A Christmas Carol - 1971, television

Title:
A Christmas Carol

Format:
Animated television special

Country:
US / UK – the funding was American, but it was made in the UK

Production company:
Richard Williams Productions, for ABC

Year:
1971 (first broadcast on ABC on December 21st that year)

Length:
25 minutes

Setting:
Victorian London, and we are explicitly told at the start that it’s 1843 – the same Christmas that the original book was first published.

Background:
Made for the ABC television network in the United States as a one-off animated special, it was later given a cinema release, and actually won the Academy Award for “Short Subjects (Animated Films)” at the Oscars of May 1973. This apparently went down like a cup of cold sick with many in the film industry – given that it was originally made for television, and not for the big screen – and so the rules were later changed so that no production which had its debut on television rather than in cinemas could be eligible.

It remains the only adaptation of A Christmas Carol ever to have won an Oscar, of any sort.

A roll of the eyes for Nephew Fred's foolishness!

Cast and crew:
There was clearly inspiration taken here from the 1951 live-action feature version of the tale, as that film’s Scrooge and Marley – Alastair Sim and Michael Horden – also take the same roles here. Michael Redgrave was enlisted to give suitable gravitas to the narration, while fans of British comedy of the 20th century will note the presence of Melvyn Hayes and Joan Sims as Mr and Mrs Cratchit.

Fans of British television science-fiction, such as myself, will also spot Paul Whitsun-Jones, who played the journalist James Fullalove in the original version of The Quatermass Experiment for the BBC in 1953, among the voice cast. Tiny Tim is performed by Alexander Williams, the son of director Richard Williams.

Williams was born and raised in Canada, but moved to Britain in the 1950s, where he produced most of his work. Perhaps his most internationally-recognised production role was as animation supervisor on the 1988 live action / animation mix Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. Distinguished Warner Brothers animator Chuck Jones also worked with Williams on the film, while Ken Harris is credited as “Master Animator”, while oddly but rather nicely all the other animators receive the credit “Craftsmen”. Although this does indicate, as a sad sign of the times back then, that no women were involved in this aspect of the production.

Doctor Who fans will recognise the name of Tristram Cary, who had worked with Williams before, as the man behind the music for the production.

Underdone Potato:
Perhaps unusually given that this version starts with a narrated introduction, it doesn’t begin with the “Marley was dead…” line which opens the book, which seems rather remiss of it.

It’s a condensed version of the tale, of course, perhaps most obviously demonstrated when Scrooge tells the two charity gentlemen that “You’re going to tell me…” about many people preferring to die rather than go to the workhouses and the prisons, rather than the men telling him that themselves. But for all that, there are lots of nice little touches on display, such as Scrooge’s eye-rolling at what he perceives to be the idiocy of all around him.

When Scrooge gets back to his house, there’s a very striking sequence that you could at first almost mistake for being a draft version left in the finished edit by mistake, where as Scrooge carries his candle upstairs the whole thing reduces to a monochrome-looking pencil affair. This isn’t intended as a criticism – as I say, it’s very striking and memorable, and certainly distinctive. It also effectively conveys in animated form the unfriendly and sparse nature of Scrooge’s set of rooms as described in the original book.

Marley retains his religious line about the star which led the “wise men to a poor abode,” which often falls by the wayside in other more expansive adaptations, so much so that on viewing another version I had forgotten it was in the book and thought it was added in by the adaptation. The helpless spirits trying to help those in need outside of Scrooge’s window are also present.

An example of the striking pencil-like animation work present at times

Past:
The Spirit here is androgynous, as in the text, something achieved by using an intriguing but also slightly settling technique of it being almost literally two-faced, with most male and female aspects. It’s voiced by Diana Quick, another name that will strike a chord with certain Doctor Who fans for her later animation voiceover in the would-be-Who revival Scream of the Shalka in 2003.

The flashback to the past is achieved with an effect that might need a warning to the epileptic on it these days. In what’s something of a recurring theme, despite being a short version of the story Williams again includes something often omitted from longer versions – in this case, the young Scrooge’s love of fantastical literature, which isn’t explicitly talked about but shown almost in “thought bubble” form as he sits alone in the school.

When Scrooge becomes a little melancholy at the sight of Fezziwig’s party, there’s a nice visual flashback to his own poor clerk, Bob Cratchit. And in another nice animated touch, at the scene of his parting with Belle we get the same irritated rolling of the eyes we saw earlier in the older Scrooge, showing that he is now set on that path and not the man she fell in love with.

