Elisabeth Grace Foley

Historical Fiction Author

O. Henry’s Full House (1952)

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I’ve wanted to see this movie for several years, and the other night I finally settled down and watched it. I went into it with only moderate expectations—literary adaptations, you know—but I was pleasantly surprised; I really loved it! It is actually five separate short films, each based on one of O. Henry’s most famous stories, linked together by segments with John Steinbeck narrating some background on O. Henry’s life and writing. For me, as someone who has read the Complete Works cover to cover and never tires of recommending them, watching the camera pan over the familiar titles of the collections on the spines of beautiful leather-bound copies and listening to Steinbeck talk about the stories I’ve loved so much was lovely in itself. (For the curious, the little introductory scene, in which O. Henry—his face never seen in the shadows of a prison cell—overhears a remark by another prisoner and writes it down, was actually drawn from his story “What You Want.”) The individual adaptations are very well done, considering that so much of what is couched in crisp, humorous narration on the page has to be conveyed visually and through dialogue. The settings of the stories are opened up and moved around a bit, but the spirit of the original is maintained.
The set begins with “The Cop and the Anthem,” in which park-bench bum Soapy (Charles Laughton), determined to spend the cold winter months comfortably in jail, repeatedly and unsuccessfully tries to get himself arrested, with comic results. The script gives him a sort of sidekick in another tramp (David Wayne) who tags after him, in order that Soapy may explain his schemes for the benefit of the audience; and his personality is that of a decayed gentleman with a florid vocabulary incongruous beside his ragged appearance, providing the opportunity to work a lot of that narrative humor into the dialogue. Very well done, and Laughton’s performance, particularly in the climactic scene, is spot-on.

In “The Clarion Call,” police detective Barney Woods (Dale Robertson) recognizes that a recent murder and robbery was committed by a former friend of his, Johnny Kernan (Richard Widmark)—but since he owes Kernan a long-standing debt of a thousand dollars, he can’t bring himself to arrest him until matters are squared between them. This one is well-scripted too, and I liked Robertson as the detective, but Widmark noisily overplays the eccentricity and nastiness of his character, coming close to spoiling the effect. The moments where he is more restrained allow you to pay more attention to the story.

“The Last Leaf,” in my opinion, is the pièce de résistance of the film. The story of a despairing young girl ill with pneumonia (Anne Baxter), who becomes convinced that when the last leaves fall from the nearly-bare vine outside her window, she will die too, is one of O. Henry’s most emotional on the page, and the film version does it wonderful justice. The script gives it extra depth, I think, by making the two girls sisters and giving Joanna (Baxter) a failed romance as part of the reason for her despair. The performances by all three key characters, including elder sister Sue (Jean Peters) and the girls’ upstairs neighbor, irascible old painter Behrmann (Gregory Ratoff), are excellent, and the final scene is just as beautiful as in the story. Bring along a handkerchief for this one.

“The Ransom of Red Chief,” is, unfortunately, the weakest of the bunch, though based on one of O. Henry’s most famous tales, in which two hapless con-men  (Fred Allen and Oscar Levant) kidnap a small boy and wind up driven to their wits’ end by his antics. The dialogue is clever enough, but the pacing is very flat—it doesn’t have the same snappy hilarity as the story, with the two men reduced to exhaustion by the end. I think part of the problem is that both Allen and Levant play it with a kind of deadpan humor; I liked Allen’s performance, but thought it would have been better if he’d had a more goofy or excitable partner-in-crime to play off. Lee Aaker is just right as “Red Chief,” but his part seemed small compared to the story. (I understand that this segment was actually dropped for the first theatrical release; I can understand why.)

And finally we have “The Gift of the Magi.” You all know this one. The famed Christmas story of a young couple (Jeanne Crain and Farley Granger) trying to find a way to buy Christmas presents for each other, in spite of having very little money, is given a very sweet and faithful adaptation—again, using the dialogue and a scene with the couple looking in shop windows to expand the background of the characters. You might want to save a corner of your handkerchief from “The Last Leaf”—it’s a lovely way to end the film.

One of the things I loved best about O. Henry’s Full House is the period-correct atmosphere: the Edwardian-era clothing and hairstyles are excellent, much better than one usually sees in a film like this; the setting of old New York City with its brownstones and shop-window displays and the rattling and roaring of the elevated trains is brought to life wonderfully. Besides the original music by Alfred Newman, the score is filled with old popular songs, hymns and Christmas carols, adding to the old-fashioned feel (you can hear “After the Ball” playing in the background of the short scene with Marilyn Monroe in “The Cop and the Anthem”). It’d make a great holiday-season film, I think, considering that three of the five stories have a wintry setting and the final one winds up at Christmas!

