What do we call this type of film?

There are films in which the entire progression of story is a series of vignettes involving characters somehow affected by an external item or separate character. All characters, often otherwise unrelated, are linked by this item.
Examples off the top of my head are 20 Bucks, De Jurk (The Dress) and even an episode of The Simpsons.

-What do we call this sort of film?
-What was the first film to tell a story in this way?
-Did this device originate in novels, or is it unique to film?

I don't know if it has a specific name except for falling under the broader category of anthology.

The first one I am aware of is If I Had a Million (1932) where an eccentric millionaire gives various people a million dollars. Tales of Manhattan made about a decade later has various people finding a coat.

A few others are The Red Violin, The Gun.

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I've also wondered about this---I call it a daisy chain. IMBd mentions the script for 20 bucks was written in 1935.

Eclipse - (1994) also uses this form; the very last character in the film meets up with first one in a circle of anonymous sexual encounters.

Not sure if this is what you're talking about but... While its not limited to a single item, James Joyce used counterpointing mechanisms (objects, events, buildings and streets in Dublin, sounds...) to synchronize all the characters and events in Ulysses, which takes place over a single day. The novel is full of coincidental intersections that the characters aren't fully aware of but the reader is meant to be.

I'm sure I've encountered it before in older books but no specific examples are coming to mind.

If If I Had a Million is the earliest "connected anthology" film, then the idea definitely came from books, since the movie was based on the book by Robert Andrews.

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Can't recall the title but one of the better films of this sort involved a Justice of the Peace who somehow learns he had functioned for awhile some years back without the official authorization to be Justice of the Peace. So in looking back over his records, he finds some marriages he performed during that period that were not legal. So he sends out notifications to all the couples telling them they need to go somewhere and get a legal marriage. The only one of the various stories then told in the film that I recall involved Marjorie Main as a dissatisfied backwoods bride who is constantly being sweet-talked by a local bachelor, (Arthur Hunnicutt), telling her that if only she wasn't already married, he'd carry her off and wherever they'd go would be paradise just having her with him. She in turn feeds him pies and cakes and other special foods she cooked for him as they stand talking over the back fence. She excuses herself to go fetch a batch of cookies from the oven just before the postman arrives with a letter for her, which he leaves with her beau. Of course, he opens it and is dismayed to find out she really isn't married to the guy she thinks is her husband. About that time she returns with the cookies, and he thrusts the letter into his overalls and proceeds to tell her what a great life they would have together--if only she wasn't already married!

However, the best anthology I've ever seen on screen was O. Henry's Full House, a film presenting five of O. Henry's short stories, including the best telling of The Ransom of Red Chief I've ever seen, with Fred Allan as the head kidnapper and (I think) Oscar Levant as his partner and stooge. Other stories depicted were "Gift of the Magi" with the late Farley Granger. "The Cop and the Anthem" (one of the funniest, most ironic short stories ever); "The Clarion Call", and "The Last Leaf."

Thanks for the ideas so far. I had assumed that it must have a more specific classification than anthology or portmanteau because it is a very distinct subclass of anthology, particularly because the individual "plots" often have no resolution of their own. Rather, the only resolution is typically that of the device that links the stories.

Gee, rufnek, you have a puzzler. It sounded like you were describing We're Not Married (1952) but neither that story or Main and Hunnicutt are in it.

A far as I can tell they only appeared together in The Kettles in the Ozarks, which I tried to watch once but without Percy Kilbride is unbearable. Reading the little available on it I think you confused a subplot in it with We're Not Married, but it wasn't Marjorie Main Hunnicutt was linked to romantically, it was Una Merkel.

While it doesn't quite fit your requirements, the origin of a novel conisting of short stories that are linked together in a narrative probably is Canterbury Tales.

That may be the one, because in the dark recesses of my mind, I seem to remember that story had to be edited out under the censorship code of that time because it ends up with an unwed woman and man living together, which if done was not talked about in 1952. However, at some point that story was edited back in or else someone came up with the original copy of the film because I definitely saw it somewhere, some time. And it was not the Ma Kettle film that had Hunnicutt playing Pa Kettle's brother or some relation that Ma and the kids were visiting after Percy Kilbride was killed or was otherwise not available.

I was thinking the film was made earlier than 1952; it had an "earlier" feel to me, but that may be because the stories generally were set shortly after the turn of the 20th century.