A two-faced Spirit!

Present:
The Spirit here is much as usually described and seen. He tips his Christmas spirit onto passers-by to improve their mood, again something not necessarily always included, and we are also treated to some of the rarer visitations he and Scrooge make during the course of the book. We see the miners marking Christmas, and also in a lighthouse and on a ship at sea in a storm.

These sea-going sequences, with the Spirit and Scrooge flying over them, put me a little in mind of the flying sequence from the famed 1982 animation of Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman. Although I can’t say for sure, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they were at least partly an inspiration for the animators of that production, whether consciously or otherwise.

You’d think that, given this is an animated version and thus likely to appeal to children, Ignorance and Want might be omitted here, but Williams pleasingly makes no effort to pull the tale’s teeth, and they are in place at the end of the sequence.

Yet to Come:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come slides up in an almost liquid manner, and is suitably unsettling. Although it’s a brief encounter, Williams again manages to squeeze quite a lot into it, and there are some very effective scene changes which might almost be attempts at Scrooge’s subjective point of view as we melt between one vision and the next.

It’s intriguing that the spirit’s hand – here a sort of cross between thinly-skinned and actually skeletal, and again looking almost like monochrome pencil work – falters a little in its pointing at the grave as Scrooge beseeches and pleads with it.

What’s To-Day:
Unusually, the boy outside the window isn’t sent to the poulterer’s to go and fetch a turkey for the Cratchit family. When Scrooge encounters the two charitable gentlemen again, he actually doesn’t – there is only one of them present as he happens to walk by in the street, which I suppose is a bit more realistic an encounter.

It all ends as with the book, with Scrooge surprising Cratchit in the office the next day, rather than going to the Cratchit household as in many other versions.

Michael Redgrave provides the closing narration, which as usual is sourced from the book’s final paragraph. In an odd choice of performance and direction, however, he rather throws away the “who did not die,” aside about Tiny Tim. I know it’s an odd line anyway, as of course Tim, like everyone, will have died eventually, but there is usually at least some emphasis given to the “not” bit, almost like a sort of pantomime delivery for the reassurance of the audience.

"We're walking in the air..."

Review:
I was pleasantly surprised when I watched this again, having seen it once before many years ago on television when I was a child. I didn’t retain any strong memories of it from that viewing – which was unusual, as the other versions of the Carol I saw when I was young all made very strong impressions upon me indeed.

I say I was pleasantly surprised because this is an excellent adaptation of the tale. Despite its short length, Williams manages to balance the story quite well, and it never feels too rushed, unlike the longer BBC live-action version from a few years later. The animation is also excellent, much more accomplished and distinctive than some of the cheap-and-cheerful rubbish of some of the feature-length animated efforts that were to follow. It is also notable for making a conscious effort to try and evoke the original John Leech illustrations for the story in places, perhaps most notably in the depiction of Bob Cratchit.

Whisper is quietly, but from a personal perspective I’d also say this is the best version of the Carol to star Alastair Sim in the lead role…

In a nutshell:
A very good effort, and certainly the best animated version of the story. Its short length and general adherence to the book would make it a very good adaptation for teachers to use in the classroom if they wanted to introduce children to the tale and still have time in a lesson to discuss it with them afterwards.

Links:
Wikipedia 
IMDb

A Christmas Carol - 1938, film

 Title:
A Christmas Carol

Format:
Black-and-white feature film

Country:
USA

Production company:
MGM

Year:
1938

Length:
69 minutes

Setting:
London, but oddly, earlier than the book – the opening caption declares that the events take place “More than a century ago,” which given that it was released in 1938 and the book came out in 1843 places it prior to when Dickens wrote it. “More than a century” could still (just about) make it Victorian, technically, so I’m placing it in the “Victorian” category on the blog rather than create a new category for Georgian or whatever William’s reign counts as!

It would help, of course, if the Ghost of Christmas Present’s line about his brothers was as specific as it is in some adaptations, but similarly to the book he just gives a general “some 1800” when numbering them.

Background:
This is, as far as I can tell, the first American production of the Carol to be made with sound, and following three years after the 1935 British version is the second major ‘talkie’ adaptation of the tale. As I understand it, it continued for some years through the middle of the 20th century to be the most familiar adaptation of the story, certainly to American viewers at least, with something of an afterlife on television in that country as an annual tradition on some local stations.

