Gah. Not quite good enough to be Uncanny Valley, but definitely in the Creepy Foothills.
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“It’s a Wonderful Film” pays some homage to “A Christmas Carol”.
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Addendum: There’s a Rifftrax version of this.
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This one is something:
This version is 70 minutes long, and yet inexplicably has time for:
- An introductory scene with Fred where he slides on the ice with some neighborhood kids, and meets Tiny Tim and one of the other Cratchit sons. They give him a shopping list for their father.
- An extended scene with Fred and Bob Cratchit, where they pour wine and talk about Scrooge.
- A scene where Bob Cratchit gets into a snowball fight with some kids, then teams up with them to throw a snowball at the next person who walks by. That person is Scrooge, Bob knocks his hat off, it gets run over by a carriage, Bob gets fired and has to forfeit his last weeks wages (plus some more) to cover the cost of the hat.
- An extended sequence where Bob Cratchit goes on a shopping spree.
- A scene at a restaurant before he goes home where he does not tip the waiter and checks the authenticity of the change by biting one of the coins.
- An extended scene with Marley’s ghost where Scrooge calls the cops on him. They don’t see the ghost, and instead make a joke about spirits as in alcohol.
- With the ghost of Christmas Past:
- An extended sequence where young Scrooge talks to one of his schoolmates about why he is not going home for Christmas, shortly before F(r)an shows up to tell him that he can go home after all.
- With the ghost of Christmas Present:
- An extended scene where Scrooge and the spirit use the spirit’s powers to defuse arguments between random people on the street, multiple times.
- An extended scene in a church where a choir sings O Come All Ye Faithful and we see Fred, his Fiance, Bob Cratchit, and Tiny Tim.
- An extended scene of children sliding on the ice in front of the church from the previous scene. Fred attempts to get his fiance to slide on the ice. The minister chases off the kids, then slides briefly himself. Fred and Bess slide on the ice and fall into a snow pile, ending with a kiss.
- A Brief scene with Bob Cratchit carrying Tiny Tim home on his shoulders. Scrooge asks about Tiny Tim’s fate during this sequence instead of the one that follows.
- An extended version of the scene at the Cratchit’s house, including a brief acknowledgement that Bob has been fired. This scene is 7 minutes long, making it a full 10% of the runtime.
- A 20 second montage of the events Scrooge has encountered with both spirits up to this point.
- A brief scene of Scrooge preparing to shave after waking up on Christmas morning, laughing in the mirror.
Conversely, it doesn’t have time for:
- Marley’s ghost to sit down. Scrooge never offers.
- The wandering spirits.
- The party at Fezziwig’s. Instead, we are treated to a young Scrooge and another clerk putting up shutters and briefly interacting with Fezziwig.
- Belle. Since there’s no party, she isn’t present there, and there are no more memories with the Ghost of Christmas past after that. Scrooge pulls her cloak over her head and wakes up in his bed throttling a pillow. Scrooge doesn’t really have any bad memories of his past in this version.
- Ignorance and Want, the children of Man. Maybe they were sliding on the ice and I just missed them. The primary purpose of the Present section in this version seems to be to show Scrooge just how great Christmas is, with it literally ending with him saying “I love Christmas!”
- The ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. The entire sequence lasts just under 7 minutes. There is no scene of anyone fencing his possessions, nor of the couple who will now have more time to pay their debts.
- Much of an ending. The entire sequence after scrooge wakes up on Christmas morning is less than 8 minutes. It’s not like anything is missing, really, it just feels like a bit of a weak payoff.
- Respect for the source material. In addition to the largely pointless new scenes detailed above, there are numerous dialogue changes throughout. I’m not opposed to changing the script for a specific purpose, but these changes feel more like someone was transcribing the book from vague memory, and it really does the prose a disservice.
Also, is it possible for acting to be both over-the-top and lazy at the same time? Nearly everyone in this feels like they’re exaggerating their lines too much, but also somehow not committing to their character. It’s hard to describe.
There are other miscellaneous issues. Everything is too clean, and nobody seems to be too bad off, including the Cratchits. The accents don’t seem right either. I couldn’t tell if anyone was trying for a British accent, or some sort of Mid-Atlantic accent. It also lacks any real teeth. Scrooge is meant to be haunted by these ghosts, not sold a time-share.
