I don’t feel like I have an awful lot to say about this one. It’s an anthology film, director Julien Duvivier (sitting out the then-current war in Hollywood) had just had some success with a similar production the year before called Tales of Manhattan, and evidently felt more of the same was in order… this time there was no connecting theme (the earlier film having revolved around a topcoat and what happens to it over the years, cf. Winchester ’73) but each story would have a kind of supernatural twist. The end result was not quite what Duvivier planned; Universal rearranged the story order and cut the opening story entirely (eventually turning it into a film in its own right by shooting more scenes), adding in its place a sort of odd wraparound with Robert Benchley… and though it was a Universal production (overseen by Duvivier and star Charles Boyer), it’s not exactly a “Universal horror”. Tale number one is a sort of moral fable, I suppose, about inner beauty, a fairly tedious trope hampered by the fact that its putatively ugly lead (Betty Field) was bugger all of the sort (lighting and makeup fixes everything, apparently), and number three revolves around a highwire circus performer who dreams about a woman and then meets her in real life, which makes for some charming romance between Boyer and Barbara Stanwyck but is nearly as slight otherwise. That leaves tale number two to save the film, which it fortunately does… adapted from Oscar Wilde’s “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” (so it has a good pedigree), Edward G. Robinson is the man told by a fortune teller that he’s going to kill someone, and has to decide what to do with this information; while the whole film looks great (Stanley Cortez and Paul Ivano were on camera duties, so obviously it does), it looks especially so in this segment, pulling out the film noir stops, and I loved the conceit of Robinson’s subconscious conversing with him from mirrors and other reflective surfaces. Best part of the film by some length; shame the rest is kind of negligible.
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