Retro Television Review: The American Short Story Episode 7: The Displaced Person

Posted on July 19, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Saturdays, I will be reviewing The American Short Story, which ran semi-regularly on PBS in 1974 to 1981. The entire show can be purchased on Prime and found on YouTube and Tubi.

This week, we have an adaptation of Flannery O’Connor’s longest short story.

Episode #7: “The Displaced Person”

(Dir by Glenn Jordan, originally aired in 1977)

Life at a Georgia farm is thrown into turmoil when the farm’s owner, widow Mrs. McIntyre (Irene Worth), agrees to give a job to a Polish refugee named Mr. Guizac (Noam Yerushalmi). As World War II has just ended and Father Flynn (John Houseman) has assured Mrs. McIntyre that Guizac can drive a tractor, Mrs. McIntyre is happy to give Guizac a home in America. Less happy are the people who already work at the farm, most of whom see the hard-working Guizac as being a threat. Mrs. Shortley (Shirley Stoler) worries that her husband (Lane Smith) is going to lose his job to Guizac. Meanwhile, a young farmhand named Sulk (Samuel L. Jackson) enters into a business arrangement with Guizac, one that causes Mrs. McIntyre to change her opinion of Guizac. Needless to say, it all ends in tragedy.

This adaptation is based on a short story that Flannery O’Connor wrote after her own mother hired a family of Polish refugees to work at their family farm, Andalusia. This adaptation was actually filmed at Andalusia, only a few months after Flannery O’Connor’s death. The furniture seen in the house was O’Connor’s own furniture. The peacocks the drive Mrs. McIntyre crazy and which cause Father Flynn to have a religious epiphany are the same peacocks that roamed the farm when Flanney O’Connor lived there. The cemetery that Mrs. McIntyre visits is the O’Connor family cemetery. It brings a sense of authenticity to the film, one that is often missing from films made about the South.

The adaptation moves at a deliberate pace but it’s well-acted and it stays true to O’Connor’s aesthetic. Those who might complain that there are only two likable characters in the film — Mr. Guizac and Father Flynn — are missing the point of O’Connor’s story. Even Mrs. McIntyre, who initially seems to be trying to do the right thing, is blinded by the prejudices of race and class. Father Flynn never gives up on trying to redeem both Mrs. McIntyre and the rest of the world but one gets the feeling that he might be too late.

The cast is what truly makes this adaptation stand-out. Irene Worth, John Houseman, Lane Smith, Robert Earl Jones, they all give excellent performances. Samuel L. Jackson was very young when he appeared in The Displaced Person but he already had the screen presence that has since made him famous. The best performance comes from Shirley Stoler, who plays Mrs. Shortley as being a master manipulator who, unfortunately, happens to be married to a worthless man. Mrs. Shortley does what she does to protect her husband. Mr. Shortley does what he does because he’s a loud mouth bigot. Everyone has their own reasons, to paraphrase Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game. In this story, those reasons lead to tragedy.

Made-For-Television Film Review: Hogan’s Goat (dir by Glenn Jordan)

Posted on March 16, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

1971’s Hogan’s Goat opens in Brooklyn in the 1890s. This was when Brooklyn itself was still a separate city, before it become a borough of the unified New York City. If you’ve watched the video that I include with most of my Welcome Back Kotter reviews, you’ll notice the boast: “Fourth largest city” on the Welcome to Brooklyn sign. And indeed, if Brookyln had remained independent, it would now be the fourth most populated city in America, behind New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Sorry, Brooklyn.

(However, Houston thanks you.)

Local ward boss Matt Stanton (Robert Foxworth) heads home with what he thinks is exciting news. He tells his wife, Kathleen (Faye Dunaway), that he is finally going to be mayor of Brooklyn. The current mayor, a man named Quinn (George Rose), has been caught up in some sort of corruption and the Democratic political machine is ready to abandon him. Matt Stanton is about to become one of the most powerful men in New York. That’s not bad for a relatively young man who came to America from Ireland in search of a better life. Adding to Stanton’s happiness is the fact that he’ll be defeating Quinn, a canny politician towards whom Stanton holds a grudge. Kathleen, however, is worried. An immigrant herself, Kathleen met Stanton while the latter was in London. They were married in a civil ceremony and, ever since Stanton brought her back to Brooklyn, she has been lying and telling everyone that they were married in a church. Kathleen feels that she and Stanton have been living in sin and she wants to have a convalidation ceremony. Stanton refuses because doing so would mean admitting the lie in the first place and he can’t afford to lose the support of the Irish Catholic voters of Brooklyn.

However, it turns out that there are even more secrets in Stanton’s past, ones that Kathleen doesn’t know about but Quinn does. When those secrets start to come out, Kathleen comes to realize that there’s much that she doesn’t know about her husband. Stanton, with political power in his grasp, desperately tries to hold on to the image that he’s created of himself and Kathleen, leading to tragedy.

