Introducing the anthology segments in O. HENRY’S FULL HOUSE (1952), John Steinbeck assures us that O. Henry is a great American author, one of the bedrocks of our country’s literature. Which is ironic because watching, I realized how much Henry is known — for Gift of the Magi if nothing else — rather than read (I might have read The Cop and the Anthem but that’s it). And these stories didn’t make me feel I was missing anything.
It’s not that the stories are bad, they’re just not particularly memorable, even with a solid cast performing them. Charles Laughton as a tramp hoping to get thrown in jail for Christmas. Richard Widmark as a tough guy cashing in on an old debt. A young, in love couple sacrificing their most precious possessions to buy each other a Christmas gift (but watching now, I realize the ending is unbalanced — her hair will grow back, he may never recover his fine ancestral watch). Kidnappers Fred Allen and Oscar Levant paying the parents to take back the nightmare child they kidnap in Ransom of Red Chief. There’s something about them that screaams “old fashioned” and not in a nostalgic, charming way.
Howard Hawks directs the Red Chief segment competently but I wouldn’t have suffered if this wasn’t available online.
TYG is a big fan of PRISCILLA, QUEEN OF THE DESERT (1994) and I like it too, so we went to rewatch it at the Carolina Theater (first big-screen viewing for both of us). A good, quirky Aussie comedy as drag queen Hugo Weaving recruits aging transwoman Terence Stamp and flamboyant queer Guy Pearce to come along on a road trip to Alice Springs to meet his ex-wife and their son. A solid character study with Stamp a standout as a world-weary soul (though TYG’s favorite was the Pearce role). “Assumption is the mother of all fuckups.”
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