Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 19-January-03
Spoiler Rating: Low

Tales of Manhattan (1942)

It took thirteen writers (and one director) to create Tales of Manhattan, a series of six star-filled vignettes loosely linked together by the roving prop of a dinner jacket with a curse. As with literary short stories, the challenges in such a movie are great, and the successes particularly satisfying. When plot, character, and dialog come together to produce a fully realized narrative in a brief amount of time, it's a memorable experience; but when these things fall flat, even the few minutes you spend on them seem wasted. As you may well imagine with so many hands in the pot, the results of Tales of Manhattan are mixed, encompassing both of these highs and lows.

Three of the stories are very good and well worth the price of a rental. (Fortunately, they are consecutive, making it easy to focus on them and ignore the others, especially if you can find the film on DVD.) The second tale is a charming piece about the power of words and the triumph of the little guy. Ginger Rogers plays a woman who discovers a steamy love letter in her fiancé's jacket on their wedding day. The slimy groom-to-be (Cesar Romero) enlists his nerdy best man (Henry Fonda) to bail him out, but this proves to be the wrong move, as Rogers has become rather hot and bothered by the contents of the letter and now sees Fonda in a whole new light. Next, a terrific Charles Laughton stars in the highlight of the movie, playing a poor but brilliant musician whose one big chance at fame and recognition is gravely imperiled by his wearing the cursed tuxedo. However, compassion proves stronger than any curse, leading to an extremely touching conclusion. Then, another tale about goodwill beating back despair features Edward G. Robinson as an alcoholic bum who takes a last shot at life by attending his 25th college reunion. This is a nicely acted segment of which bad, melodramatic music is the only flaw.

The stories that don't work in Tales of Manhattan include a love triangle between Charles Boyer, Thomas Mitchell, and Rita Hayworth; an inane skit featuring W. C. Fields as a sham minister of temperance (which was wisely cut from the original theater version); and the finale, starring Paul Robeson and Ethel Waters as a poor Southern couple who witness a miracle. The love triangle is boring and offers a horrible performance by Hayworth, but it introduces one of the two notions surrounding the curse of the dinner jacket, namely that misfortune may also contain a blessing (which is echoed in both the Laughton and Robinson pieces). The W. C. Fields section is completely incongruous and has no purpose other than stupidity (I find Fields distasteful, so just watching him do his thing is not entertaining to me). The final story emphasizes the second notion about the cursed jacket (introduced in the Rogers tale), that what is bad for one person may be good for another. In addition to its use of crude black stereotypes, this part doesn't work because it takes place hundreds of miles south of Manhattan and seems to exist only to give Robeson the chance to uncork his gorgeous baritone for a old-fashioned spiritual.

Tales of Manhattan ends on Christmas Day, but the season of kindness suggests itself well before that point in the poignant denouements of the Laughton and Robinson tales. The movie may not be consistently watchable from beginning to end, but the middle is made up of three sweet, moving, and impressive pieces of work.

Copyright © 2003 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.