MGM were, and remained for decades afterwards, one of the biggest film companies in the English-speaking world. Although they had at this point in the late 1930s begun setting up a production arm in the UK, this film was made in the United States. A colourised version was created in the late 1980s, but as with many of these versions now appears to be much harder to find than the original black and white version, which is probably no bad thing.

It's not as obvious in a screen grab, but Leo G. Carroll really does look very like John Le Mesurier, also a Marley nearly 40 years later, at times.

Cast and crew:
Reginald Owen as Scrooge was a British actor who had been living in the States for almost twenty years by this point; he has a decent enough stab at the part, although you do get the sense at times that his accent has undergone a fair amount of Americanisation. He was not the first choice for the role; the film was supposed to star American actor Lionel Barrymore, who had become associated with the character in an annual radio adaptation in the States. Arthritis meant that Barrymore had to back out of the project; he would later get the opportunity to appear in a rather better-remembered Christmas film when he played Mr Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life.

Speaking of the accents, they do on the whole stay British, but there are a few exceptions where they are out-and-out American, such as the character of Bess, while John O’Day as Peter Cratchit goes what we would now regard as full-on Dick Van Dyke. Oddly, a singing choir in a street scene early on sounds very distinctively American, too.

Canadian actor Gene Lockhart makes for a rather rotund-looking Cratchit, appearing alongside his real-life wife, Kathleen, and daughter June as fellow members of the Cratchit family. Ann Rutherford as the Ghost of Christmas Past later appeared as Scarlett O’Hara’s sister in Gone With the Wind, and one of the Bennett sisters in the 1940 MGM version of Pride and Prejudice.

Two faces probably stand out the most to the more casual fan of vintage film and television. Leo G. Carroll, who plays Marley – looking uncannily like John Le Mesurier, who takes the same role in the 1977 BBC version – played Mr Waverley in The Man from UNCLE in the 1960s, and Tiny Tim actor Terry Kilburn is probably most recognisable from another juvenile role in a much bigger MGM success the year after A Christmas Carol – he played young Colley in Goodbye, Mr Chips. He is, at time of writing on December 1st 2016, also still alive and last month celebrated his 90th birthday. Happy birthday, Mr Kilburn!

Thanks to the joys of the internet, I can pass on the pleasingly random fact that Cliff Severn, in the minor role of the boy Scrooge sends to the poulterer at the end, later went on to play for the US national cricket team.

Edwin L. Marin, who directed the film, seems to have had quite a long and prolific career behind the camera, but without ever helming anything really of the first rank. Hugo Butler, a Canadian, provided the screenplay, and is probably most notable for having fallen victim to the infamous Hollywood blacklist of the 1950s. Producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz went on to have a higher-profile career as a director, including winning the Oscar for best director twice, in 1949 and 1950, and in 1964 helming a US television adaptation of the Carol written by Rod Serling, called Carol for Another Christmas.

Underdone Potato:
For its first few minutes, this seems like a completely different take on the Carol – telling the story through Fred’s eyes. He’s the main character in the opening scenes, as he makes his way to Scrooge’s office, bumping into Peter and Tim Cratchit, and it’s he rather than Bob who has a go at sliding on the ice in the street.

This might be an interesting – although difficult to pull off, given he’s not party to any of the main action! – take on the story, but once Fred has got to the office and passed some booze on to Bob, the story falls back onto more traditional lines for a while. We get the familiar arguments between Scrooge and Fred, as well as the two charitable gentlemen – given names in this version, Trill and Rummidge – and Scrooge and Bob’s conversation at the end of the day.

Things then go rather off the rails, as Bob celebrates leaving the office for Christmas by joining a group of boys throwing snowballs at people. He ends up knocking Scrooge’s hat off, and is immediately dismissed. Seemingly thinking “to hell with it!” Bob goes on a festive splurge, buying various Christmas goodies, including a goose for the family dinner that seems a pretty reasonable size, and rather undermines one of the most famous moments of the story later on.

As for Scrooge, his evening is much as usual except that he interrupts Marley’s visit to call the watch, who come into his house only to find, of course, nothing there. Jacob resumes his lecture, and sends Ebenezer to bed with his usual warning.

Past:
No androgynous spirit for this version – Past is very definitely female here, and saddled with a rather ridiculous-looking hat with a star on the top as well, as if she’s some sort of walking Christmas tree decoration.

