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.
