BEHIND the romantic distortion of Negro life in “Tales of Manhattan” is a discrimination as old as Hollywood. The Negro life is the last section of a six-part Cinderella story which traces the life of an evening coat. At the end, while being worn by a gangster, the coat is accidentally dropped from an airplane, and picked up by two Negro sharecroppers. The coat has the gangster’s fifty thousand dollars in it; the two distribute it among the poor Negroes of their village.
This episode superficially seems harmless enough. Its Negroes are gentle, persevering, comical people, who love to sing religious songs in glee-club formation. The atmosphere, costuming and intent, as in all Negro movies, is quaint and charming. Of course, the Negroes are segregated. There are no white people in the whole scene, just as there are no white people anywhere that the Negro plays a leading role. If the movies want to give a Negro front billing, it has to be an all-Negro picture or nothing. The segregation in “Tales of Manhattan” is complete. The village they live in is in deep wilderness, not a white man in sight. After segregating them, the movie shows the Negro his place in the social scale. In the earlier parts of the picture the white people are lawyers, directors, actors and composers. The Negroes are either sharecroppers or nothing. Elsewhere in movieland they may be servants, comical fellows or members of the Hall Johnson choir. However, once the Negro recognizes his place in movies, he is treated with a great love. The roles he is given to play are always likable. We take everything away from them, stick them off by themselves or make men-servants of them, and then are terribly fond of them. In “Tales of Manhattan” we drop fifty thousand dollars to them.
In the same picture with this episode are five others having to do with white people, and it is really not much fairer to them. To start with, Charles Boyer gets shot at for playing around with another man’s wife. You think he’s dead, but since he is wearing a lucky tailcoat, he isn’t. Among the failings of this scene are unoriginality, a hoked-up quality about the people, and too much talk to get through. Mr. Boyer of course brings out that incredible vein on his forehead, and Rita Hayworth shows herself. The next scene is worse, since it doesn’t even have the movement of a bullet. Henry Fonda and Ginger Rogers here spend the longest half-hour in their picture life. As everyone must now know, Charles Laughton bursts the coat at the shoulders while conducting the next sketch at Carnegie Hall. His audience in the movie, unlike the audience I was in, laughs itself dizzy over this, while Laughton sits down on the podium to cry. The picture audience then apologizes to him by taking off their own coats, and Mr. Laughton proceeds—an inspired player even here, with his mobile face, which, some people only now are finding, overacts. I also like his wife, Elsa Lanchester. Following this, Ed. G. Robinson, an alcoholic tramp, wears the coat to a college reunion and is given a helping hand by his former college mates (all leaders in the industrial world), a chance to become once again a respected member of society. This scene carries the most obnoxious load of pseudo-Christian teaching since “Mrs. Miniver,” a picture MGM made this year.
Without considering esthetics, this is six of the ten worst pictures of the week.
October 12, 1942