THE BESPOKE OVERCOAT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 944, 13 September 1957, Page 31

THE BESPOKE OVERCOAT

(Romulus-Lion International) G Cert. HE best short stories, I have always thought, have a perfection not equalled in any other prose form, so it is fitting that Gogol, the father of the short story, should be the grandfather of one of the most nearly perfect films I have seen. The Bespoke Overcoat, which Wolf Mankowitz first wrote for the stage, was suggested by Gogol’s story The Overcoat. As directed by Jack Clayton, it runs for just over half an hour. There are really only two charactersFender, an old warehouse clerk, who has died from cold, and his friend Morrie, a tailor, who was making a new bespoke overcoat for him when he died. Morrie is a not very surprising triumph for David Kossoff-basically he’s the old tailor of A Kid for Two Farthings. But Alfie Bass (who, incidentally, succeeded Kossoff as Jet Morgan’s crewman Lemmy in "The World of Peril") plays with a quite unexpected touch of genius as Fender. Though the film starts with Fender’s funeral, he quickly returns, the most humorous, matter-of-fact ghost you ever saw, to visit Morrie and to steal an overcoat from his old hard-as-nails employer. Of course, it could be that Morrie has just drunk too much brandy. The director has said he decided to try to blend fact and fantasy by treating the whole with absolute realism. That is what he has done, using for Fender’s visitation a technique that recalls the memory scenes in Death of a Salesman. A full theatre which had gone along to see Three Men in a Boat seemed quite enchanted. In this gentle, touching, humorous film the dialogue and Wolfgang Suschitzky’s photography and lighting are always just right. (Was there ever a gentler, more effective camera movement than the encirclement of Fender’s bed as he lies dying?) It is a film that everyone who cares for the cinema, or for his fellow men, must see.