There’s an interesting little touch of Dick Wilkins being a schoolboy friend of Scrooge’s before they are apprenticed together at Fezziwig’s. There’s also a nice invented scene of Scrooge claiming to another schoolfriend, Jack, that he’s glad to be staying at school for the festive season, and that the extra “swotting” (not sure that’s of the era!) will be good for him, when he’s clearly putting on a front and doesn’t really believe that.

When we’re onto Fezziwig’s, it’s a bit of skimping on the scale. There’s no party, just old Fezziwig giving Ebenezer and Dick a gold sovereign each, and telling them to join him and his family for Christmas Dinner tomorrow.

The Spirit then brings things to a close with a sort of precis of things we’re not shown – saying she hasn’t yet shown him his “black years” and his “gradual enslavement to greed.” But that’s all we get that hints at the Belle scene – there is no sign of her, and Scrooge extinguishes the Spirit before she can expand on these edited highlights.

Not exactly the most androgynous Ghost of Christmas Past ever seen on film...

Present:
Very much the traditional Spirit here, and quite well-played by Lionel Braham. This sequence touches on some aspect of the book not always carried over to adaptations – the Spirit’s spreading of Christmas cheer to those he and Scrooge pass by, and the fact that the Cratchits and those like them would have taken their Christmas meat to be cooked at the local bakery rather than having an oven in which to cook it themselves.

We then shift to a new scene, which if you’re being charitable you can say is hinted at in the original, of a church service. I say hinted at as Bob mentions being at one, it’s where he’s been with Tim, and we see them in church – at the very same service at Nephew Fred and his fiancée. That’s right, fiancée; he’s not married in this version, being too poor to afford to get married, which becomes relevant later.

It’s almost as if the filmmakers have given up here, lazily sitting around while the congregation gets deep into verses of O Come all Ye Faithful that your average person in the street wouldn’t recognise. Bess, Fred’s fiancée, doesn’t even attempt an English accent, and there’s a bit of ‘comedy’ business with an ice-sliding vicar which you’ll see coming a mile off.

We then spend a lot of time with the Cratchits and their frankly perfectly good Christmas goose, before Mrs Cratchit, and not Bob, proposes the toast to Scrooge, and Ghost of Christmas Present (or rather, scriptwriter Butler) manages to mess up the “surplus population” line by omitting the surplus.

Scrooge seems fully done by this point, declaring that he loves Christmas, and even though the film is not even an hour old they still feel the need to stick in a sort of recap of Scrooge’s visions so far, just to hammer home the point.

No Ignorance and Want, of course.

Yet to Come:
A traditional depiction of the third Spirit, on the whole, although he comes marching in like a monk on a mission, rather than sort of drifting with his stride invisible under his robe as he does in many other versions. His hand and arm, when raising to point or gesture, are also visibly human here, rather than either kept hidden by the arm of his robe or given a more skeletal appearance, as is often the case.

We see the vision of Scrooge’s death being discussed by his fellow businessmen, but none of the Old Joe section.

What’s To-Day:
When Scrooge sends for the goose, which he then takes to the Cratchits’ house in person, the bird is oddly no bigger than the one Bob had already purchased for the family the day before, which rather undermines the whole thing. As does the fact that it’s been established in the film they can’t cook the thing at their own home anyway.

As seems to be a depressingly common theme in many adaptations of the tale, they decide here to have Scrooge solve all of Fred’s problems with money, in this case making him a partner in Scrooge & Marley so that he can now afford to marry his fiancée. Once again, I can’t help but feel as if they’re rather missing the point.

An interesting note for fans of the 1970 musical version starring Albert Finney is that the present Scrooge gives to Tim here is a toy carousel. The same gift is given in the musical; possibly a coincidence, but perhaps a deliberate nod to this version, or maybe even an unconscious influence.

Review:
This is, in some ways, an odd version of the story. Given its compact length of 69 minutes, quite a bit is cut – which is perhaps understandable. But what’s less understandable is why, having done that, they then choose to squander so much time on scenes of their own creation, particularly all the business with Fred at the beginning, or on sections such as the Cratchits’ Christmas, which while important seem to unduly dominate the running time.

It must be said, however, that the production standards are very good for the era, with several large and detailed sets – Scrooge’s chambers being particularly good in this regard, if perhaps a touch overlit – and even a rare luxury for Carol adaptations up to this point, actual outdoor scenes. They may only be on backlots, but they do add an extra, expanded quality sometimes lacking in the smaller sets of previous versions.

The modelwork and effects are also good, with Marley’s ghost being excellently-executed, and the sweeping vistas flown over by Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Past also very effective, if somewhat unintentionally evocative of Superman carrying Lois Lane as he flies for a modern viewer!

