Scrooged

Not the actual title card from the film - this is the one from the trailer, but I only have the film on blu-ray so can't do grabs from it on my laptop, which only has a DVD drive. I'm sure you wanted to know all of that...!

Title:

Scrooged

Format:

Colour feature film

Country:

USA

Production company:

Mirage Productions, for Paramount Pictures

Year:

1988

Length:

101 minutes

Setting:

Contemporary USA.

Background:

A modern-day retelling of the story set in the headquarters of a fictional television network – and actually, probably the first big, mainstream Hollywood adaptation of A Christmas Carol for fifty years.  The most famous versions made in the meantime had all either been for television or had been British films.

Cast and crew:

Bill Murray plays the Scrooge equivalent here, television executive Frank Cross, the president of the fictional ‘IBC’ network. Murray was a huge star at the time, well known for another highly successful film involving ghosts, Ghostbusters. Karen Allen plays love interest and Belle equivalent Claire Phillips – Allen was probably best known at time for playing opposite Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Frank’s brother James is played by Murray’s own brother John, while Robert Mitchum makes a heavyweight cameo as Frank’s boss. Bobcat Goldthwait as the employee fired by Frank seems to be doing a sort of impression of another Ghostbusters alumnus, Rick Moranis – but then again, as I’ve never seen Goldthwait in anything else, this may just be how he is all the time. Alfre Woodard as Grace is not an actress I am very familiar with, but she had earlier in the decade been nominated for an Academy Award, so certainly added to a storied cast list.

Director Richard Donner had previously handled two of the best-known films of the 1970s, The Omen and the Christopher Reeve Superman. Mitch Glazer and Michael O’Donoghue provided the screenplay – they had both worked on magazines before moving into scriptwriting, and had been writing partners on other projects in the past.

Not exactly the best boss in town...

Underdone Potato:

The film takes place in a storybook idea of a television network – the big, fancy network offices, but with a working production studio present in the building as well, making a live television adaptation of A Christmas Carol for broadcast on Christmas Eve in the United States, the type of programme that even by 1988 was pretty much a thing of the past.

Frank Cross fires an underling who dares to question him, and has his Bob Cratchit equivalent – his personal assistant, Grace – compiling his Christmas list of which important business contacts get a bath towel, and which a VHS machine. We see various examples of how cynical and morally bankrupt Frank is, although he is also quite amusingly blackly comic with it.

Frank is visited by the ghost of his former boss, Lew Hayward, who warns him to change his ways and tells him he will be visited by three spirits – but in the middle of the day, rather than the night. Also unlike the original, Frank has time back in the ‘real’ world between each of his ghostly visitations, seeming increasingly unravelled to his colleagues as he struggles to come to terms with what’s happening to him.

The character of Lew gets one of the few of Dickens’s original lines to appear in the film, when he tells Frank that “mankind was my business!”

Past:

The first of the three spirits is probably the most memorable of this adaptation – in this instance, the Ghost of Christmas Past is a grubby, loud-mouthed, obnoxious New York cab driver. He makes for a good foil to the cynical cross, and takes Frank to some locations that have echoes of Scrooge’s upbringing in the original.

Instead of lonely schooldays, we see a lonely home life for young Frank, with the television his only company and how he lives his life vicariously – actually, quite a good parallel for Scrooge’s enthusiasm for his childhood storybooks in the original. A party at the television network where Frank has just started working makes a good replacement for Fezziwig’s party. (Although Dickens would never, in his wildest imaginings, have pictured a party which featured a young lady making pictures of her backside on the office photocopier!)

Having said that, trying to persuade us that Murray is 17 years old – 17! – as the young Frank is almost as ludicrous as Seymour Hicks trying to get away with portraying the younger Scrooge in the 1935 version. Indeed, Murray and Karen Allen never seem to look any different at any point in the twenty-odd year time frame of their characters which they portray during the film, which is something of an issue but one the film pretty much cheerfully ignores.

There’s also an equivalent of the Belle scene, as Claire tells Frank that they should split up… while the young Frank is dressed as a giant dog on the set of a children’s television show. Once again, probably not something Dickens ever had in mind…

Present:

The Ghost of Christmas Present is portrayed as a hugely irritating character here, but deliberately so – Carol Kane looks like a woman going to a fancy dress part as a fairy when she’s slightly too old for it, and adopts a forthright, squeaky-voiced, overly-excitable and at times quite violent attitude towards Frank.

