On March 1, 1957, CBS televised Flannery O’Connor’s short story The Life You Save May Be Your Own, starring Gene Kelly and Agnes Moorehead. In the original story, a one-armed handyman named Mr. Shiftlet agrees to marry a woman’s handicapped daughter if he can keep her rundown car. Not caring much for the civil union, he abandons the girl in a bar and drives away to face the fury of God, symbolically spinning toward him in a tornado.
O’Connor’s stories are like that — strange depictions of human sin that reveal to us how imperfect and susceptible to evil that we truly are. For this reason, her stories did not make for lighthearted television. The producers altered the story into a comedy where Mr. Shiftlet stays contentedly married at the end.
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