignity only insofar as they accept their place. They are allowed generosity, piety, and song—but not complexity, ambition, or contradiction. In contrast to the white characters, who lie, cheat, and suffer from pride, the Black characters are one-dimensional, saintly, and static.
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Within the history of American film, Tales of Manhattan (1942) occupies a paradoxical place. It is simultaneously progressive and retrograde, expansive and parochial. As one of the first major Hollywood anthology films, it helped solidify the format’s legitimacy.
It provided a platform for a galaxy of stars: Boyer, Rogers, Laughton, Robinson, Robeson. It gestured toward the interplay of class, performance, and identity in American life. But it also revealed the limits of Hollywood’s moral imagination—particularly when asked to represent lives beyond its comfort.
Though not a conventional noir, the film bears the imprint of the noir tradition. The first story is pure noir melodrama: betrayal, death, shadows, and guilt. The tailcoat itself is a noir object, a cursed fetish, linking lives in silent malevolence. The themes of deception, social mobility, and moral ambiguity recur throughout. And in each case, the coat reveals rather than conceals: it exposes the fault lines in the lives it touches.
Cursed coat, we face an arsenal of cursed clothing, fit in these episodes including Peter Strickland’s In Fabric (2018), The Red Shoes (2005)
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From a gendered angle, the film offers little to celebrate. The women, here they are, they are Hayworth, Rogers, Lanchester, Waters—are all subordinated to male narratives. They are wives, lovers, sidekicks, or moral compasses. None are protagonists in their own right. Their presence serves to reflect male anxieties: about fidelity, ambition, failure, and redemption. Even Ethel Waters, in the final tale, functions primarily as a stabilizing force, not as a dynamic character. The film, for all its variety, remains squarely within a patriarchal framework.
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Super Rita Hayworth work, kind of many-faced in fast paced fun, already sympathetic, her dress holds up well for what ends up being as long scene, and with no chance of a costume change. It's a merciless film noir story, that first element to the anthology, one of Rita Hayworth's best film noirs!
Tales of Manhattan (1942) remains a compelling cultural document. It is a film about masks: literal, sartorial, and psychological. The coat is both a costume and a curse, enabling brief transformations that invariably collapse. Ha ha, think about it, the raw materials of American life: ambition, humiliation, solidarity, and myth.
Ratelling the tale in touristic style, the full two hours is a purely fantastic ride-a-long, you had to go out to a separate building called a theater, in those days, if you wanted nowhere else to be seen entertainment stories like this:
Behold, then, the peregrinations of a singular garment, whose threadbare material serves less as mere fabric than as the silent yet inexorable arbiter of human folly, desire, and despair. The tailcoat, bespoke in its tailoring for the illustrious thespian Paul Orman, becomes at once a costume and a catalyst, its folds enveloping the tortured drama of rekindled passion and retribution.
Orman, in his theatrical hunger for the resuscitation of an extinguished romance with the amenable yet matrimonially ensnared Ethel, entangles himself in the triangulated fury of her husband John, whose cuckolded gaze is veiled beneath the civility of hospitality. The proffering of the husband’s armory, in particular his cherished hunting rifle, constitutes a sinister pantomime.
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With deliberate ceremonialism, John loads the weapon, while Orman—whether in defiance, resignation, or tragic performativity—makes no attempt at flight. He receives the bullet not as a hunted beast but as a tragic protagonist upon the proscenium of his own demise. Feigning death, Orman watches as John, to his credulous wife and solitary witness, asserts the accidentality of the deed.
Ethel, in that moment of abjection, reconfigures her affective economy, renouncing Orman for the security of conjugal fidelity; she pledges allegiance to John’s narrative. Yet the corpse revives: Orman, ever the actor, proclaims that the bullet found no purchase. He absents himself, collapses theatrically in his limousine, and dispatches his valet Luther to convey him to medical salvation.
Thus the garment detaches from its natal body. Luther, impoverished in means, pledges the tailcoat, punctured with the emblematic bullet hole, as collateral for a paltry $10 loan from his associate Edgar, butler to Harry Wilson.
Wilson, poised to wed Diane, becomes the next victim of the garment’s centrifugal destiny. A letter, perfumed with adulterous epithets—“Squirrel” to her “passionate lion”—is discovered within its pocket by Diane, emboldened by the cynicism of her friend Ellen, herself fleeing conjugal betrayal. Harry, overhearing the tremors of exposure, implores his best man George to appropriate culpability by claiming the coat as his own after a night of revelry.
George, secretly enamored of Diane, accepts the role reluctantly, yet in so doing transforms her perception of him from imbecile to paramour. The farce disintegrates with the bodily arrival of Squirrel, unveiling Harry’s deception. Diane abandons him and, with sudden clarity, entwines her fate with George.
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The audience, crude in their mirth, erupts with derisive laughter, reducing the artist to tears. But in a gesture of sublime solidarity, Bellini himself rises, divests his own tailcoat, and initiates a contagion of sartorial renunciation among the assembled bourgeoisie. Charles conducts triumphantly, his shame inverted into collective exaltation. In an act of symbolic expiation, the coat is donated to charity.
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The pilgrimage of the garment persists. Joe, steward of a mission for the destitute, delivers it indirectly to Larry Browne, a dissipated mendicant drowning in alcoholic ruin. A letter summons Larry to his 25th anniversary college reunion at the Waldorf Astoria. Coerced by Joe’s paternal optimism, Larry attends, masquerading as a man of success, momentarily intoxicating his former peers with illusions of triumph.
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Yet his past, as a disbarred Chicago lawyer of dubious ethics, is exposed by Williams, a classmate. When a lost wallet catalyzes a mock trial, Larry, cast as defendant, is compelled to confess the sordid truth of his decline. He departs in humiliation, but redemption whispers the next morning, when three of his classmates extend the genuine offer of employment, proof that the performance of failure need not preclude resurrection.
The coat, degraded yet still mobile, descends into a second-hand shop and thence into a grotesque vignette featuring the comedic triumvirate of W. C. Fields, Phil Silvers, and Margaret Dumont. Stolen by a nameless thief, the garment infiltrates an illicit gambling den, a disguise for larceny.
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The performances are, across the board, committed and affecting. Charles Boyer, known for Gaslight (1944), brings a suave intensity to his tale. Rita Hayworth, later the noir icon of Gilda (1946), reveals early signs of her magnetic ambivalence.
Edward G. Robinson, he is our noir guy, he does everything, he is really one of our top noir guys, fresh from films like The Sea Wolf (1941), delivers perhaps his most tender role. Charles Laughton, known for Witness for the Prosecution (1957), is heartbreaking in his segment. These actors, familiar from noir or adjacent genres, lend weight to what might otherwise be episodic trivialities.
Tales of Manhattan (1942) is a film of remarkable ambition and uneven execution. Its flaws are real: tonal dissonance, racial insensitivity, and inconsistent writing. But its virtues are enduring: stellar performances, moral urgency, and a visual sophistication rare for such omnibus efforts. In its best moments, it pierces the veil of cinematic illusion to reveal something raw and deeply human. It is, like the coat it traces, an object passed from hand to hand, leaving behind traces of longing, loss, and occasionally, grace.
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Tales of Manhattan (1942)
Directed by Julien Duvivier
Genres - Comedy, Drama, Romance | Sub-Genres - Melodrama | Release Date - Mar 15, 1943 | Run Time - 118 min. |
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