Tales of Manhattan (1942)

 

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.