"Tales of Manhattan" is the kind of picture that. Hollywood producers dream about. Take a dozen of the best performers in the business, find a story which can include them all in two hours, and you have what should be a box-office hit in anybody's theatre. But somehow this double-barreled attempt falls short, perhaps because it tries to push too much into one picture.

The Ben Hecht story concerns a tail-coat, bought from the tailor by Charles Boyer, and passing in turn to Henry Fonda, Cesar Romero, Charles Laughton, Edward G. Robinson, and Paul Robeson, ending up ingloriously on a scarecrow in a poor negro's corn patch. The coat brings happiness to some and serves as a jinx to others, but it travels merrily on its way, oblivious of all the trouble it is causing. The film is divided into five sequences, the first is marvelous, but by the end of the two hours, the audience is more than ready to say farewell to the tailcoat.

By far the best part of the whole picture is the opening twenty minutes--bringing in Charles Boyer, Rita Hayworth (Oh Rita), and Thomas Mitchell, who plays one of the best drunken jealous husbands in years. Charles Boyer is a self-loved Broadway Romeo who makes bedroom eyes at Rita, who out bedrooms him until her husband interrupts with a rifle. Boyer puts on a show that makes the whole picture worth seeing, but Mitchell gets his wife back.

The tailcoat passes to Cesar Romero but gets lost in the shuffle, while Ginger Rogers leads Harvard's own Henry Fonda into growling like a lion. He does this so successfully that she promptly falls in love with him. Just to prove that it is not socially exclusive, the "hero" of the story goes to Edward G. Robinson, a definitely fallen college man who dresses up to attend his college reunion. There he joins in the singing or "Far Above Cayuga's Waters," proving that it isn't just Harvard men who pass from champagne parties to the gutter in ten easy lessons.

Whatever the advertisement in the Boston Herald may say, the last part of the picture is a good substitute for a sleeping pill, in spite of Paul Robeson, Ethel Waters, and Rochester, who seems far removed from Jack Benny's valet of the same name.

"Tales of Manhattan" is unique in cinema production, and it will probably be a success just because of that. It is difficult to evaluate as a whole, because it is so chopped up into little episodes, some great, and some very much third rate. But the bad points are more than compensated for by Rita Hayworth, who should make the evening worth while for any red-blooded Harvard man.