"Is it a bird? Is it a plane...?"

In a nutshell:
This is sadly another example of taking a great story and somehow managing to suck most of the charm from it. Well-produced, but poorly-written and with uneven performances. Missable.

Links:
Wikipedia
IMDb

Dickensian

I won’t be adding a full-blown review of Dickensian here, because it doesn’t really count as an adaptation of A Christmas Carol – it merely uses some of the characters from the Carol in a story of its own. I also didn’t see the whole thing – I watched the first five of its 20 episodes when they were broadcast over the Christmas and New Year period, but I am afraid I rather lost track of it after that, and lacked the time or the will to catch up with it on the iPlayer.

That’s a shame, as what I saw was by no means awful, and it is quite a fun idea. For anyone who’s not aware of what Tony Jordan and company have done, they’ve taken a large group of some of Charles Dickens’s best known characters from his most famous works, set them all down in the same part of London at the same time, and fashioned a story which weaves them in and out of one another’s lives.

As the final episode was broadcast on BBC One yesterday – for which I did dip back into the programme, out of curiosity – I thought it was worth recording at least a few thoughts on the drama, especially as it was the first time we’d seen Scrooge, Marley and Bob Cratchit on screen in a brand new original BBC drama for the first time in nearly forty years.

In common with the vast majority of the stories Jordan has taken elements from for Dickensian, the series acts as a sort of prequel to A Christmas Carol, with Marley alive and well and Scrooge’s partner at the outset of proceedings. Not for long, however – Marley is soon killed off, instigating a murder-mystery plot investigated by Bleak House’s Inspector Bucket which is the driving engine for much of the plot of the series.

Peter Firth as Jacob Marley, in life... for a little while!

While it’s true to say that it’s never explicitly stated how Marley died in the Carol, it’s also never mentioned that he was murdered, and Belle’s husband’s statement that he’s heard Marley “…lies on the point of death” only gives the tiniest amount of wiggle room if you’re very charitable and assume that he was speaking of another occasion, from which Marley subsequently recovered before his eventual death. You do have to be in a very generous mood to allow this, however, and it’s clearly not what Dickens intended.

Also, Dickensian explicitly takes place under the reign of a queen – Victoria, obviously – whereas if you assume that A Christmas Carol is set in its year of release, 1843, then Marley’s death seven years beforehand would have occurred under William IV, just before Victoria came to the throne. Tiny Tim also appears as a character in Dickensian, at about the age he should be in the Carol, so the timeline has clearly been squeezed up a bit – and it’s hard to imagine the cheerful Bob Cratchit seen here standing another seven years of employment under the deeply unpleasant Scrooge.

For make no mistake, Ned Dennehy is a hugely unlikeable Scrooge, played as such a realistically mean, miserable and unfriendly character that it’s actually quite hard to imagine him ever undergoing the redemption for which the character is destined. He’s almost too hard for Scrooge, somehow, as paradoxical as that sounds. Peter Firth as Marley is a similarly unsympathetic character, and to be honest as good as Dennehy and Firth are, it’s only Robert Wilfort as Cratchit who I can really picture slipping seamlessly into a genuine adaptation of the Carol.

Ned Dennehy as Scrooge - extremely unpleasant!

I did like the moments in the final episode where Scrooge, alone in his rooms, sees his candle flicker out and hears Marley’s voice ominously whispering his name, a little foreshadowing of what’s to come. But overall, the whole thing only made me wish that the BBC would perhaps one year have a go at doing a proper, faithful stab at the Carol. British television has never really had one – the 1977 BBC version simply isn’t up to it – and surely for one of the greatest pieces of literature ever written in this country, our greatest broadcaster ought to have given it at least one prestige outing on the small screen…?

There is evidently some talk of a second series for Dickensian, from Tony Jordan at least, which surprised me as it seemed to be set-up very much as a self-contained, one-off serial. I’m also not sure there’d necessarily be the will there, given how its viewing figures have decreased during the run, and it’s suffered being shunted hither and thither about the schedules. The final episode went out at 6.25pm on a Sunday evening, for goodness sake – hardly a prime slot.

But if it was a failure in ratings terms, it was at least an interesting one, and a worthy attempt to do something a little different with a costume drama and a literary adaptation. But for the purposes of this blog, at least, it goes down as an interesting curio rather than anything to ever threaten the best of the Carol adaptations.