Of course you know I’m going to finish by recommending the original stories. Viewers who already love O. Henry will probably enjoy this film most, but I think even those not yet acquainted with him will probably like it too. It’s available on DVD and on Amazon Instant Video.

Fairytale Blogathon: First Love (1939)

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A few months ago, while preparing for the launch of my own little fairytale retelling, I stumbled across the news of an upcoming movie blogathon on fairytales in film. It seemed like a wonderful opportunity to revisit and spruce up my review of one of my favorite movies, which also happens to be a Cinderella retelling, 1939’s First Love. So here it is, as my entry for the Fairytale Blogathon hosted by Movies, Silently.

As the film opens, orphaned Connie Harding (Deanna Durbin) has finished boarding school and is sent to live with her wealthy relatives, the Clintons, in New York City. She quickly falls into the position of a typical poor relation—often overlooked, fetching and carrying, and generally living in the shadow of her pretty but spoiled cousin Barbara (Helen Parrish), society belle and the darling of magazine photographers. Her scatterbrained, astrology-obsessed aunt (Leatrice Joy) and supremely lazy cousin Walter (Lewis Howard) aren’t much help either. Uncle Jim (Eugene Pallette), a man of few words, is only visible ducking between his workplace and his study when the coast is clear, seemingly making it his object in life to spend as little time in his family’s company as possible—and it’s hard to blame him. But Connie quickly endears herself to the household staff (Charles Coleman, Mary Treen and Lucille Ward), who become her firm friends and allies.

Prince Charming enters the picture in the form of Ted Drake (Robert Stack, in his film debut), an eligible young man whose attention Barbara is bent on monopolizing. After an awkwardly comic first meeting on the grounds of a country club while employed as her scheming cousin’s go-between, Connie is smitten too, and sets her heart on attending a ball hosted by Ted’s parents. Barbara, by no means welcoming competition, does everything possible to prevent her from getting there, but Connie’s friends the servants pitch in to see that she has a suitable dress, and conspire with the cook’s policeman brother (Frank Jenks) to keep the rest of her relatives from getting to the ball before midnight so she’ll have a little time to enjoy herself. (One of my favorite lines in the film comes here from Coleman, the perennial movie butler: “You will have an escort of six white bikes, miss!”) Though the ball proves to be a dream come true, the stroke of midnight of course heralds disaster…and it’s up to Connie’s old schoolteacher and friend, the grim-faced Miss Wiggins (Kathleen Howard) to play fairy godmother and try to mend the situation with the help of a silver slipper.

First Love seems to be a relatively obscure movie today, even among classic film fans. At the time of its release it was a big affair, for Deanna Durbin was Universal’s wildly popular singing star, and a flutter of publicity whirled around the movie because it contained her first screen kiss. Perhaps the rather generic and unimpressive title has something to do with its slipping from view—one source says it was originally supposed to be called Cinderella 1939, which would at least have been a bit more descriptive of the story! But it’s such a clever, charming adaptation of the Cinderella story, I still wonder that it’s not better known. The script is sprightly and humorous, filled with amusing scenes—the frustrated Clintons delayed by the laid-back policeman on their way to the ball; Barbara and her so-called friend (June Storey) sweetly trading barbs about each other’s clothes and dispositions; and the hilarious climactic scene where Pallette’s Uncle Jim finally blows his top and lets his family have it.

The whole cast is good, but I was particularly impressed by Helen Parrish as the spoiled Barbara—I’d seen her before playing such sweet, naïve characters, her performance here seemed that much better! She played the “mean girl” to Deanna Durbin’s heroine in a couple of films, but off-screen they were good friends; Parrish was a bridesmaid at Durbin’s first wedding. They eventually got to play sisters in Three Smart Girls Grow Up, the sequel to Deanna Durbin’s first film.

Though the setting is contemporary 1930s all the way, there are a couple little touches that remind us of the fairytale background. A moment where Connie’s reflection in the mirror unexpectedly answers her back might be magic…and then it might just be her imagination. And a lovely special-effects moment comes when Connie and Ted are dancing at the ball, as the other dancers momentarily fade away to leave them waltzing alone to the dreamy strains of a melody from Johann Strauss’ “Roses From the South,” one of my very favorite waltzes. As in any Durbin film, there’s some wonderful music—a spirited rendition of “Amapola,” a medley of Strauss waltzes for the ball scene, and finally, Puccini’s “Un bel di” (sung in English), in a wonderfully out-of-context performance that suits its new usage beautifully.


First Love is available as an individual DVD which seems to be currently out of print, and also as part of a Deanna Durbin box set DVD with five other movies. You can click here to see more film stills and behind-the-scenes clippings and trivia at the Deanna Durbin Devotees fansite (all pictures in this post courtesy of the same page).

