Title:
A Christmas Carol
Format:
Film production for television – according to an Associated Press piece from January 1955 it was shot in colour, but internet
sources suggest only a black-and-white version now survives. Certainly that was
the only format I was able to find it in, and would have been how the majority
of viewers at the time would have seen it, so I am putting it down as
black-and-white in my categories.
Country:
USA
Production
company:
Desilu Productions, for CBS
Year:
1954 (first broadcast on the CBS network on December 23rd
that year)
Length:
52 minutes
Setting:
Victorian – supposedly British, as there’s mention of
pounds and shillings, but as often seems to be the case in American versions
there’s little or no attempt at any British accents.
Background:
This was made for an anthology series called Shower of Stars, which ran on the CBS
network in the United States from the autumn of 1954 to the spring of 1958. I
have found some suggestion online that every edition of Shower of Stars was produced by Desilu, although I haven’t been
able to verify that. Evidently broadcast approximately once a month, it was
mostly known for lighter, musical and comedy fare rather than hard-hitting
drama.
Desilu, of course, were one of the top independent
production companies in US television during the 1950s and 60s, known
particularly for their co-founder Lucille Ball’s sitcom I Love Lucy. These days, however, they are probably best known for being
the original makers of Star Trek.
Cast and crew:
Fredric March is probably one of the most distinguished
actors ever to have played Scrooge, going solely in terms of awards – he was
twice a winner of the Academy Award for Best Actor, although I would suggest
that these days he is little known outside of the world of film buffs. Basil Rathbone as Marley might be a slightly better-remembered performer,
particularly as he is well-known for his role as one of the big screen’s most
prominent Sherlock Holmeses.
Director Ralph Levy handled various other entries into
the Shower of Stars series, and had
been working in television since its earliest days in the United States in the
1940s. He continued directing filmed drama series right up until the dawn of
the 1980s, helming episodes of Hawaii
Five-O.
The adaptation and the lyrics for the songs were written
by acclaimed American playwright Maxwell Anderson, celebrated for such works as
Anne of the Thousand Days, although I
doubt this features very high in anybody’s lists of his greatest achievements. Bernard Hermann, the hugely successful Hollywood composer behind such things as Psycho’s strings, provided the score,
although again I don’t think this is likely to be remembered as one of his
greatest achievements.
One unusual note on the acting score is that Queenie
Leonard reprises the Mrs Cratchit role she had previously played in the 1949 American television version.
 |
| "Humbug!" |
Underdone Potato:
In an interesting twist to how these things usually work,
we start outside in the street, see the two charitable gentlemen soliciting
another donation from someone else, and then follow them into Scrooge’s office,
where they are met with their usual response. March gives a bizarre smile after
delivering the “surplus population”
line, as if Scrooge were utterly delighted for having come up with it, and it
makes him seem a little demented.
Ray Middleton seems a bit too old, a bit too solid and
several shades too over-the-top for Fred, and is frankly pretty dreadful in the
part. He’s clearly been cast with more of an eye on the second role he plays in
the production, as we’ll come to later.
Despite not having much of the original dialogue to deliver,
Basil Rathbone does a good turn as Marley. Indeed, he’s possibly the best thing
in this, and his mournful cries of “Oh
God…” as he backs out of the room and fades away after speaking to Scrooge
are quite genuinely disturbing.
Past:
The Ghost of Christmas Past is very definitely female,
and for a good reason – Sally Fraser is cast both as the spirit and as Belle,
with Scrooge noticing the resemblance. She’s actually quite cheerful and kind
towards Scrooge, more so than the Spirit seems to be in the original book when
it’s perhaps a little more distant towards him.
There’s quite a nice transition when she persuades
Scrooge to follow her out of his bedroom window, and they step through the
shutters onto the edge of the dance floor at old Fezziwig’s Christmas party.
Anderson does rather labour the point, however, when he has the spirit reply to
Scrooge’s delight at seeing “Old
Fezziwig, alive again!” with “No, not
alive again, this is Christmas Past.”
The part as a whole seems a bit too posh and refined –
less of a works Christmas Eve knees-up, and more like something out of a Jane
Austen adaptation. Ebenezer and Belle getting all operatic with one another
probably doesn’t help things a great deal in this regard.
