The New Pictures, Sep. 21, 1942

Tales of Manhattan (20th Century-Fox) is a multiplex answer to a Hollywood producer’s dream—a show that telescopes parts for nine stars and five dramatic episodes in one over-all picture. The only continuity is provided by a tail coat which appears in each episode in a hand-me-down career from the shoulders of a rich wastrel to a scarecrow.

Its episodes include:

> The usual triangle with Charles Boyer (the lover), Rita Hayworth (the wife), Thomas Mitchell (the husband) and a homicidal ending.

> A dressed-up Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang interlude with Henry Fonda and Ginger Rogers, who underlines the more dubious dialogue with loud whews and whistles.

> The familiar tear-jerker about the barroom piano thumper (Charles Laughton) who has written the great symphony, is finally given a chance to play it by a Toscanini-like maestro (Victor Francen).

> The familiar tear-jerker about the class reunion where the class down-&-outer (Edward G. Robinson) pretends to be prospering, is unmasked, humiliated, then taken back into the fraternity and a Wall Street firm.

> A socially conscious minstrel show in which Paul Robeson and Ethel Waters find $50,000 in the tail coat, and with the help of Jack Benny’s Rochester divide it with the Hall Johnson Choir and other Hollywood sharecroppers.

Tales of Manhattan first occurred to the mind of a cultivated European named Samuel Spiegel, who, in a burst of Americanism, recently changed his business name to S. P. Eagle. Friends still call him Sam. Three years ago, when he first thought up the film, S. P. Eagle had no business. He had nothing more than the bare idea for the picture. And he was close to starving. The apocryphal story has it that Mr. Eagle thereupon invited Hollywood’s most expensive authors to dinner at Dave Chasen’s swank restaurant, ordered the best that Mr. Chasen had, disclosed his idea, picked the writers clean of theirs, and then walked out, leaving the check.

Hungry again but still drunk with his idea, S. P. Eagle later ran into Boris Morros, also a man of ideas. They went into partnership.

Then word filtered around that Sam and Boris were planning an episodic movie with 45 stars and a different scenarist and director for each episode. The partners tried to sell parts simultaneously to Edward G. Robinson, Charles Boyer and Charles Laughton. Each held out, waiting for the others. Then, emboldened by one another’s daring, all signed at once.

Sam still did not know what Tales of Manhattan was all about, though he had decided that the first episode should be a short play called The Marshall by Ferenc Molnar. Molnar gave Sam an option gratis. Eagle had read some 250 other short plays and stories, but as things turned out a good deal of the film is, in the strictly legal sense, original. Ben Hecht ducoed the Molnar play into the triangle. Donald Ogden Stewart and Alan Campbell whipped up the first act of Ladislaus Fodor’s play Burberry into the brief burlesque. Two other Ladislauses, Vadnai and Gorog, worked up the Charles Laughton tearjerker. Samuel Hoffenstein and Henry Blankfort are responsible for the sharecropper scene.

One episode, with W. C. Fields, was deleted from the finished film. Everyone decided it would be out of tone (it certainly would: Fields is intentionally funny). It will soon be released as a short.

Each actor was permitted to make changes in the script, but the only one who bothered much was Paul Robeson. He piously refused to have any religious words put in his mouth.

Messrs. Eagle & Morros kept on wanting seven directors for quite a while. William Wyler was too busy. They stalked Leo McCarey for the Rogers-Fonda skit, Lubitsch for the triangle, John Ford for the Robeson-Waters minstrel show. Julien Duvivier, who had done the same sort of thing much better in France (Un Carnet du Bal), was offered the leftovers. He said he would take all or none. His excitement about Sam’s idea so excited Sam that Sam gave him the whole works.

The World At War, first feature-length film to be issued by the U.S. Government, was put together by the Motion Picture Unit of the OWI, is to be distributed rent free (except for the cost of the print) through the major U.S. producers.

The picture attempts, in an hour and six minutes, to show and tell what World War II is all about. Its story begins with the Mukden “incident” eleven years ago, ends with the raid on Pearl Harbor. The editors selected the shots from among some 500,000 feet of newsreels and military records filmed by U.S., British, French, Japanese, Russian and German cameramen. Some of the shots have overwhelming power; some are dull as ditchwater. Since the German photography is, by & large, the picture’s best, it may be of dubious value as propaganda outside the U.S. The World At War is a mixed grill.

There are scenes in which its storytelling is brilliant. A Polish railway junction rises up slowly as an opening flower to meet a diving Nazi plane; and across this landscape moves the shadow, slow and angular as a windmill, of the plane’s propeller. From the air Warsaw and Rotterdam lie naked and intricate as ripped honeycombs. On the unwounded streets of Brussels, occupation imposes its frostlike patterns of order. A bombed cathedral spire shifts a little at its base, hangs intact a half second and, with the slow gesture of a great dancer, reluctantly stoops almost vertically into its dust. Flames for which hollowed buildings are the flues roar like blowtorches. Day & night, guns deafen or blind the screen, jab and recoil with the wild delicateness of cats’ paws or snakes’ heads.

The best of The World At War was shot by the enemy, because in this respect the enemy took care to know precisely what he was about. Most of the American photographs are, by comparison, shiny, sentimental, technically competent, phony.

There are some well-chosen shots: in London’s bomb shelters, for instance, the shoes of a family, arranged in prim pairs, catch the light. This is incomparably more touching than anything that is said. But when words hobble the camera, as they do in this film, the shrewdest editor can do little more than make the best of a bad job.

CURRENT & CHOICE

Wake Island (Brian Donlevy, Albert Dekker, Macdonald Carey, Robert Preston, William Bendix; TIME, Sept. 14).

Somewhere I’ll Find You (Clark Gable, Lana Turner, Robert Sterling; TIME, Sept. 14).

Holiday Inn (Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby; TIME, Aug. 31).

Bambi (Bambi, Thumper, Flower, Faline, Friend Owl; TIME, Aug. 24).

The Talk of the Town (Ronald Colman, Jean Arthur, Gary Grant; TIME, Aug. 17).

The Magnificent Ambersons (Anne Baxter, Agnes Moorehead, Joseph Gotten, Tim Holt; TIME, July 20).

Mrs. Miniver (Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon, Teresa Wright, Richard Ney; TIME, June 29).