How They Made The Canterville Ghost Better Than Oscar Wilde's Original

Why I Like What Some Screenwriters Do to the Stories They Base Their Movies On.

Just finished watching the 1944 movie, The Canterville Ghost and then went back and refreshed my memory of the original Oscar Wilde story from which it was drawn. There have been other versions, but I like the '44 outing with Margaret O'Brien and Robert Montgomery. It is the kindest version of the lot. 

First of all in the movie, Sir Simon is only guilty of cowardice. In the book he murdered his wife in cold blood along with 4 other people who died as a result of his prodigious haunting ability. He is an evil spirit and lies and manipulates the daughter of the American minister's family who have come to live in Canterville Chase while working for the American government. Sir Simon delights in pointing out the hypocrisy of the minister. This is not in any way a story to create good feelings between the British and Americans.

The '44 movie version, on the other hand, is set during WWII and the story is adjusted to promote good feelings between the Brits and their American cousins jammed into southern England preparatory to crossing the channel into France. In the story, a platoon of Army Rangers take up residence in the castle and are confronted by the ghost. The soldiers aren't intimidated by the ghost and drive into a corner in deep depression. Margaret O'Brien who is delightful as the Lady Jessica DeCanterville, meets her spectral  ancestor and sets about to help him find a brave relative to help him end the curse.

The original story also has a female character, Virginia Otis, whom Sir Simon manipulates into helping him cross over to the other side. Given his track record, I suspect that bright light he goes into are the fires of hell, but that's just me. Wilde seemed to be saying that the unrepentant Simon managed to manipulate his way to heaven without having to repent of murdering his wife.

One of the American soldiers in the '44 movie, Cuffy Williams, played by Robert Montgomery, turns out to be a descendant of the Cantervilles and as such can do a heroic deed in Sir Simon's name and free his spirit to rest in the garden behind the pines. He overcomes his own fear, does the heroic deed proving that all Cantervilles are not cowards and frees Sir Simon's spirit from the curse his father had put upon him when he was walled up in the closet. This Simon did repent and was more of a hapless victim than the Oscar Wilde Simon. 

I think the movie is way better than Oscar Wilde's cynical version. Wilde, a gay socialist and aesthetic, never wrote anything I cared for other than ones that screenwriters managed to give happy endings like Canterville. The poor man kept looking for God, but didn't seem terribly interested in obtaining forgiveness or changing his ways. Wishful thinking may explain why Sir Simon in his story manages to take advantage of a pure hearted girl and a letter of the law ritual. Wilde attempted to do much the same by doing a last minute Catholic conversion and last rites on his deathbed. 

I like movies with happy endings. So sue me!

Tom King
© 2023
                                              

I Think Angels Took Pity on Me

The scene of the action. I worked in the mop
shop on the left side of the brown building.
Doc Ward's shop was behind us less than a quarter
mile. The station where I bought Mission Orange
Grape Nehi and, of course, Dr. Pepper is the white
building at the far left which often sold gas at 17¢ a 
gallon when he got into a price war with the station
across the street where Mom bought baloney.*

My friend John worked at one of my hometown's ubiquitous broom shops. Doc Ward had a shop on College Drive where John, now a respectable dentist, worked. I worked just down the street making mops for EK Birdwell. Everybody pretty much had a job in Keene, Texas. At one point it was the per capita most heavily industrialized college town in America someone figured. It was mostly because we worked our way through high school and college to pay our tuition.

John had warned me before I went to work at the mop shop to watch out for the pranks they liked to play on new guys. So, my second day at Birdwell's, the guys tried to send me down to Doc Ward's to borrow back our "handle stretcher." There was a whole, unnecessarily detailed story about mop handles that had been cut too short that went with the request. We worked strictly on piece time so a trip down to Doc's would not earn me a nickel and back then, I could get a bottle of Grape Nehi for a nickel. My thrifty soul, smelled a rat. 

