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

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Holiday Affair I was prepared to watch the next item on Turner Classic Movies’ Christmas-eve schedule – the 1938 version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol with Reginald Owen as Scrooge, directed by Edwin L. Marin (who’d directed Owen as Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet five years earlier). Owen was a last-minute substitute for Lionel Barrymore, who was identified with Scrooge on radio and whom MGM wanted for the film – only just before shooting his chronic arthritis reached the point of no return and he had to drop out of the part at the last minute. So MGM had Lionel Barrymore host the trailer and symbolically hand over the part to Owen for the actual movie. Instead my husband Charles and I watched a YouTube video post of a 1971 French animated film of Oscar Wilde’s fairy tale The Selfish Giant, a nice but rather didactic tale of a selfish giant who gets tired of the local forest kids playing in the garden of his castle. So he builds a giant wall around it and posts “No Trespassing” signs to keep them out. Only without the children around to bring joy to the trees and other plant life in the garden, the walled-off garden is subject to perpetual winter and only the North Wind, Frost and Hail want to hang out there. Eventually the selfish giant’s heart is thawed by a particularly scrawny kid who wants to be lifted onto one of the trees – and as soon as the giant does this, the tree blossoms and spring returns to the garden. The giant ultimately knocks down the wall and the children return to his garden, but he misses the child who opened his heart. He doesn’t return for many years – though since this is a fairy tale he doesn’t seem to be any older when he finally shows up – and in an explicitly Christian ending that was a real surprise coming from a writer like Wilde, he turns out to have the stigmata. When he returns for the giant, who’s old and about to die, he tells the giant, “I’m going to take you to my garden – Paradise.” The 1971 version was half an hour long and directed by Peter Sander, who also wrote the screenplay based on Wilde’s story. It was narrated in English by Paul Hecht and in French by the great cabaret singer Charles Aznavour, and the English version we watched featured three ultra-sappy soft-rock songs by, of all people, the King Sisters. 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!