War and Peace (1956)

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I waited quite a while to see this movie. I’d told my mom that it would best be seen after reading the book—which I’d already done several years ago—and she had plans to read it, so we put off watching the movie till then. Mom finally read the book this summer. For a long time she kept telling me it was slow going, but by the final quarter of the book she was completely invested in the story and characters—giving the rest of us periodic bulletins on what they were up to, while I was kind of grinning behind my hand because I already knew how things turned out and had a feeling she’d like it. And when she finished the book last week, we finally watched the movie.

The first thing one has to acknowledge, of course, are the film’s limitations. So much of the meat of Tolstoy’s novels lies in the thoughts of his characters; so many important events are viewed through their eyes. That’s the kind of thing that is nearly impossible to transfer to the screen. And the sheer massive size of War and Peace means that a feature film, even a three-and-a-half-hour one, must choose which scenes to dramatize and move quickly through them. The beginning of the film feels a little piecemeal, with a little of these characters, a little of those, different scenes that don’t connect right away, but it gradually picks up steam and draws together a little as it goes on. I told my mom that if you borrowed a bit of music terminology you could call it “Selections From War and Peace.” But there are a lot of individual moments and crucial scenes that are beautifully done.

The thing that has to be the biggest head-scratcher for anyone who knows the book is how the character of Pierre Bezukhov, variously described as “stout,” “enormous,” “corpulent” and “fat,” could possibly be portrayed by…Henry Fonda? Yet he manages to give a pretty good performance. In spite of the obvious wrongness of his age and appearance, one still somehow gets glimpses of the personality and mannerisms of Tolstoy’s Pierre. I don’t know if it’s the spectacles or something in makeup or hairstyling, but Fonda doesn’t even look quite like himself sometimes (though there’s never any question of his being the least bit stout).

On the other hand, the casting of Audrey Hepburn as Natasha Rostov is absolute perfection. She brings to life the flighty, heedless but bewitching girl and her gradual, sometimes painful maturation through love, mistakes made and the suffering of war. And she looks and sounds just as I always pictured Natasha. Mel Ferrer’s Prince Andrei is also excellent, in spite of the script’s stinting a bit on the development of his character. I thought their real-life chemistry (they were newly married at the time) particularly showed through in the lovely proposal scene, one of those fine moments of the film. (I also loved the whole sequence of Natasha’s first ball). John Mills has fairly little screen time in the role of Platon Karatev, but makes the most of it, although the film doesn’t really capture the importance of the character. I was amazed how entirely different his voice, accent and entire personality were from other characters I’ve seen him play. Some supporting characters, such as Dolokhov (Helmut Dantine), Anatole Kuragin (Vittorio Gassman) and the rest of the Rostov family, come off well, but others such as Helene Kuragina (Anita Ekberg) and Lisa Bolkonskaya (Milly Vitale) don’t really have enough screen time to be understood or make an impression.

The film spends a while on Peace before working its way into War, but once there, the historical scenes really crackle with the contrasting personalities of the two commanding generals, Napoleon (Herbert Lom) and Field Marshal Kutuzov (Oscar Homolka). The appearance, posturing and mannerisms of Lom’s Napoleon are so remarkably like every picture I’ve ever seen of the real man, it’s uncannily like seeing a historical figure come to life before your eyes. The initial battle scenes seemed a trifle flat, but as the film goes on they gradually built in complexity and intensity—the battle of Borodino is staggering in its sheer scale and detail; moments like the French cavalry charge just stunning. It all climaxes in the devastating retreat from Moscow, with the demoralized French army struggling through rain, mud and snow. The final shot of Napoleon’s face as he leaves the scene of the disastrous river crossing says it all.

The one thing that I found unforgiveable in this adaptation, however, was the slashing of the subplot concerning Nikolai Rostov (Jeremy Brett) and Princess Marya (Anna Maria Ferrero). In the novel, they are the most significant characters after the trio of Pierre, Natasha and Andrei, with large sections of plot told from their perspective; and incidentally some of my favorites. In the film they are reduced to peripheral characters, Marya practically a nonentity. The scene where Nikolai comes to her rescue during the French invasion becomes an off-screen incident, briefly mentioned in a couple of lines spoken by Pierre. I was also disappointed that the character of Denisov (Patrick Crean) was cut down to practically nothing; I enjoyed his scenes in the book.

Is it a good adaptation? Yes and no. The ending is obviously too quick; there isn’t enough emphasis on how much time is supposed to have passed since the end of the war, and an important relationship is brought to a resolution almost instantly instead of undergoing the slow and natural growth it sees in the book. But this, as with most of the film’s flaws, has to be put down to time limits. A viewer who doesn’t know the book would probably find it an occasionally wandering but predominately well-acted and visually beautiful film. I still think it’s best seen after reading the book; even though you know there are enormous gaps, it’s worth the experience of seeing some parts attractively brought to life.

And now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’m off to read War and Peace again…