COAT OF MANY TALES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 246, 10 March 1944, Page 22

COAT OF MANY TALES

TALES OF MANHATTAN (20th Century-Fox)

HEN we were very young, long before the ‘Committee on Post-Primary Education issued its recommendations on

the teaching of English, there was one particularly popular subject for essay-writing entitled "The Adventures of a Penny," which required you to describe all manner of strange situations in which a penny might be expected to become involved as it circulated. Sam Spiegel (now known as S. P. Eagle), the man who conceived the idea of Tales of Manhattan, probably wrote an essay. like that in his youth; only when it came to making the film, he changed the penny into a man’s tail coat. That coat of tails figures in six separate episodes, involving nine stars, 44 featured players, and I don’t know how many script-writers. But there is only one director, the Frenchman Julien Duvivier; and with all due respect to Charles Boyer, Rita Hayworth, Edward Robinson, Charles Laughton, Thomas Mitchell, Paul Robeson, Henry Fonda, Ginger Rogers, Ferenc Molnar, Samuel Hoffenstein, Ben Hecht,. Ladislaus Gorog, Henry Blankfort, old Uncle Sam Spiegel and all, it is the solitary director who interests me most. HE coat of many tales starts its career on the beautiful shoulders of M. Boyer, a matinee idol who gets himself shot just below the breast pocket by Mr. Mitchell for making love to Mr, Mitchell’s wife (Rita Hayworth), By the time it finishes on a scarecrow in the Paul Robeson finale nearly two hours and 12,000 feet later, it has become a trifle threadbare and patchy. So has the theme of the film and the quality of the entertainment. In the intervening four episodes, the coat has served to convince Ginger Rogers that she loves Henry Fonda and not Cesar Romero; it has covered but not adorned the podgy figure of the great but unknown composer (Laughton) when conducting his own symphony at Carnegie Hall, and has reduced him to tears by splitting at the seams in the fortissimo passages; it ha$ helped to make a new man of Edward G. Robirison, a dreg of the Bowery gutters, by enabling him to attend a_ stuffed-shirt reunion of the class of ’93 at his Alma Mater; it has been stolen by a gangster (J. Carroll Naish) and used in a gambling-den holdup; and from there it has been taken by plane and dropped, loaded with dollar bills, at the fortunate feet of Paul Robeson and a number of other well-known negroes (including Rochester and the Hall: Johnson Choir) who live in an atmosphere of extreme poverty and religious . fervour somewhere down South. * * * OW this sort of thing, of course, hasn’t only been done with a penn and a coat: it has also been done wi (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) an old dance programme, and done by Duvivier, too. He did it in Un Carnet du Bal, an episodic story about a middleaged woman’s attempts to trace the sweethearts of her ,youth, which I hope you had the good fortune to see. If not, you missed something. You may also fail to understand the rather critical tone uf this review. But it would be impossible for anyone who saw Duvivier’s Carnet not to make comparisons with Duvivier’s Tales. From a critic’s point of view, indeed from that of anyone who is interested in the art of the films, those two productions provide an object-Jesson in technique. And there is even more to it than that. When Duvivier’s new film is examined by the light of his old one, almost everything that we mean by the word "Hollywood" is revealed. All the faults of the American cinema and its star-system ‘stand out in sharp relief--its lack of proportion, its worship of Big Names, its measurement of nearly everything by the money it costs. For although the French used fine actors in their films, they put the story and its treatment by the director first, and did not allow the salaries or the personalities of the stars to get in the way; whereas Hollywood builds everything round its stars and the screen personalities that have been created for them. This is so obvious in Tales of Manhattan that you can almost see Hollywood’s mind working. Here’s Charles Boyer, secured at enormous expense. Good; he’s been made famous as the Great LoverMatinee Idol type, so we'll create an episode showing him in that light. And here’s Henry Fonda, the tongue-tied gauche young man of a dozen pictures. All right; an episode for him. Roland Young? Must fit him somehow as a comic valet. Charles Laughton? Something sentimental that demands ‘what some of the critics call "mugging" but what the public has been led to believe is brilliant acting. Paul: Robeson, eh? Well, obviously he must sing. In fact, let’s have an all-negro sequence, with plenty of broad comedy and revivalmeeting religion. Audiences love it. Well, I don’t know about audiences; but Paul Robeson, who is rightly a bit touchy about the status of the negro, ¢ertainly didn’t love it. When he saw the finished sequence he declared that it made his race look ridiculous, and added, "If they picket the theatres, I’ll join the picket line myself," ae ae * JF any kind of art emerges from this kind of film-making, it is usually by accident. That some does emerge occasionally from Tales of Manhattan is partly because even the great amorphous, undigested mass of story-material and star-personalities cannot completely stifle Duvivier’s native talents, and partly because some of the players are such fine artists (Thomas Mitchell and Edward G. Robinson, for instance) that they can breathe life even into inherently phoney situations, (And phoney is the word for most of the Tales.) Artistically, then, the film is a mess. As entertainment, however, it is something else again. I would liken it to a mixed grill and say that, as with most mixed grills (pre-meat-rationing ones), there are some items you will relish and

others you would just as soon leave on the side of your plate. As to which should be so treated one can already hear great argument; the film is one of the current topics of conversation. I wili merely indicate my preference for the first episode (because of Mr. Mitchell) and the fourth (because of Mr. Robin-son)-the kidney and the bacon of the dish, so to speak.