Not recommended.
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But…but…Terry Kilburn as Tiny Tim! 
Gotta love MGM, no dirt allowed!
Why are they calling that version the “very first” on film? The first was in 1908; such bullshit! From 2016:
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The only things I remember about this version are: the snowball fight, sliding on ice, roasted chestnuts, and Reginald Owen’s odd crouch while delivering his lines.
Other problems this movie has are:
- All the “good” people can immediately be detected because they are incessantly joyful.
- The people who made this movie apparently never actually tried to pick up snow in their bare hands.
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A Christmas Carol (1954)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13569424
(This is not oneboxing for some reason…)
This one opens with a musical number, as this is a musical of sorts. There are carolers singing along to a man with a flute. They change locations a few times in order to provide establishing shots until we land on a man buying a book in a bookstore. He’s buying a copy of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The book opens to reveal the opening credits to this production, rather than the opening passages of the book. The man then leaves the bookstore and bumps into the two men who are gathering funds for the poor. This is not a framing device like many other adaptations. This man appears to exist in the world of the story, and he’s buying a copy of the story he’s in. Sure, it seems to be fake, but it’s still a pretty heavy concept to throw at your audience so early in what is an otherwise inoffensively mediocre adaptation. This version is essentially a TV movie, and has a runtime of 52 minutes. Between the short runtime and the addition of music, this one is pretty bare bones in terms of content from the book. The two men proceed to the offices of Scrooge & Marley and events unfold in much the same way as most adaptations. I won’t keep up the play-by-play, but I do want to call out one specific moment in this scene. After Scrooge delivers the classic line “They’d rather die, they’d better do it. Decrease the surplus population.”, he makes a very unusual facial expression, that seems entirely out of character, and then just sort of moves on. I haven’t found anything that seems to indicate one way or another, but is this an instance of corpsing?
Here’s the moment:
It’s the only instance I noticed of this, but it’s just weird. There’s also another slightly strange interaction with his nephew where he goes out of his way to avoid saying the word Hell. I assume it was to satisfy Standards and Practices of the time, but with all of the other edits to the text, why not just eliminate the line entirely?
A note about the general look and feel. This is an early television production, and it shows. In many ways this is as much a stage play as anything else. The sets are generally very small and feel a bit cramped at times. This is, thus far, the only adaptation I’ve seen that makes it look as though Scrooge and Bob Cratchit live in houses of roughly the same size.
The ghost of Jacob Marley is played by Basil Rathbone. It’s a name I’ve heard of, but I’m not specifically familiar with any of his work. His performance is decent. The special effects are also surprisingly decent for 1950s television. There’s also an odd line about Marley having no balls that I’ve not seen in any other version. This scene proceeds more or less as normal, although it changes up quite a bit of dialogue, and is surprisingly long relative to the total runtime. There’s also a bit where Marley leaves behind a ghostly ledger to reinforce to Scrooge that the encounter was not just a dream.
The Spirit of Christmas Past is played by the same actor as Belle in the Fezziwig scene. It’s odd because we are introduced to her as the spirit before we’re introduced to whom she is supposed to resemble. Likely due to time constraints, the Fezziwig scene is almost the only scene present during the Past chapter. The party at Fezziwig’s is less a rowdy dance at the warehouse and more a fancy dinner party. Due to this being a musical, Young Scrooge and Belle sing a duet. After the duet, and presumably after some time has passed (despite seemingly being on the same set), Belle releases Scrooge from his engagement for pretty much the usual reasons. This scene is so perfunctory that you’d be forgiven for not understanding the point of this chapter at all.
The Spirit of Christmas Present is played by the same actor as Scrooge’s nephew. It’s probably worth mentioning how much he looks like Will Ferrel, to me at least. This chapter consists of the Spirit doing a musical number and some stage magic that segues into the typical scene at Bob Cratchit’s house. They make the interesting choice of combining the Cratchit family with the guessing game that is usually at Fred’s. There’s also a solo sung by Tiny Tim.
The Spirit of Christmas Future is entirely absent, unless you count the crow that appears in the graveyard that Scrooge arrives at. He bumps into his own headstone, and then that of Tiny Tim. He gets upset, and the wakes up in his bed. The whole sequence is like maybe 2 minutes.