Would you include Pulp Fiction or Snatch-type movies in this category? Where the characters are somewhat intertwined?

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Do we know if the novel was connected short stories? Trying to find out on the web I had no luck. It is known for sure that the Charles Laughton and W.C. Fields episodes, the two best, were written directly for the movie.

Another one that comes to mind is The Confidence Man by Herman Melville. Published in 1857 it's basically a series of vignettes aboard a river boat, that are connected by an annonymous con-man who sneaks aboard and assumes a series of identities to con various people on board. A lot of the episodes could be pretty well self-contained and in some of the episodes it's up to the reader to figure out if one of the characters is a confidence man, and it has the same sort of prismatic shift in focus that seems to define what the original poster is looking for.

Sorry I still can't find a name for this story form, but now we're back to the mid-19th century.

How about Rod Stieger's The Illustrated Man in which two men meet walking along the trail and spend the evening around the campfire. Steiger plays a former carnival worker whose arms and upper body are covered with tatoos. And by looking at the tatoos, the young man sees (or imagines) connected stories unfold. As I remember it, all of the stories have the same people playin the various roles--Steiger and the young man and a female actress who appears in some of the stories. Occasionally, you see additional people--children, village elders. It was one of those '60s type of films with more show than meaning, but Steiger is always worth watching, and there were some ironic twists.

There are also movies like A Letter to Three Wives which has separate stories, but all the characters know each other.

Altmanesque?

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The book was short stories Ray Bradbury had previously published in magazines and included a new connecting narrative to them.

Yep. "Canterbury Tales" is a frame narrative, but even so they all fit together.

Coffee and Cigarettes was the first film I thought of when reading the original post.

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Reading the examples here there seem to be several levels of this.

The most basic is, as Will said, the general anthology film where there are n number of separate stories included in a single film for whatever reason. Usually they are linked by some general factor such as location or theme. I think this can be assumed since why else would these stories be included together at all if they were not first linked by some factor t?

I suppose we can call this factor t the pre-established link between the stories that is generative of their anthologization in the first place. In this sense, the factor t would not necessarily be the same as the affecting factor that is suggested by OP to impel each of the stories.

So you can have n stories/scenes included in anthology a due to factor f. I suppose his could be called the most general level of anthology.

Now just going off of how we experience the movement of "several stories" into "one story", it would seem that the sense of oneness in a story is due to an increasing level of factor f---increasing level of linkage. There is also the matter of scenes versus stories denoted by n. It doesn't really seem to matter how many n stories/scenes there are in a film for the film to seem like just one story if factor f is great enough. Now, whenever n = 1, factor f goes to infinity (∞) as a necessary consequence of definition---not so much as a function. However, in many stories, factor f is extremely high to the point where n becomes irrelevant. No matter how many different stories/scenes, if there are enough linkages between each, they will all seem like one.

This is actually pretty rough and ill-developed now that I think about it, but the point I would try and make is that there is a smooth distribution of oneness between anthology and single narrative based on linkage.

When I think of anthology films, I first think of the various popular horror anthology films, especially those of the 1960s and 1970s. These would include Dr. Teror's House of Horrors, Tales from the Crypt, The House That Dripped Blood, Asylum, etc. These are usually films where seemingly-unconnected characters lives intersect due to their being in the same location at different times or being in the presence of one other character who usually reveals or learns of their fates. These lone "controlling" characters could be a fortune teller, a doctor, a detective or even a crypt keeper. The individual stories are not connected through the characters but through thematic outcomes.

There are also some horror films which involve a character seeking revenge on others and we see how this is accomplished usually through some kind of "poetic justice". Vincent Price's The Abominable Dr. Phibes and Theater of Blood are examples of these straightforward, non-anthology films.

There is another type of anthology called the omnibus which is usually connected by the stories being based on the works of the same author. Examples would include the aforementioned O. Henry's Full House, two Somerset Maugham collections called Trio and Quartet, and Truman Capote's Trilogy.

As far as answering the original question about the specific storytelling device or method's name, I'm unsure of what that is, but I think we've determined that it was developed before the invention of cinema. I don't believe the phrases "interlocking stories" or "episodic narrative" are technical terms, and anyway, they seem to mean different things to different people.

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There is also Waxworks from the silent era where the stories all come from various wax figures of famous villains.