THE RANSOM OF RED CHIEF by O.HENRY
1001 Classic Short Stories & Tales
Jon Hagadorn
4.5 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 12 July 2023
⏱️ 28 minutes
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Summary
Back by popular demand- this is one of O.Henry's best! This "Home Alone" style comedy has been made into a movie plus countless bits on TV sitcoms have used versions of it over the years. Two hapless con men try to kidnap a wealthy man's boy but get more than they bargained for.. O.HENRY STORIES PODCAST
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Oh, Welcome to another episode of 1,001 Classic Short Stories and Tales, this time a satire from one of my favorite authors, O Henry. |
| 0:41.0 | In the Ransom of Red Chief, two small-time thieves, Sam and Bill, |
| 0:46.8 | hatch a plot to kidnap a rich man's son and hold him for ransom, only to discover that |
| 0:52.2 | the boy is a holy terror and much more than they can manage. |
| 0:55.8 | As the famous comedian W.C. Fields once said, |
| 0:59.2 | never work with animals or children. |
| 1:03.4 | If you ever saw the movie Home Alone, the story of the two sympathetic and |
| 1:07.7 | bumbling thieves was probably inspired by the characters in O'Henry's The |
| 1:12.1 | Ransom of Red Chief and now our story the Ransom of Red Chief by |
| 1:17.8 | O Henry. It looked like a good thing but wait wait till I tell you. We were down south in Alabama, Bill Driscoll and myself, when this kidnapping idea struck us. |
| 1:30.0 | It was, as Bill afterward expressed it, during a moment of temporary mental apparition, |
| 1:36.0 | but we didn't find that out until later. |
| 1:39.0 | There was a town down there as flat as a flannel cake and called summit of course. It contained |
| 1:45.3 | inhabitants of as undilliterious and self-satisfied a class of peasantry as |
| 1:50.4 | ever clustered around a maypole. |
| 1:54.4 | Bill and me had a joint capital of about $600 and we needed just $2,000 more to pull off a fraudulent |
| 2:00.9 | town lot scheme in Western Illinois whip. |
| 2:04.1 | We talked it over on the front steps of the hotel. |
| 2:07.3 | Phylo progenitiveness, says we, is strong in semi-rural communities therefore, and for other reasons a kidnapping project ought to do better there |
| 2:16.8 | than in the radius of newspapers that send reporters out in plain clothes to stir up talk about such things. |
| 2:23.4 | We knew that Summit couldn't get after us with anything stronger than constables, and maybe some |
| 2:27.8 | laxadasical bloodhounds and a diatribe or two in the weekly farmers budget. So it looked good. We selected for a victim the |
... |
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