The ending skips the part where Scrooge conscripts a random boy to buy a turkey for Bob Cratchit’s family, although he does ask what day it is. He then bumps into the charity solicitors, makes a quick stop at Fred’s house, steals a Christmas decoration to put on his business, and then visits Bob Cratchit, where Tim reprises his song from earlier. The End.
While it’s certainly possible to do an adaptation in the appropriate spirit with a shorter time budget, this version strips out a significant amount of content and replaces it with largely irrelevant songs. There’s nothing specifically wrong with the songs themselves, it’s just that they don’t really fit the tone of the story, and do nothing to enhance it. Instead, they mostly fill time that would be better served by the actual plot It feels a bit like a variety show with A Christmas Carol bolted onto it rather than a musical version of the story. It ends up being The Star Wars Holiday Special version of A Christmas Carol.
Not recommended.
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This version is a curiosity. Notable for having its light-hearted music written by Bernard Herrmann (which is an unusual choice) and staring Fredric March (who should have done a better job).
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Somehow I missed this when I was looking back through the posts. I try to reply to any one that mentions a specific version when I post about it. The thumbnail even includes his goofy expression…
I definitely need to see the RiffTrax version.
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There’s also this:
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I had planned to watch a couple more before the deadline, but that didn’t end up happening. I was able to watch the Albert Finney one, however. It’s a pretty good version to end on, honestly
In general, I think it gets most of the essential elements right, and is faithful in spirit if not in letter. There’s definitely some editorializing to make the script more approachable to a 1970s audience, but I don’t think any of it hurts too much. This is likewise a musical, so there are some sections that have been shortened, others that have been extended, and yet others that have been omitted. Again, I think they strike an acceptable balance here. I like the scene during I Hate People where he is going around to his various debtors and attempting to collect and using that as leverage for additional personal gain. It even culminates in what I think might be the best explanation for why he’s eating soup by his fireplace right before Marley’s ghost shows up. The songs are decent enough, but importantly they contribute to the story rather than distract from it. Alec Guiness’ performance as Marley is… something. I had planned to make a genuine class joke before watching this film, but that is not an apt description of his very campy portrayal. It’s a choice, to be sure, and I don’t dislike it, but it’s not my favorite. Similar are my feelings about Albert Finney’s Scrooge. His performance is a bit more of a caricature, which I suppose better fits the tone of a musical. I kind of half like him as Scrooge, if that makes sense. He does a good job of portraying a curmudgeonly old man while somehow also being slightly off (He was only 33 at the time.) He’s also weirdly likable despite very obviously doing normal Scrooge-like things.
There are a few questionable decisions, like setting the movie in 1860 instead of 1843 and making Belle (Isabel here) Fezziwig’s daughter. They’re mostly harmless changes, but I’m not sure what the purpose of them is either. Probably the biggest departure is during the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come sequence, where Scrooge falls into his grave. This was apparently the first time this was done in an adaptation, and I’m generally a fan, as it adds a bit more fear to that scene and also provides a nice visual transition to return to Scrooge’s bed. Only that’s not what happens in this version. In this version, Scrooge keeps falling until he arrives in Hell, where he is met by Marley who informs him that he will now become a clerk for the Devil, and specifically mentions how their relationship will mirror Scrooge and Cratchit’s. On the one hand, I can appreciate what they’re attempting here. They’re being very specific about what kind of punishment he can expect. Where I think it fails, other than being a pretty trippy version of Hell, is that I’ve never really seen Scrooge’s redemption about him being good in order to avoid eternal damnation, but rather about him seeing the error of his ways and choosing to be good because he is no longer afraid of being hurt by the world.
Recommended
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Yes. To me the book is a Victorian talking cure.
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… I knew I’d seen him somewhere before 
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One of my favorites:
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I’ll add it to the list, maybe for next year…
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Since you’ve already done this one: A somewhat unique take… I don’t think I’d go into a Muppets movie expecting to critique the historical accuracy, but…
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Here is a nice short one that was on our local NPR station…
The animation is kind of hysterical… But I love H. Johnson’s reading!
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From just after the timestamp that link started at… I’ll say, that made me wonder if it was an entirely different kind of video, wink, wink.
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