Charles Dickens's
A Christmas Carol has been adapted to the film a lot. Here's six of the most notable ones. For another take on the story, check out my Facebook page
Duckwise for the month of December 2016.
1938
A CHRISTMAS CAROL
Directed by Edwin L. Mann
Starring: Reginald Owen, Gene Lockhart, Kathleen Lockhart, Terry Kilburn, Barry MacKay, Lynne Carver, Leo G. Carroll, Lionel Braham, Ann Rutherford, Ronald Sinclair
Not Rated (G-level; mildly scary scenes).
69 minutes
As one of the first major Hollywood adaptations of
A Christmas Carol in the sound era, in the "Golden Age of Hollywood", the 1938 version produced by prolific filmmaker Joseph L. Mankiewicz is one of those "classic" movies that seems to get more respect than it deserves. On the bright side, as it comes near the front of the pack of Dickens adaptations, it doesn't follow the basic formula of scenes and word-by-word quotations that many do, so at least it's different, but it's also juvenile and bears many of the weaker traits of old-fashioned Hollywood. It's a period film, but there's no mistaking for anything but a product of the '30s, and not in a particularly good way. Originally intended to star Lionel Barrymore (which sounds pretty good, at least based on the fact that he well-known for playing the character on radio and played the Scrooge-like Mr. Potter in IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE), this version stars British character actor Reginald Owen (probably most familiar to audiences as the Banks' neighbor Admiral Boom in MARY POPPINS) in ridiculous hair and makeup. Owen may be the weakest Scrooge on this list, a bland and cartoonish rendering with seriously distracting fake eyebrows. Largely simplified and neutered of most of its darker elements, it's milquetoast with an excess of Old Hollywood varnish, including a Tiny Tim (Terry Kilburn) sporting a slick comb-over and a Fan Scrooge (Elvira Stevens) who talks like Shirley Temple. Among some of the more interesting changes from the material (of which there aren't many, except for heavy excising of darker scenes), at the beginning of the film, Bob Cratchit (Gene Lockhart) accidentally knocks Scrooge's hat off with a snowball, prompting the old miser to fire him, a development that weighs on him over Christmas.
1951
SCROOGE (U.S. release title: A CHRISTMAS CAROL)
Directed by Brian Desmond Hurst
Starring: Alastair Sim, Mervyn Johns, Hermione Baddeley, Michael Hordern, Michael J. Dolan, Francis de Wolff, Brian Worth, Kathleen Harrison, Glyn Dearman, Roddy Hughes, Jack Warner, Olga Edwardes, Peter Bull
Not Rated (PG-level; some scary moments).
86 minutes
A British production, the 1951 version, originally titled SCROOGE but released as A CHRISTMAS CAROL in the United States, is one of the film adaptations of Dickens' novel or of any Dickens novel. It's another one that avoids too specific an adherence to the familiar prose, but instead of simplifying an already simple story, it expands upon areas of interest, especially in the area of the "Ghost of Christmas Past" section, which really packs a punch. With the help of a script credited to Noel Langley, the cast of illustrious character actors plays out their overly familiar parts in unusually natural fashion and immediacy, more like a true adaptation rather than the knowing tributes to the well-known story that many other dramatizations of the story become. Alastair Sim's Scrooge is cold, rudely direct and exasperated with everyone around him, smart and sympathetic, and frequently funny, and Michael Hordern has a terrific ghostly wail as Jacob Marley. In this version, the Ghost of Christmas Past (Michael J. Dolan, an unusual male interpretation of the role which Dickens wrote as androgynous) shows Scrooge the course he took from a hopeful but poor young man to being a slick, ruthless and successful businessman, betraying the benevolence shown to him by Mr. Fezziwig (Roddy Hughes) and adopting the no-holds-barred capitalism of a new employer, Mr. Jorkin (Jack Warner), joining forces with the similarly savvy Marley and callously watching as his only friend dies as he struggles to warn Scrooge a time before to "save yourself". Glyn Dearman is a little oversized as Tiny Tim, but not annoying, which is the biggest hurdle for anyone playing the sappy little crippled boy. It's very handsome and authentic, turning Dickens brilliant but overplayed story fresh and engaging.
1984
A CHRISTMAS CAROL
Directed by Clive Donner
Starring: George C. Scott, Frank Finlay, David Warner, Susannah York, Angela Pleasence, Edward Woodward, Anthony Walters, Roger Rees, Caroline Langrishe, Lucy Gutteridge, Nigel Davenport, Mark Strickson, Timothy Bateson
Rated PG for unspecified reasons (some scary moments and mild language).