So, I asked the if they wanted #2 or #4 stretching oil to go with it and by their smirks I knew I'd dodged one of those get-the-new-guy pranks. Later they tried to send me to the broom shop for a yarn stretcher. I used the time to step over to the gas station next door for a 16 oz.  Mission Orange. When I got back, I told Rocky who was on his third attempt to "get me" that the broom shop guys had put it under his mop machine. Rocky actually looked under the machine for a second before he caught himself.

For some reason I managed to avoid pranks. I think my guardian angel looked out for me. Tommy Lewis attempted to rig my mop taping and trimming station so that when you pulled the handle release it dumped a big box of mop yarn clippings on your head. Unfortunately (for him) I was over on the mop making machine learning how to make mops that day and EK came in to get a mop sample to put on one of the trucks. He wanted to make sure the sample was perfect and I don't think he trusted any of us to do it right. 

Anyway, E.K. shoved the mop's handle up into the catch above him, taped and trimmed the mop and then gave the release rope a big jerk. A cascade of white mop fuzz rained down on his head. He did not look happy. I managed to look duly shocked and thus avoided retribution. I was laughing so hard inside, however, I think I was internally hemorrhaging. Tommy on the other hand looked like a cat trying to pretend it hadn't just eaten the canary while having yellow feathers sticking out of his whiskers.

While working at summer camp, I had two pranksters go after me. I suppose I looked a likely target. My soon-to-be buddy, the young not-yet-a-doctor Allen tried putting jalapenos and bay leaves in my pancakes, but the kitchen staff, whose aid in the prank he'd enlisted, switched the poisoned pancakes and stuck some extra bay leaves in the ones they gave him. There's no taste quite like onion jalapeno chili powder bay leaf pancakes with butter and syrup. Jack ran choking and gagging across the dining area to the water fountain. It took him 3 days to get rid of the taste. He even apologized to me afterward for even thinking of such a thing.

Another prankster dumped water on one of the kitchen girls after he failed to pull off the old glass balanced on a nail gag on me. He picked the wrong victim. The next day the cook called him aside while one of the girls swapped his glass of red Kool-Aid for a glass of onion juice with red food coloring and ice in it. Tim took a big swig of it while the campers were singing the prayer song. The camp director fixed him with an icy stare when he started coughing and sputtering and he had to wait till the song was over before staggering to the water fountain to spend an unpleasant half hour trying and clear his palate.

I learned from all this that you never prank your boss, the kitchen staff, the bookkeeping staff or the innocent. Angels are watching and the word "karma" is probably derived from observation of the likely gleeful angelic works of retribution perpetrated upon naughty persons.

© 2023 by Tom King

*The photo above was taken from the parking lot of Ada's Cafe across the street from the mop shop, where I would on rare occasions buy myself breakfast or lunch of a warm Sunday morning, taking a considerable chunk out of my pitiful wages for the week. But boy howdy, the woman could cook!

