At long last one of my favorite films has finally made it to DVD and I can throw my TV copy VHS away. O Henry has always been a favorite writer of mine and it just so happens that he is buried near me in Asheville, North Carolina. If you visit his grave you will find coins on it in honor of THE GIFT OF THE MAGI. I remember first seeing this film on television back in the early 1960s. I was especially taken by the story of THE LAST LEAF (and still am today). It spurred me on to find and read other O Henry short stories where I then discovered that he had written well over two hundred of them!
For this 1952 omnibus film 5 stories were chosen (THE COP AND THE ANTHEM, THE CLARION CALL, THE LAST LEAF, THE RANSOM OF RED CHIEF, and of course MAGI) along with 5 different directors (Howard Hawks, Henry Hathaway, Henry King, Henry Koster, Jean Negulesco) and a top notch cast (Charles Laughton, Richard Widmark, Anne Baxter, Fred Allen, Jeanne Crain and a young Marilyn Monroe). To top it all off 20th Century Fox got author John Steinbeck to introduce the stories. As is often the case with anthology films the stories are a mixed bag with ANTHEM, LEAF, and MAGI being first rate while THE CLARION CALL and THE RANSOM OF RED CHIEF miss the mark due to lack of subtlety in direction and in some of the performances (RED CHIEF was cut after the premiere but restored for TV showings).
Nevertheless this release is a 5 star effort all the way thanks to a beautifully restored print and a slew of informative extras including two silent shorts, a trip to the O. Henry Museum in Austin, Texas and no less than a recording of O Henry himself done in the mid 1900s (he died in 1910). An excellent example of the old studio system school of filmmaking at its best and a great incentive to check out the original stories which had to be altered and expanded for the movie (ie. THE LAST LEAF is only 3 pages long in a full size edition).
The Capsule Critic 