"There's music, there's drama, there's just plain fun--it's the most outrageous 'travelogue' you'll ever see!"

Tales of Manhattan - The Big Picture
A fancy tail coat is shuttled from person to person in this innovative, star-studded comedy, exposing the wide spectrum of the human character as seen through the predicaments in which the jacket's different owners find themselves.

Plot Thickeners
The story begins as a famous actor (Charles Boyer) buys the evening coat, only to be told that the garment carries a curse. Later, the coat winds up with a man (Cesar Romero) whose fiancee (Ginger Rogers) finds a steamy love letter in one of the pockets. To escape her fury, Romero insists the coat belongs to his friend (Henry Fonda), but his strategy backfires when, impressed by the letter's passion, she runs off with the friend. The coat then passes from a composer (Charles Laughton) to an impoverished lawyer (Edward. G. Robinson) who wears it to a college reunion. Next to own the jacket is a crook (J. Carrol Naish) who wears it while he pulls off a job; pocketing the loot, he boards a plane, but during the flight he throws the coat out of the window, forgetting that it's stuffed with bills. The money flutters to the ground and is picked up by two sharecroppers (Paul Robeson and Ethel Waters) who take it to the local preacher, while the coat ends up on a scarecrow.

Notes and Quotes
Julien Duvivier had previous experience in directing such episodic movies, with his "Un Carnet du Bal" in 1938. "Tales" employed many different writers for the different sequences, including--although he was not credited--silent film great Buster Keaton. Although the film was a commercial success, there were some accusations of racism regarding the simplistic presentation of blacks in the final episode, and Robeson later denounced the film.

For Trivia Experts Only
The film also included a sixth episode, which, although considered by some to be the movie's best sequence, was eventually cut. It featured W.C. Fields as a lecturer who buys the jacket at a second-hand shop, and then wears it to a swanky affair at the home of Margaret Dumont. There he delivers a lecture on--what else?--the evils of alcohol. Fields worked only five days on the sequence, ad-libbed much of his dialog (to great praise), and received $50,000, double that of anyone in the star-studded cast.