Shopping With My Sweetie

Lost in Walmart

Since you'll be incommunicado all weekend and we could hardly hear each other, I thought I'd tell you this story before I forget it. We went shopping yesterday. It was social security check day for everybody, so Walmart was packed. We got lucky and I got a mobility cart for Mom. We'd already walked to the Ross store and then to Panda Express and then over to Walmart so she was fading fast. We put our folding camp chairs in the basket. (Walmart has taken away the outside benches during CoVid and never put them back, so we take our own chairs to wait for the return bus). Also loaded the bag from Ross, and Mom's purse in there. This info is important to the story. Mom took off in the electric cart and I waited around to see if anyone dropped off another cart on their way out. My knees have had it so when I can get off them it helps. My left knee has a big dent in it where the cartilage has worn away and left it bone on bone. I now understand why Grandpa used to walk the way he did. I walk like that now. Anyway nobody gave up a cart, so I took off with the shopping basket full of stuff looking for your Mom. The woman can disappear faster than a Navy SEA:L in full camo in the middle of a jungle. I searched for her for quite a while, bought some clearance sale chrysanthemums and scanned the retail horizon before me. No sign of my Sweet Baboo. Then I got a bright idea. I'd call her phone and get her to tell me where she was. To my surprise and relief, when I called, I heard her the distinctive sound of her phone ringing somewhere up ahead of me. So off I went trying to find the source of the sound. She wasn't answering her phone so I figured I'd follow the ringing. I have her set up with an old-fashioned telephone ring so it's quite loud and easily to identify. Still, I couldn't quite track down the source of the ringing. It seemed to move here and there ahead of me. When the phone went to voice mail, I called again. The ringing sounded really close by so I took off again in pursuit. This time it sounded like she was in the cleaning supplies (not surprising), so I hurried on hoping to catch her. She still wasn't answering her phone. Again the phone went to voicemail and stopped ringing. I called again from the sour cream and yogurt section. This time it sounded like the ringing of her phone was coming from behind the back wall. I circled back found those double swinging employee doors going back into the stock room. I opened it a little and it sounded like she was back there somewhere. So I turned my cart around and parked it by the door. I rang her phone again. This time the ringing had moved off, to the left again sounding like it was moving but now moving behind the back wall of the store. I hurried to follow, hoping she'd pop out somewhere. Finally, I came to the shoe section. "Aha!" I said, knowing she'd been looking at shoes earlier. I reached the end of the back aisle and turned left onto the sneakers aisle. Again the ring tone seemed move quickly cutting across my path coming out from behind the wall. moving behind the display shelves ahead and settled on a new course somewhere up ahead somewhere. By chance, as I accelerated to catch up with her, I glanced down into the basket and stopped. My eye caught sight of a brown bag with MAMA written on it in big letters. A sudden awareness began to dawn on me. This was Sheila's handbag there in the front of my basket. And what would be in her handbag? Wallet, hand sanitizer, hairbrush, perfume, her medications, and..............................................................oh nuts! Her phone! I'd been frantically following the sound of her phone ringing at me from the front of my shopping cart trying to keep up with a phantom wife. I'm getting too old to keep up with a shopping wife. So, I went to the Subway at the front of the store, bought a drink and sat down to wait. Sure enough, in about twenty minutes, I heard my name being paged to come to the fitting room to meet my wife. I stumbled back across the store to find my sweetie perusing the clearance rack. We managed to escape Walmart once we joined forces and got out for just under $200. She says she's going to quit going shopping because she spends too much money. I'm not helping much. She shops by picking up things, trundling around for a while and then putting it back on the shelf because she thinks she's spending too much. Earlier she'd put back some shoes and some lavender hand lotion. Coming along behind her, I picked up the discarded items and carried them along with me on the side where she couldn't see them to the checkout stand. While the cashier was ringing up her stuff, I slipped the shoes and lavender lotion onto the counter while she was looking for something in her purse. I can't stand for her to not get what she wants. Us guys are like that. Our wives put up with so much from us, we jump at any opportunity to spoil them just a bit. We guys have no idea how to get in her head and just know what she needs or wants. So, if we see that she wants something, we jump on it. Notice that women and men express love in different ways. Women read your mind and do things for their men before they ask. It is their highest form of love. Sheila buys stuff for me that I didn't know I needed. Men on the other hand, express love by deed - I'll climb the highest mountain, fight tigers, cross blazing deserts and raging rivers. Our expressions of love are things we can do that we know how to do. We're lousy at guessing what women want. We don't read minds. Tell us and we're on the job. It's the nature of men and women. Men do goal directed stuff. Women build nests and social circles. Men are outwardly focused against the threats from the world against their wives and families. Women are inwardly focused, trying to make everyone in the circle, if not, happy, at least safe, alive and breathing. So guys like me follow our wives' handbags around Walmart, rescuing shopping discards and trying to figure out how to make them feel special. I'm going to go ice down my knees now. She's taking a nap. All is well in our little world.