Quote of the Day (O. Henry, on the Start of a Crazy Kidnapping Plot)

“It looked like a good thing: but wait till I tell you. We were down South, in Alabama -- Bill Driscoll and myself -- when this kidnapping idea struck us. It was, as Bill afterward expressed it, ‘during a moment of temporary mental apparition’; but we didn't find that out till later." —American short-story writer William Sidney Porter (a.k.a. O. Henry) (1862-1910), “The Ransom of Red Chief,” in Whirligigs (1910)

So begins the most out-of-left-field plot of storytelling master O. Henry. He became famous for the surprise endings of his short stories, but few readers could have seen this particular plot turn: a hilarious tale in which a seemingly innocent child turns the tables on his would-be tormenters.

I became aware of this story as a child watching, on daytime TV, the 1952 anthology film O.Henry’s Full House. The two-hour movie, introduced by novelist John Steinbeck, also spotlighted the stories “The Cop and the Anthem,” “The Last Leaf,” “The Gift of the Magi,” and “The Clarion Call,” but for my money the best of the quintet was “The Ransom of Red Chief.”

Even filmgoers who unfortunately have never gotten around to this chestnut may have seen its unusual premise—the victim whose brattiness makes the criminals sorry they were ever born—adapted to other situations. The most famous and profitable was Home Alone (1990), in which Macaulay Culkin makes mincemeat of the two men attempting to break into his family’s house. But three years earlier, Hollywood executed a cleverer, more raucous version of this with Ruthless People, in which the “victim” is not a child but just as obstreperous: Bette Midler.  

The original screen version of O.Henry’s tale certainly has its charm, but it’s hard to improve on the short story. Even the first paragraph hints at its cleverness. It has a premonition of disaster (“It looked like”—not was— "a good thing”), a fish-out-of-water premise (the narrator and “Bill” are Yankees, incorrectly sizing up Southerners as rubes), and a wonderful malapropism (“temporary mental apparition” instead of “temporary mental aberration”).

(The image accompanying this post comes from “The Ransom of Red Chief” segment of O.Henry’s Full House. Pictured are those wonderful dour wits, Fred Allen and Oscar Levant, as Sam and Bill, the two cons who get more than they bargained for from little J.B. Dorset, aka Red Chief. The sour looks on their faces would make you think that the terrible little tyke has slipped castor oil into their bourbon—which nobody watching the film would put past him!)