When the spirit then moves things on to show Belle
rejecting him, it’s handled in something of a cack-handed manner which makes it
unclear whether this is something which happened in the same location at a
later Christmas, or whether after singing their song she’s decided that’s quite
enough of that, and dumped him on the spot.
This is all we see, with nothing of Scrooge at school, no
mention of Fan, and no glimpse of Belle happily married later in life.
Present:
The Ghost of Christmas Present is also a figure familiar
to Scrooge – it’s Ray Middleton again, who also plays Fred. A beardless version
of the spirit seemingly covered in cheap tinsel, he’s better here than he is as
Fred, but that’s not saying a great deal. After singing an interminably dull
song about how Christmas, he shows Scrooge just a single vision, a rather
treacly depiction of Christmas in the Cratchit household.
Once again Anderson seems to lay it on a bit thick,
having Bob tell his wife that he’d be able to buy Tiny Tim the medical care he
needs with “…just a few more shillings a
week.”
As this is the only scene of the present we are shown,
Anderson takes the guessing game about Scrooge being a dangerous animal and
transposes it from Fred’s party to the Cratchit house, with the children trying
to guess from Bob’s clues, which feels rather out of character for him.
Yet to Come:
In trimming the story down to fit an hour-long slot on
commercial television, this is the section that has suffered the most. During
the early part of the story, I noticed that weirdly, Scrooge’s dwellings had a
stuffed raven as a bit of set decoration. During the Christmas Present section,
the spirit seems to bring this creature back to life and send it flying out of
Scrooge’s window.
Now the bird returns, sitting and shuffling around to
sort of indicate that it wants Scrooge to look at some graves in a graveyard.
He sees his own grave, dated 1843 – the year of the book’s release, of course,
which perhaps suggests he’ll die this very year if he doesn’t reform his ways –
and then the grave of Tiny Tim (bizarrely, labelled “Tiny Tim” and not “Timothy
Cratchit”).
And that’s it.
 |
| Er... The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, apparently. I can't help but feel this was a rather serious piece of miscasting... |
What’s To-Day:
Scrooge asks the boy what day it is out of his window,
but doesn’t send him for a turkey. He meets the charitable gentlemen in the
street again and gives them what seems to be nothing more than a bit of loose
change, but they appear amazed and delighted by it.
He goes to Fred’s and asks him to “save me some mince pie…” as he’ll be coming back later, before he
heads of to the Cratchits. There is no pretending to still be mean and horrible
in this version, he’s forgiving and repentant. He’s not that kind, though, as
he’s invited them round for Christmas dinner without even having provided a new
bird himself – perhaps Anderson was making a point about not liking what
Dickens does in the original, as Mrs Cratchit has a line earlier on about how
many hours their meagre goose will take to cook.
“Would you like to
hear my Christmas song?” Tim asks Scrooge at the end. No, we bloody wouldn’t!
We heard it a few minutes ago in the Christmas Present section, and it was
terrible then! However, we – and Scrooge – have to sit there and suffer it, and
incredibly the whole thing ends with about two minutes of a close-up on Scrooge’s
face while he listens to this dirge.
Review:
Often labelled as a musical, I’m not sure whether that’s
actually the case with this production. For one thing the songs are – mercifully!
– relatively few, but also they are actually all a part of the action, all sung
by characters in context. So, for example, you have carollers singing in the
street, people singing at a party, the Ghost of Christmas Present singing to
Scrooge… the characters are all aware of singing and having sung as a part of
their actual world.
The main problem with the songs is that none of them
serve to move the story on in any fashion – they simply appear, sit there
wasting time for a couple of minutes usually repeating one line over and over
again, holding up the action for no good reason and bringing the pace of the
whole production to a complete standstill. Nor do any of them have the
redeeming quality of being in any way special or memorable.
Maxwell Anderson may have been a highly-acclaimed writer,
but his decision to throw out a lot of Dickens’s original dialogue and replace
it with inventions of his own only results in disappointment here. According to
the Associated Press in 1955, at $100,000 this was reckoned to have possibly
been the most expensive one-hour television special yet made. While some of the
effects work quite well, it’s hard to work out what they spent all of that
money on, as for the most part this is quite a threadbare production, both
physically and imaginatively.
In a nutshell:
Distinctly unimpressive, and not worth seeking out.
Links:
No comments:
Post a Comment