O Help, O. Henry!
HE need for drawing the line somewhere in radio dramatisations of short stories was shown in an ABC version, heard from 1YD recently, of what purported to be O. Henry’s "The Last Leaf." The author’s central characters are two girls, Sue and Johnsy (short for Joanna); in the "play" they become
Sue and Johnny, husband and wife, with Sue, not Johnsy, suffering from pneumonia. Nor was this all. O. Henry’s crisp tale, much of whose effect depends on its brevity, was spun out by preposterous dialogue between whimsical inecarnations of Death and Hope, inventions of the scriptwriter, while the climax of the story --a simple paragraph in O. Henry
-was thrown away in a_ laborious 10 minutes of dialogue. O. Henry slugged you suddenly with a_sandbag; the dramatiser walked towards you shouting, with a pea-shooter in his hand. The crowning insult was the presentation of the aggressively American characters by actors speaking Elsie’ Fogarty English, without a trace of the accents O. Henry carefully re- _ cords, although small gobbets of his dia‘logue bobbed once or twice to the surface of the stew, with the "dear" cleverly changed to "honey." "The Last Leaf" is no masterpiece, but if it had to be dramatised, why could it not have been presented as O. Henry wrote it, without gratuitous additions, meaningless changes, and padding, and with some attempt at realism in the playing?
J.C.
R.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19491118.2.25.3
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 543, 18 November 1949, Page 14
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236O Help, O. Henry! New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 543, 18 November 1949, Page 14
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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