O. Henry's bitter-sweet stories are superficial; the bums, scoundrels, and idealists who over-populate his New York live in a world where Bobby Thompson always hits the long one, only to be called out for not touching third. Yet, literary or not, we liked O. Henry. Perhaps the same failings which kept him a mediocre artist gave him his appeal. His style was good journalism if poor fiction, and the oversimplified characters and twist endings made good copy.
Good copy, however, does not always make good drama. O. Henry's lack of character delineation forces an actor to use his script as a bare guide. In three of Full House's five stories, the casts are able to fill in O. Henry's deficiencies; in the other two, the sweet is sugery, the humor forced, and the bitter melodramatic.
The biggest disappointment in Full House is The Ransom of Red Chief, where two kidnappers steal a ten-year-old terror. Fred Allen and Oscar Levant would seem ideal as the bumbling criminals; instead, both play it dead-pan, leaving Red Chief--who should be the only poker face--to grovel for the laughs.
In contrast to this, both Charles Laughton and David Wayne soar far beyond O. Henry's narrow limits in The Cop and the Anthem. Both are tramps who spend the summer in New York's parks, the winter in its jails. But getting into "a nice, warm cell" is not as easy as one might think. Blending pathos with humor, Laughton steals an umbrella, breaks a window, swindles a restaurant--all unnoticed by the police. In the best tradition of O. Henry irony, he is nabbed just when he decides to turn respectable.
The Clarion Call is an amusing study in pitch black and snow white, with Richard Wildmark slamming women and manhandling kittens with finesse and obvious relish. In The Last Leaf, Gregory Ratoff is the idealistic but frustrated abstractionist, born twenty years too soon; here, the part happily becomes more Ratoff than O. Henry.
It is regrettable, however, that the Gift of the Magi--somewhat of a Yuletide classic--comes off with a distinct soap-opera flavor. But even with its two discards, Full House is a strong three of a kind. And enough of its actors are able to go beyond their scripts to make the movie worth seeing.