Hogan’s Goat was an Off-Broadway hit when it premiered in the mid-60s and its success led to Faye Dunaway getting her first film offers. The made-for-television version of Hogan’s Goat, which premiered on PBS and featured Dunaway recreating her stage role, is essentially a filmed play. Little effort was made to “open up” the story and, as a result, the film is undeniably stagy. It’s clear from the start the film was mostly shot to record Faye Dunaway’s acclaimed performance for posterity. Indeed, she’s the only member of the theatrical cast to appear in the film version. Dunaway does give a strong performance, easily dominating the film with her mix of nervous intensity and cool intelligence. The rest of the cast is a mixed bag. Robert Foxworth is appropriately driven and ambitious as Stanton but his Irish accent comes and goes. Philip Bosco does well as a sympathetic priest and George Rose is appropriately manipulative as Quinn.

In the end, the story of Hogan’s Goat is probably of the greatest interest to Irish-American history nerds like me, who have read and studied how Irish immigrants, especially in the 19th century, faced tremendous prejudice when coming to the United States and how they reacted by building their own political machines and dispensing their own patronage. In Hogan’s Goat, the conflict is less between more Stanton and Quinn and more between Kathleen’s traditional views and her devout Catholicism and Stanton’s own very American ambition. Whereas Kathleen still fights to retain her faith, pride, and her commitment to who she was before she married Stanton, Stanton fights for power and to conquer the man who Stanton feels has everything that he desires. In the end, Stanton’s hubris is not only his downfall but Kathleen’s as well.

Shell Game (1975, directed by Glenn Jordan)

Posted on July 22, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

Max Castle (John Davidson) is a conman who gets arrested in Florida because of a shady real estate deal. The judge releases him into the custody of his older brother, an attorney named Stephen (Robert Castle). Though Max is technically just a paralegal, he secretly helps out his brother’s clients but running elaborate scams on the people who have cheated them. When businessman Lyle Rafferty (Jack Kehoe) embezzles money from his own charity and then lets one of his employees take the fall, Max decides that Rafferty is going to be his next target.

Shell Game was a made-for-TV movie. It’s pretty obvious that it was meant to be the pilot for a weekly series, where I guess Max would have pulled a con on every different evildoer every week. Because the show is more interested in setting up who Max is and why he cons people, there’s not much dramatic tension in Shell Game. Max tricks Rafferty into buying a worthless gold mine and Rafferty falls for every single trick that Max pulls on him. Unfortunately, since Rafferty is such an easy target, there’s no real pay-off to seeing him get conned. It’s not like The Sting, where there were real stakes and dangers involved in Paul Newman and Robert Redford’s pursuit of Robert Shaw’s money. The con is just too easy.

On the plus side, Max’s old partner-in-crime is played by Tom Atkins. Atkins is so believable as a veteran conman with a heart of gold that he probably would have been a better pick for the lead role than the likable but bland John Davidson. The rest of the cast is forgettable.

Would Shell Game have worked as a weekly series? Maybe, especially if Tom Atkins was a part of the regular cast. The idea of a former conman now running scams on other con artists had the potential to be intriguing and Max hints that he was framed by his partners in Florida. I guess a weekly series would have explored that in greater detail. However, it was not to be. This shell game was played once and then forgotten.

Insomnia File No. 14: Promise (dir by Glenn Jordan)

Posted on May 24, 2016 by Lisa Marie Bowman

What’s an Insomnia File? You know how some times you just can’t get any sleep and, at about three in the morning, you’ll find yourself watching whatever you can find on cable? This feature is all about those insomnia-inspired discoveries!

If you were awake at midnight last night and if you were watching TCM, you would have seen a 1986 film called Promise.

Promise stars James Garner as Bob Beuhler, who is one of those deceptively confident men who seems to have his entire life together. He’s made a nice little life for himself, buying and selling houses and he lives in a small town where everyone appears to know and respect him. If Promise were made today, Bob is the type of person who could probably have his own A&E reality show.

But then Bob’s mother dies and we learn of a promise that Bob made forty years ago. It turns out that Bob has a younger brother, named D.J. (James Woods). D.J. suffers from schizophrenia and he’s spent all of his life living with his mother. It quickly becomes apparent that the main driving force behind Bob’s success has been the need to prove that he’s nothing like D.J. When he doesn’t take his medication, D.J. is unpredictable and suffers from violent mood swings. Bob loves his brother but he’s also scared of him.

However, Bob made a promise and he’s going to try to honor it.

It turns out to be even more difficult than he expected. Sometimes, D.J. is calm and sweetly shy. Other times, he becomes violent. The rest of the town starts to gossip about Bob’s “crazy” brother. After one fight, Bob discovers that D.J. has become catatonic. When Bob calls an ambulance, everyone in the neighborhood lines up on Bob’s lawn to watch as D.J. is taken away.

Even though D.J. is eventually released from the hospital and returns home, Bob still is unsure of whether or not he can properly care for his brother. When they go on a trip to a cabin that they often visited as children, Bob is surprised to see how “normal” D.J. is acting. But how long will it last?

When I looked up Promise on the imdb, I was not surprised to discover that it was originally made for television. The fact that nobody in the film ever curses was a dead giveaway and the script occasionally threatens to turn into a PSA. But, with all that in mind, Promise is still a wonderfully effective and rather heartbreaking little movie. James Woods has the more showy role and does a great job with it’s the far more low-key James Garner who keeps the film grounded. Watching a film like Promise, you see that Garner was really a great actor.

Promise is a sad film but it’s definitely one worth watching.

Previous Insomnia Files: