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O. Henry's Full House (1952)

Rate: 2
Viewed: 7/25

OHenry
7/25: O. Henry's Full House is now the earliest anthology film I've seen, and it's awful, disparate, and so boring.

I was shocked to see John Steinbeck in the flesh as the narrator. It's his only on-screen appearance in film history. He looks really, really old for a 50-year-old guy. That's what smoking like a chimney can do to a person. As for the stories, they're all unremarkable.

The Cop and the Anthem: Marilyn Monroe is the main reason why this film has been inserted into Marilyn Monroe: The Premiere DVD Collection, but she oddly appears for 89 seconds (yep, I used a stopwatch) out of 117 minutes in total.

The Clarion Call: Henry Hathaway. Richard Widmark. Tommy Udo. Are you kidding me? It's Kiss of Death all over again.

The Last Leaf: Yeah, sure...at the expense of a failed artist's life. I didn't care about the dying patient. Maybe this is a good opportunity to replace Anne Baxter with Marilyn Monroe. Oh, how All About Eve that would be.

The Ransom of Red Chief: This segment is truly the worst of the five. No wonder why it was cut out back then before being restored on TV a decade later. There's no way those two men can't handle a 50-lb kid. Incidentally, this may not be clear at first, but it was remade as Ruthless People with Judge Reinhold and Helen Slater as the kidnappers, Bette Milder as the boy, and Danny DeVito as the parents.

The Gift of the Magi: Della Young is obviously a stupid woman who finds value in worthless junk, going so far to cut her own hair to obtain them for such a princely sum. Even worse is Jeanne Crain's overacting. Calm the hell down!

All in all, O. Henry's Full House will do in place of a sleeping pill.