Books, Arts & Manners: Three New Yorks Is a Crowd

New York Stories comprises three short films about some aspects of New York life by three major moviemakers: Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, and Woody Allen. The extremely tenuous link is the locale, New York, somewhat arbitrarily assigned. The less obvious but more relevant connection is that none of them comes off, raising the question of whether the filmed short story—for that is what we are ultimately dealing with—works as a genre.

There was a time, during the Forties, when the short-story film had its flowering. Most successful, perhaps, was Quartet (1948), based on four stories by Somerset Maugham, followed, at intervals, by two more Maugham omnibuses. Though there was no connecting link other than the common authorship, there were homogenizing elements: magnificent British character actors and such formidable screenwriters as R. C. Sherriff, Noel Langley, T. E. B. Clarke, Arthur Macrae, and Willie himself. The genre had its Hollywood counterpart, notably in a film such as Tales of Manhattan (1942—observe the similarity of title to New York Stories), where the connection was a suit of tails that went from owner to owner, ever lower on the social scale, until it ended on a scarecrow. Here, too, there was a fancy international cast of actors and writers (the latter included four Hungarians headed by Molnar himself), and the director was the famed Julien Duvivier.

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John Simon

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New York Stories comprises three short films about some aspects of New York life by three major moviemakers: Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, and Woody Allen. The extremely tenuous link is the locale, New York, somewhat arbitrarily assigned. The less obvious but more relevant connection is that none of them comes off, raising the question of whether the filmed short story—for that is what we are ultimately dealing with—works as a genre.

There was a time, during the Forties, when the short-story film had its flowering. Most successful, perhaps, was Quartet (1948), based on four stories by Somerset Maugham, followed, at intervals, by two more Maugham omnibuses. Though there was no connecting link other than the common authorship, there were homogenizing elements: magnificent British character actors and such formidable screenwriters as R. C. Sherriff, Noel Langley, T. E. B. Clarke, Arthur Macrae, and Willie himself. The genre had its Hollywood counterpart, notably in a film such as Tales of Manhattan (1942—observe the similarity of title to New York Stories), where the connection was a suit of tails that went from owner to owner, ever lower on the social scale, until it ended on a scarecrow. Here, too, there was a fancy international cast of actors and writers (the latter included four Hungarians headed by Molnar himself), and the director was the famed Julien Duvivier.