Carol For
Another Christmas
Format:
Black-and-white
filmed television movie
Country:
USA
Production
company:
Telsun Foundation
Year:
1964 (first
broadcast on the ABC network in the USA on December 28th that year)
Length:
84 minutes
Setting:
Not made
absolutely explicit, but appears to be pretty solidly the contemporary United
States, around the time of first broadcast.
Background:
The ‘Telsun
Foundation’ wasn’t some independent production company which had taken the idea
for a new adaptation of A Christmas Carol to the American television
networks. It was actually a sort of propaganda arm of the United Nations, with
the idea being they would make a series of television movies which would help
promote the idea of the UN to the American public through the medium of
television – and in this particular case, deliver a lesson about the evils of
nuclear war at the same time.
 |
| The film's Ebenezer Scrooge equivalent - Daniel Grudge, played by Sterling Hayden. |
Cast and crew:
Given the background – and probably not harmed by a huge
cash injection from the Xerox company which helped bankroll both this
production and the others in the series – several stars were attracted, although not all of them were big at this point. Britt Ekland and Peter Sellers (who were marred at the time) as original characters in the ‘Yet to Come’ section,
and Robert Shaw as that section’s ghost himself, are the names which probably
jump out most readily from the cast list to modern eyes.
Behind-the-scenes, Rod Serling’s name on script-writing
duties is probably the one which stands out – in 1964, he would have been just
after the success of The Twilight Zone, which finished its original run
that year. Director Joseph L. Mankiewicz was also no slouch, however, having
twice won the Academy Award for Best Director. He’d also been the producer of
an earlier adaptation of the Carol, the 1938 MGM feature film version,
which while no classic is undoubtedly much better than what he served up here.
With Henry Mancini on musical duties this was clearly a
powerfully-assembled team. Just a shame it all went to waste on such a
disappointing production…
Underdone Potato:
The first section
isn’t bad, by any means, but gives a warning of what’s to come. That’s not just
for our Dickens equivalent, one Daniel Grudge – played by Sterling Hayden – but
for the viewer as well. It’s all just so very slow. Most of the
action is carried by very long exchanges between Grudge and his visiting Nephew
Fred, who’s rather more hard-bitten and less jolly than in most other versions.
There are little
hints and gesture towards other part of the story – Grudge’s manservant,
Charles, is the closest we get to any kind of Bob Cratchit, and while Marley is
present in the form of Grudge’s dead son (lost to an unnamed military
conflict), he never speaks and is only glimpsed very briefly. There is no
warning for Grudge about what is to come, he pretty much just steps into the
past section and that’s it – taking it all in without a great deal of surprise,
it has to be said.
 |
| Steve Lawrence as the Ghost of Christmas Past. |
Past:
This is probably
the best of the sections, with Steve Lawrence giving an enjoyable performance
as a world-weary, ‘New Yoik’ style American soldier on a sort of ‘barge of the
dead’ carrying bodies from the various conflicts of history.
Like all of the
sections, however, the problem is that the hectoring and the lecturing of the
script goes on for a very long time indeed. Grudge is taken back to a scene
from his own life, visiting Hiroshima just after the end of the Second World
War, and showing the injured schoolgirls there is very effective.
The problem is,
however – and I appreciate that this isn’t unique to this adaptation – that
Hayden in no way looks twenty years younger during this part. It also turns out
to be the last and indeed only bit of his own personal story with which he
interacts during the whole thing.
Present:
The dullest of
the three sections. Serling takes what’s a poignant moment in the original –
the hungry and poor out on the cold streets – and uses it as the only element
in this section. While Pat Hingle as the ghost does have elements of the
literary source, he has none of the joie de vivre, presumably because
this is supposed to be a ‘gritty’ and ‘realistic’ interpretation of the story.
Yet to Come:
Definitely the
strangest part of the whole thing. Grudge is whisked off to his local town hall
in a post-apocalyptic landscape, which isn’t a bad idea when the whole
production is meant to be warning about the dangers of nuclear war. But the
group of people he sees there – a very weird, ultra-isolationist death cult led
by a manic Peter Sellers – offer the viewer nothing but a bewildering and
off-putting scene of grim, surreal depression.
The Cratchit
equivalent, Charles, puts in an appearance as perhaps the past sane man on
Earth, but is shot dead by a small child – whose mother is played by Britt
Ekland – in what might be some sort of
this-is-how-Tiny-Tim-turns-out-in-this-world message, or may not.
The ghost in this
section is played by Robert Shaw, and isn’t all that different in terms of
character to the previous spirit. He speaks and interacts with Grudge in a way
totally divorced from the manner in which the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is
usually depicted, even in satirical and comedy versions of the tale.
 |
| Peter Sellers, in bizarre form. |
What’s To-Day:
There’s no great
change in Grudge when he returns from his time among the spirits. He perhaps
seems very slightly nicer, and goes and drinks his Christmas morning
coffee in the kitchen with Charles and his wife. That’s about it.
Review:
There are two
main problems with Carol for Another Christmas, I think. The first is
in terms of characterisation – Grudge may be gruff, cynical and an
isolationist, but he is nowhere near as bad a person as the traditional
Ebenezer Scrooge. And Serling gives him actually pretty solid motivations for
being the way he is – he wants to keep America out of the world’s conflicts
because he has seen first-hand the horrors of war, and lost his own son to
them. Unlike Scrooge, you may not like Grudge’s world view, but you can at
least understand it. And Grudge is never really particularly personally
unpleasant to anybody, also unlike Scrooge.
The main problem,
however, is just how dull the whole thing is. One of the strengths of
the Carol is its pace and zip, so it seems almost criminal to throw all
of that away for the many, many, many tedious scenes of lecturing which
we get here. It all feels so sluggish and pedestrian. Making the Carol a
parable of anti-nuclear war sentiment, especially at the height of 1960s Cold
War paranoia only a couple of years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, is an
admirable idea. The tale is, after all, often adapted to suit the times in which any new
version is being made.
But this
production is very, very clearly from the PR arm of the United Nations,
and as such it comes very close to self-parody at times, lurching towards The
Simpsons skewering the educational film format with its “You wanted to live in a world without zinc, Jimmy!”
Serling also has
to take much of the blame here, with his plodding script. He’d won great
acclaim with his live TV dramas in the 1950s, and at times this is very much
what that feels like – a multi-camera production performed more in the manner
of a stage play. Being limited to a studio is no sin, of course, and some of
the greatest television dramas ever made have been in that format. Despite
having the advantage of being shot on film, however, and all the pace
an energy and sheen that ought to be able to give them, this never has any
spark of life to it at all.
In a nutshell:
Perhaps of
interest to students of Cold War paranoia or the history of how the UN has
tried to publicise its work. For everyone else – best avoided. Given the talent
involved, a huge disappointment.
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