Tales of Manhattan

A tailor delivers the tailcoat he has made with a curse on the customer who does not pay for it. The coat then passes from hand to hand and lands each time at a turning point in its owner's life: an actor caught out on stage, a woman who learns everything at her wedding, a lawyer talking his way out of prison, a man facing his old friends. Five separate stories, one coat. Julien Duvivier directed, ten screenwriters wrote it, and the cast was assembled from the biggest names of the period: Charles Boyer, Rita Hayworth, Ginger Rogers, Henry Fonda, Charles Laughton, Edward G. Robinson. Paul Robeson and Ethel Waters play in the final section, and that section drew hard criticism as early as 1942 when it came out; Robeson considered it an insult to his own people, said he would join those picketing the film, and gave up acting in Hollywood afterwards. The rest of the film is an expertly made anthology; that section is a threshold in the history of cinema itself.