We’re shown Christmases at Frank’s brother’s house, and with his assistant Grace. Between the visits of the Ghost of Christmas Past and Present, Frank had gone to seek out Claire at the homeless shelter where she’s now working, and meets a group of drunken homeless people who are convinced he’s Richard Burton. At the end of the Christmas Present section, Frank finds that one of these three has frozen to death out on the streets – quite a touching moment which, surprisingly, isn’t ‘put right’ at the end of the film, although we do see him as a cheerful ‘angel’ alongside the Ghost of Christmas Present, watching the reformed Frank briefly at the end.

Yet to Come:

In one of the ‘gaps’ between the spirits’ visitations to Frank, he is frightened by a vision of the traditional Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come… Only to find it is an actor dressed up for the part for the TV version being made. The ‘IBC’ version of the character actually looks quite cheap and tacky, while the ‘real’ version Frank goes on to meet is the full works – even having some sort of creatures living under its robes, perhaps suggested by Ignorance and Want lurking under Present’s robes in the original book.

The spirit shows Frank a future where Grace’s son Calvin is confined to an asylum, where Claire has become even harsher and more cynical than himself, and he has died and about to be cremated. Frank finds himself in the coffin as it starts to burn, perhaps an unconscious echo of Scrooge’s descent into hell in the 1970 musical version. His legs are even starting to burn, as he awakes once more into the real world…

Not the 'actual' Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come!

What’s To Day:

Frank doesn’t need to ask what day it is, but he does discover from the time that he “hasn’t missed” his live television special, which he promptly proceeds to hijack, going off onto a great long rant about how everyone should be so much nicer to one another. This means it’s still Christmas Eve, and Frank extols the virtues of what a wonderful day of the year that is – something I and I think many others would agree on. Christmas Eve has a magical quality all of its own which the day itself somehow lacks, and the film is quite clever in tapping into that sentiment.

There’s also a little bit of sentiment from the film’s Tiny Tim equivalent, Calvin, of course – he finally speaks for the first time in several years to deliver the “God bless us, every one!” line. Unlike Scrooge, Frank also gets to be reunited with his lost love, with Claire racing to the television studios in a cb driven, of course, by the Ghost of Christmas Past seen earlier in the film.

Review:

While the end credits claim that this film was merely “suggested by” Dickens’s book, it has the structure and intention of A Christmas Carol well and truly running through it, and even one or two of the lines – while at the same time of course deliberately referencing the original with its conceit of being based around a live television spectacular adaptation of the novel.

The television aspect actually does make the film well and truly like a period piece now. It’s a relic from the days when old-fashioned linear network television was the king of the modern media, before the arrival of the internet and the fragmentation of the audience with so many new things to watch and so many new ways of watching them. It does at times almost feel as if the film is something of an attack on television – or more charitably, a satire of – skewering some of its very worst and most tasteless excesses. Which is pretty rich, when you consider some of the absolute rubbish the film industry has always churned out, and continues to do so.

This is certainly not rubbish, however. While it may have quite a cynical edge, it’s an intriguing and cleverly-done updating of the story of A Christmas Carol, and Murray certainly makes for a very engaging and amusing leading man. He carries off Frank’s cynicism and sarcasm very nicely, although he’s not quite as convincing when it comes to the post-redemption Frank. Indeed, the whole film does rather run out of steam when everything is nice and happy and solved at the end, with Frank’s rant on the set of the live Christmas Carol adaptation going on for rather too long and taking some of the fun out of the film.

But there is a lot of fun to be had here, from Frank’s escapades and how he reacts to what’s happening, and the intriguing versions of the ghosts. For any dedicated fan of the Carol, there’s also a great deal of fun to be had from the glimpses we see of the ‘IBC’ network’s adaptation of the story, with its bizarre international settings, troop of scantily-clad disco dancers and mice with antlers glued onto them. Even most of the bits of dialogue and narration we hear from the production are actually cod-Victorian nonsense, rather than genuinely from the Carol. Nowhere is this adaptation of the story ever called A Christmas Carol, either – it’s always referred to as “Charles Dickens’ classic Scrooge…”

This certainly isn’t a film that will be to everyone’s tastes, and the fact that it has dated so much because of its setting means I doubt it stands the test of time as well as any of the more faithful and straight adaptations. But it’s certainly worth a watch, and was a great relief to enjoy after having suffered through so many distinctly ropey adaptations of the Carol of late!

In a nutshell:

Not in any way traditional or faithful to the book, but it takes the story and its main features and does something different and fun with them.

Links:

Wikipedia

IMDb