When a man (Robert Benchley, I Married a Witch) has a “rough night” combination of a chat with a fortune teller and then a bad dream, his friend at the club (David Hoffman, The Beast with Five Fingers) attempts to snap him out of his jitters with three stories of the supernatural. Synopses of Flesh & Fantasy (1943) promise “ironic and romantic twists,” but it's no The Twilight Zone.
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All three stories have romantic relationships at their cores. In the first tale, written by Ellis St. Joseph, Henrietta (Batty Field), a shrew of a woman, wears a magical mask during Mardi Gras to make the man of her dreams, Michael (Robert Cummings), notice her. The moral of the story is to have faith in yourself, as the two characters in the wraparound story make sure to mansplain to the audience.
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In the second tale, Marshall Tyler (Edward G. Robinson), becomes a believer when a palm reader’s predictions come true. However, when he’s told he’s going to kill someone, he becomes obsessed, making a self-fulfilling prophecy. I’m not sure what the moral of this story is, and I don’t think this adaptation of the Oscar Wilde story, “Lord Arthur Saville’s Crime,” is either, because we skip a wraparound transition and move immediately forward.
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In the third tale, based on a story by Laszlo Vadnay, Paul Gaspar (Charles Boyer), a circus performer who’s lost his nerve, becomes obsessed with Joan Stanley (Barbara Stanwyck), a woman he first saw in a dream that ended with him falling from the tightrope, practically on top of her. The moral is unclear with this one, also, the wraparound story concluding with merely a comment on general superstition.
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A genre anthology that pre-dates the more familiar Dead of Night (1945), Flesh & Fantasy isn’t bad. It just doesn’t make much of an impact. I suppose my favorite story is the first, simply because it makes the best attempt at a surprise ending. You see the ending coming in the second, and the ending is flat in the third. The tone is wrong for the conclusion of the wraparound but is fun and fulfills the need for a happy ending.
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The pace is also different among the three stories. I don’t know if it was literally shorter, but the first story sped along. The second and third dragged. There’s more “action” in the first story, also. The other two are as obsessive as the characters in rehashing their situations. Overall, I’d say it’s an average anthology, but I bump it up a notch for the terrific cast and the dreamlike production design and direction. It’s worth watching… once.
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