100 minutes
This is the other really great version of
A Christmas Carol. Perhaps it's unfair, but I'm usually dismissive of TV movies, but if it has George C. Scott in it, you have to check it out at least once, and if you watch it once, you realize how great this particular TV movie happens to be. At first thought, Scott doesn't seem well suited to the role of Ebeneezer Scrooge, with his stalky build that clashes with the usually lean and shriveled vision of the character (not to mention he's American), but he does play cantankerous famously well. He's also unusually boisterous, and damn it all, but you could watch George C. Scott act anything and it would be worth the time. Like Sim's take, Scott plays Scrooge naturally, reciting well known lines of dialogue with freshness and immediacy, such as cracking up sadistically at his own "buried with a stake of holly through his heart" wit. Although the movie is solid throughout, the scene of Marley's Ghost is masterful, and Frank Finlay is the best Marley I've ever seen. Painted in a metallic blue, this Marley is tragic, his voice breaking during his monologue and his wails are very much in the vein of "weeping and gnashing of teeth"-style frustration. He's ethereal enough, but never distant, and the words are rich with meaning in his delivery. The framing is small for television, but the power of it is in the performances, and the on location production in historic Shrewbury, England, along with beautiful lighting and interesting faces add to a rich flavor.
1988
SCROOGED
Directed by Richard Donner
Starring: Bill Murray, Karen Allen, Alfre Woodard, John Forsythe, John Glover, Bobcat Goldthwait, David Johansen, Carol Kane, Robert Mitchum, Nicholas Phillips, Buddy Hackett
Rated PG-13 for unspecified reasons (thematic elements, some sensuality, language and scary images).
101 minutes
Here, we're going to take a sharp turn into retro modernization with the very weird Bill Murray starring vehicle, SCROOGED. Written by recurring Murray collaborator Mitch Glazer and initial
Saturday Night Live head writer Michael O'Donoghue, and directed by Richard Donner (fresh off of LETHAL WEAPON, arguably his best movie), perhaps the best way to describe it is 'undisciplined'. SCROOGED is very funny on a certain level, but objectively, it's not exactly good. It's nuts, and not in a way that comes together. Murray plays Frank Cross, a then-modern day (1988) Scrooge of a television network executive producing a big-budget live adaptation of
"A Christmas Carol" when he's visited by the grotesquely decayed corpse of his former mentor (John Forsythe, buried under excellent makeup effects) who heralds the coming of three spirits. The Ghost of Christmas Past (David Johansen), a cigar-smoking New York cab driver, shows him the things he gave up to pursue his career, including a relationship with an old girlfriend, Claire (Karen Allen), while the Ghost of Christmas Present (Carol Kane), a sugary sweet fairy with a proclivity for violence, shows him how he mistreats his assistant Grace (Alfre Woodard), and the ghoulish Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come does his usual thing. Meanwhile, the arrival of each of the spirits creates disaster for Frank in the middle of production while a young upstart (Brice Cummings) is gunning for his job, and an employee fired the day before, Eliot Loudermilk (Bobcat Goldthwait), is aimlessly plotting revenge. The movie is all over the place and full of bizarre tonal shifts between manic comedy and really dark stuff, and while the sugary sweetness of the finale is precluded by a lot of mean-spirited joking around, it doesn't feel earned. It doesn't know whether to take itself seriously or to just be an all-out farce, but it takes aim at either alternating direction with aggressive energy. There is the strangest sequence just following the Ghost of Christmas Present segment in which Frank discovers the dead frozen body of a homeless man he met earlier underneath the streets. I sort of get it, but it's such a dark and inappropriate turn for this kind of movie. But Johansen and Kane are both hilarious, and even as things turn really black for Goldthwait's characters, I get a kick out of all his scenes. Bill Murray gives him a "zerbert" on the belly. Just beautiful.
