The Selfish Giant (Potterton Productions, Reader’s Digest, Pyramid Productions, Arrow Entertainment, 1971. released 1972)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, December 24) my husband Charles suggested we watch a YouTube post of the 1971 TV short The Selfish Giant, based on a fairy tale by Oscar Wilde. It was produced by Reader’s Digest, not exactly a company known for progressive politics, and it featured the King Sisters vocal group (or whatever their incarnation was in 1971, three decades after they’d made their professional debut with Alvino Rey’s band; one wonders if they kept themselves going like the Carter Family or the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, by recruiting descendants of the originals as the first members retired or died). What makes that particularly interesting and jarring is that the basic story itself is a socialist parable (Wilde did write “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” after all). A group of children have got into the habit of playing in the garden of the titular giant while the giant himself has been away for seven years hanging out with an ogre. While the kids have been in the garden, the trees have borne fruit regularly in autumn and the flowers have bloomed in spring and summer. The garden has become beautiful thanks to the good energy brought to it by the children who play in it. Then the giant returns from his trip and has a hissy-fit about all those children playing in “his” garden. He builds a wall around his castle and garden to keep the children out, and without them the Snow, Frost, North Wind, and Hail came to the giant’s castle and stayed there, making it winter all year round in the garden in what seemed to me to be a quite eerie anticipation of the plot of the recent animated film Frozen. The Hail in particular danced across the roof of the castle and kept the giant awake all night every night. One day the giant heard the sound of music in his garden, which turned out to come from a little linnet bird that had flown in. He also spotted the children, whom he’d walled out of the garden but who’d found an opening to come in anyway. In the presence of the children Spring, Summer, and Autumn had returned to the garden and restored it to its former beauty and bloom.

The giant saw one particular child in front of a tree, which he tried to climb but was too short to reach the branches. The giant lifted him up to the tree and, in gratitude, the little boy kissed him. The giant was so overcome by this display of affection that he decided then and there to tear down his wall and let the children have the run of his garden. But the little boy he’d helped into the tree never returned, and the giant’s heart was broken at his absence. Decades passed and the giant got old and feeble. He still longed for the return of the mystery boy, which didn’t happen until the giant was very old and about to die. When the boy finally did return he had marks on his hands and feet representing wounds he had got when nails were driven through them. “Who hath dared to wound thee?” said the giant. “Tell me, that I may take my big sword and slay him.” The boy answered, “Nay, but these are the wounds of love.” “Who art thou?” said the giant, and the boy replied, “You let me play once in your garden. Today you shall come with me in my garden, which is Paradise.” Wilde’s story, which until then the adaptation by Peter Sander (who also directed) had followed surprisingly faithfully, ends, “And when the children ran in that afternoon, they found the giant lying dead under the tree, all covered in white blossoms.” In the film, the giant and the boy walk off together, presumably to enter Heaven. Maybe it was this rather ham-handed Jesus parallel in the ending that made this socialist parable acceptable to Reader’s Digest and its executives, for until that The Selfish Giant is a pretty obvious denunciation of the whole idea of private property and the concept of building walls to “protect” what one claims as one’s own.

Narrated by Paul Hecht and produced in Canada (there’s apparently an alternate version in French in which the narrator was the great French singer/songwriter/actor Charles Aznavour), The Selfish Giant is surprisingly well done and at 26 minutes doesn’t overstay its welcome. According to imdb.com, the first film adaptation of The Selfish Giant was a British short produced in 1939. The second was an episode of the TV series Jackanory in 1967. The third was this one, and then there was a Soviet 10-minute adaptation in 1982, additional shorts in 2003 and 2022, and a British feature from 2013 that apparently expanded the story significantly, since imdb.com’s synopsis reads, “Two thirteen-year-old working-class friends in Bradford seek fortune by getting involved with a local scrap dealer and criminal,” though Oscar Wilde is still credited as “inspiring” the film. It’s not surprising that Charles, who remembered seeing this fairly regularly on TV in his childhood, had fond memories of it and wanted to share it with me, and I notice from the moviemagg.blogspot.com back files that we’d already watched it in 2013 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-selfish-giant-potterton.html) and 2023 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-selfish-giant-potterton-productions.html). I closed my 2023 post with the words, “The Selfish Giant was acceptable entertainment, though it seemed to be an odd thing to watch in an era in which Donald Trump is poised to regain the Presidency in the 2024 election with a promise to ‘close the border’ and ‘drill, drill, drill.’ Alas, Trump is such a total psychopath it’s impossible to imagine the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come, Cindy-Lou Who or a fairy-tale child who turns out to be the resurrected Jesus opening him up and turning him into a normal, compassionate human being!” And in 2013 I wrote, “I couldn’t help imagine the story as Ayn ‘Virtue of Selfishness’ Rand would have written it; in her version, of course, the giant’s brilliant entrepreneurial spirit would have ensured that his garden blossomed while everyone else’s stayed stuck in winter, and at the end he would emerge from behind the wall and say, ‘If you want to play in my garden, you will have to do so on my terms.’”