The Bespoke Overcoat – 1956 | 33 mins | Drama, Fantasy | B&W

Plot Synopsis

Enchanting ghost story movingly directed by Jack Clayton and adapted by Wolf Mankowitz from the Nikolai Gogol short story Shinel. The film won short film awards at Academy Awards, British BAFTA’s and the Venice Film Festival. Filmed at Marylebone Studios.

The Bespoke Overcoat opens with a coffin being carted through the grimy East End backstreets to a desolate graveyard where a solitary mourner tosses an overcoat into the grave. The sole mourner, Morry (David Kossoff), returns to his dingy flat to reminisce, but his solitude is broken by the arrival of a ghost.

Fender (Alfie Bass), a lowly clerk with forty-three years employment in the cold warehouse of Ranting & Co., wants one of the warm sheepskin coats stacked around him. Miserly boss Ranting (Alan Tilvern) refuses. So Fender asks his tailor friend Morry to make him a replica coat, but Fender is fired and dies of pneumonia before it is finished. His ghost requests that Morry steals a sheepskin coat from Ranting.