1992
THE MUPPET CHRISTMAS CAROL
Directed by Brian Henson
Starring: Michael Caine, Steven Mackintosh, Meredith Braun, Robin Weaver
Muppets Performed by: David Goelz, Steve Whitmire, Jerry Nelson, Frank Oz, David Rudman, Don Austen, Jessica Fox (voice only), Robert Tygner
Rated G
86 minutes
The Muppet version of
A Christmas Carol was my introduction to the story and one of the most prominent Christmas movies of my childhood. It's alright. The first movie starring the Muppets since the death of Jim Henson in 1990, it's pretty strange in the canon of Muppet movies. For one, the Muppets are playing roles rather than themselves, something they repeated in MUPPET TREASURE ISLAND and had done in other contexts, but weirder is that the Muppets play it largely with reverence. It's hardly a somber film, but it's pretty faithful to the story and that becomes really questionable when the freaking Muppets start talking about death and Christianity with complete sincerity. I mean, say what? Muppets can die? They can get sick and die? They believe in God? Is he a Muppet god? It's just a little too weird. The songs are pretty good, and some of them are great, although the "extended cut" (the version on the VHS release was extended, but both the extended and the theatrical are included on the DVD) contains the very Muppet-less
"When Love is Gone" which drags the whole movie to a screeching halt. Infamous (for better and worse) Disney exec Jeffrey Katzenberg cut the scene against the director's wishes, without it, the cut is obvious, and the song tied into the concluding number,
"The Love We Found", plus Katzenberg was plainly wrong before when he wanted to cut
"Part of Your World" from THE LITTLE MERMAID, so I get it, but when I was a kid, the song was where the movie lost my attention, and the scene still feels like a slog. Plus, young Scrooge in that scene is really wooden. In terms of better songs, the opening number
"Scrooge",
"Marley and Marley" and the Ghost of Christmas Present's song
"It Feels Like Christmas" are all standouts.
"Scrooge", in particular, had a significant impact on me as a child, and I still which I could dress in black trousers, a waistcoat, gloves and a fancy-ass cape and walk around coolly with a cane while listening to my footsteps, but that's just not socially acceptable, so f*** it.
2009
A CHRISTMAS CAROL
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
Starring: Jim Carrey, Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Robin Wright, Daryl Sabara, Bob Hoskins, Cary Elwes, Steve Valentine, Ryan Ochoa, Sammi Hanratty
Rated PG for scary sequences and images.
95 minutes
Poor Robert Zemeckis. He spent years pushing and pioneering "motion-capture"-based animated films and digital 3D, and a month after his A CHRISTMAS CAROL, a movie with the full weight of the Disney marketing machine behind it, opened to mixed reviews and decent box office, James Cameron's mo-cap-heavy 3D extravaganza AVATAR tears into theaters to become the biggest movie of all time and becomes the heavily Oscar-nominated toast of Hollywood. To be fair though, even with its luster soon lost after the hype died down, AVATAR is still a decent action-adventure movie, and Zemeckis' A CHRISTMAS CAROL is all kinds of messed up. I took a date to it in my senior year of high school. It was much more about the girl than the movie, and it was 2009, so there were no good movies, and at least this one had the novelty of being in 3D. Within the trilogy of mo-cap productions directed by Zemeckis, A CHRISTMAS CAROL is a substantial improvement on THE POLAR EXPRESS, but not as good as BEOWULF. Zemeckis has made some great films, masterpieces for the ages even, such as BACK TO THE FUTURE and WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT, which is improbable because his most significant trademarks as a director are a slavish devotion to pioneering innovative effects technology and nostalgia. But the man knows what he's doing when he bothers to do it. With A CHRISTMAS CAROL, he has a lot of the right ideas but then misfires by blowing his load wildly on every possible excess he can come up with. For one, it's excessively grotesque, like Zemeckis is trying to mess with the Disney label by opening his movie with a smash cut to Marley's dead face. Worse, in the middle of Marley's wonderful "mankind was my business" monologue, Zemeckis undercuts everything by turning it into a gross-out comic beat when Marley's mouth rips wide open at the cheeks, leaving his jaw dangling and forcing him to puppeteer his own mouth. This on top of an already awful take on Marley acted by Gary Oldman, turning the tragic figure into an utterly distant and largely frozen specter. Seriously though, this movie is going out of its way to terrorize any children who unwittingly watch it, which I'd be fine with if it wasn't so often to the detriment of the material. Also on the list of bizarre excesses, Scrooge is inexplicably shrunk down to the size of a mouse during the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come section, complete with an accompanying high-pitch silly voice. Why? Um, because. There are plenty of the wildly swooping, extended camera shots through the Victorian London streets that you can only get from this sort of totally digital domain, and they look really cool in 3D, but always excessive and only more so without the 3D effect. The hyper-realistic animation looks pretty good, especially compared to THE POLAR EXPRESS (although still not on the level of THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN), and the production design of a classic Dickensian London Christmas is great, though. The music by Alan Silvestri is also very good, complete with a jubilant original song,
"God Bless Us Everyone" performed by Andrea Bocelli. In the leading role, as well as performing each of the Christmas Spirits through the wonders of motion-capture, Jim Carrey is generally good, but he's never convincing as four completely separate characters (to be fair, there is a brief acknowledgement of similarity between his laugh as Scrooge and his laugh as the Ghost of Christmas Present) and as Scrooge, his voice work sounds like a young man
trying to sound old.
