O. Henry's Full House (1952) on Netflix
With winter coming, the vagrant Soapy tells Horace he intends to pass it in a jail cell, but every attempt to get himself arrested misfires. Four other O. Henry stories follow.
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- IMDb7.2/103,461 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Trailer
Plot summary
Five separate stories drawn from O. Henry. In "The Cop and the Anthem," the vagrant Soapy tells Horace he plans to pass the winter in a jail cell, then fails to get himself arrested. In "The Clarion Call," the detective Barney Woods knows Johnny Kernan is a murderer but cannot arrest him, since he owes the man a debt. In "The Last Leaf," set in a Greenwich Village winter, a young woman lies ill with pneumonia and holds to the notion that she will die when the final leaf drops from the ivy outside her window. In "The Ransom of Red Chief," Sam Brown and William Smith take a child, hoping for a ransom. In "The Gift of the Magi," Della has little money on Christmas Eve and sells her hair to buy a gift for her husband Jim.
Cast
Show all 20 cast
- William Vedderas Judge (segment "The Cop and the Anthem") (uncredited)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about O. Henry's Full House (1952)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Howard Hawks's segment "The Ransom of Red Chief" went over so badly at the film's September 1952 Los Angeles premiere that Fox cut it before the New York opening that October, and some outlets billed the film as "O'Henry's Four of a Kind"; it was later reinstated.
- Nunnally Johnson wrote "The Ransom of Red Chief" for Clifton Webb and William Demarest, but once Fred Allen and Oscar Levant were cast, Howard Hawks brought in Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer to rewrite it; Johnson then asked to have his name taken off the film.
- Richard Widmark's "Clarion Call" character Johnny Kernan reprises his Oscar-nominated Tommy Udo from Kiss of Death, a role he based on Batman comics' Joker; the performance later shaped Frank Gorshin's Riddler on the 1960s Batman TV series.
- Author John Steinbeck introduced each of the five O. Henry stories on camera, the only time in his career he appeared on screen.
