We think of Jean Renoir's, Rene Clair's and Julien Duvivier's sojourns in Hollywood during the war as difficult times for these creators, and certainly Renoir's experience with the studio system was not a happy one. But I find Tales of Manhattan to be a light frolic that betrays little of the cultural confusion that these transplanted Frenchmen must have felt.
It's by no means a delight from beginning to end: the W. C. Fields episode is not funny at all, and the finale with Paul Robeson and Ethel Waters as sharecroppers drowns in bathos. There is enough fun from Henry Fonda and Ginger Rogers as tentative lovers to compensate, and Edward G. Robinson as the disgraced lawyer is worth the effort to find this film.
NOTE: How did Charles Laughton get so shapely? He can't be called slender here, but he is far from the obese hulk that we remember from his later years.
It's by no means a delight from beginning to end: the W. C. Fields episode is not funny at all, and the finale with Paul Robeson and Ethel Waters as sharecroppers drowns in bathos. There is enough fun from Henry Fonda and Ginger Rogers as tentative lovers to compensate, and Edward G. Robinson as the disgraced lawyer is worth the effort to find this film.
NOTE: How did Charles Laughton get so shapely? He can't be called slender here, but he is far from the obese hulk that we remember from his later years.