A Christmas Carol - 1999, television

Title:

A Christmas Carol

Format:

TV movie

Country:

USA / UK

Production company:

Hallmark Enertainment, for TNT

Year:

1999 (first broadcast on TNT in the US on December 5^th that year)

Length:

90 minutes

Setting:

Victorian

Background:

An American production for an American television network, this was however made in England with a predominantly British cast and crew, in which respect it resembles the 1984 George C. Scott version – with whom it also shares a cast member in exactly the same role, as we’ll come to below. Producer Robert Halmi Sr had spent the 1990s overseeing a large number of high-profile literary adaptations for American television, including the version of Merlin starring Sam Neill in 1998, and the 1994 Gone With the Wind sequel Scarlett, which was promoted as nothing short of a Messianic event. A Christmas Carol must have seemed a fairly safe bet by comparison, and came in the same year as he’d also overseen tellings of Noah’s Ark and Alice in Wonderland, so was veering towards fantastical fare.

Cast and crew:

The real hook for doing the whole thing is Patrick Stewart – at this point best known for his role as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, a part which had turned him from a reasonably well-known character actor in his native Britain to a superstar of American television. Stewart was a great lover of A Christmas Carol and had performed a one-man show version on both the West End and Broadway – the temptation to put him into a full-blown adaptation must have therefore been irresistible. Stewart also serves as one of the executive producers – it’s very much his project, and I doubt it would have happened without him.

Richard E. Grant seems a slightly odd choice as Bob Cratchit, and I remember being surprised by his casting when I first saw this, which I think was on its debut UK broadcast on Britain’s Channel 4. Grant had been a very well-known face on British film and television since the 1980s of course, but was by his own admission rather plummy. A few years before this I heard him interviewed on BBC Radio 5 Live about having been up for a part in a film where he would have had to have attempted a cockney accent, and he admitted that he’d walked out of the audition as he realised he just couldn’t do it; it wasn’t him. And yet here he is attempting a sort of mockney accent as Bob, which never really convinces. Mind you, it’s probably less of an issue if you’re not familiar with his previous work.

I mentioned above that there is some Carol crossover casting here, with Liz Smith in the second of her three Carol roles. Very well known to UK TV audiences in the 1990s for her parts as ‘the old woman’ in The Vicar of Dibley and The Royle Family, here she plays Mrs Dilber in the Yet to Come section; exactly the same role she’d played in the 1984 version.

The following year she would turn up as a different character in the ITV version starring Ross Kemp;  a production in which Ben Tibber was also cast as Tiny Tim, who he plays here – which must surely be a unique double. The rest of the cast is absolutely peppered with familiar faces from British television, which anyone who’d watched much of it in the 1990s and 2000s would recognise even if they didn’t known the name: Annette Badland, Ian McNeice, Smith’s Vicar of Dibley co-star Trevor Peacock, Dominic West (later to be known for his role on the US drama The Wire), Saskia Reeves, Laura Fraser, the wonderful Elizabeth Spriggs who people of my generation will remember as the eponymous with in Simon and the Witch, frequent Victoria Wood collaborator Celia Imrie, and Marvin the Paranoid Android himself, Stephen Moore. From the American end of things, Joel Grey – best known for his Oscar-winning performance as the MC in the film version of Cabaret – plays the Ghost of Christmas Past.

Writer Peter Barnes was a distinguished playwright, whose The Ruling Class had seen Peter O’Toole nominated for an Oscar for its film adaptation in 1972. Latterly he’d been frequently collaborating with producer Robert Halmi on these big, British-based fantastical dramas for American television, having written the 1998 Merlin and the 1999 Alice in Wonderland.

Director David Jones had already had a long and prolific career by this point, having been handling episodes of first British and then American drama series since the 1970s. Prior to this he’d worked on the prestigious BBC arts series Monitor in the 1960s and been a theatre director for the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he had worked with Stewart – an association which probably helped to gain him the director’s job here – especially given Stewart’s role as an executive producer on the project.

Underdone Potato:

This version begins with Marley’s funeral, finding ways of getting onto the screen some of Dickens’s descriptive prose not normally seen in adaptations. So we have Scrooge signing the register of Marley’s death, and then a discussion of the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade – although sadly a door knockers is mentioned rather than a coffin nail. Perhaps they wanted to foreshadow Marley’s appearance in the knocker later on.

There’s a nice transition of the sign outside Scrooge and Marley’s ageing over the following seven years, and then some dialogue between Scrooge and Cratchit to bring to us the mention from the book’s prose about Scrooge being too mean to bother having it painted out.

Fred is his usual cheerful self, and then there’s a slight change as rather than the charitable gentlemen meeting passing him as he leaves, he meets them on the street outside after having left and they ask him the way to Scrooge & Marley. Said gentlemen are given names in this version – Williams and Foster – and there’s an odd moment of self-awareness and perhaps even self-celebration from Scrooge when he asks if they are new to the area when they explain their purpose in being there.

Once Scrooge is back home, when Marley’s ghost approaches but before it is seen by him we get, very briefly, a shot from Marley’s point of view as his ghost ascends the stairs to come and give Scrooge his warning. As with most of the rest of the script, the warning uses much of the original dialogue from the book but does tweak and simplify it here and there. So Marley’s telling of Scrooge that this opportunity of his redemption was “a chance and hope of my procuring” instead becomes “a chance I got for you,” which is a shame as that’s one of my favourite lines. This being the 1990s, there’s also a gag thrown in about the quality of British beef.

After Marley’s message has been issued, we get the scene from the book with the other chained spirits outside the window, trying and failing to render help they never bothered to give in life.

Past:

The depiction of the Ghost of Christmas Past is probably one of the most faithful in any production, with Joel Grey’s characterisation doing a good job of fitting Dickens’s description of the odd man-child nature of the spirit. It’s a shame that one of the spirit’s best lines is lost early on, though, with the reassurance that Scrooge will be upheld losing its attendant “in more than this.”

When Scrooge sees his former schoolmates going home for Christmas and calls out some of their names, he calls one of them “Tony Veck” and another “Toby Bell” – references, perhaps, to Toby Veck, the hero of Dickens’s Christmas book after the Carol, the much-less-well-remembered The Chimes. When Scrooge’s sister comes to take him away from the school, for some reason her name as been adjusted to ‘Fran’ rather than ‘Fan’.

While on the whole the production seems to have had quite a decent budget, the set for the street outside Scrooge’s offices does look very set-like, something which is brought home here when what appears to be a redressed version of the same set is used for outside Fezziwig’s. Said former employer gets a song of his own in this version and is played with some gusto by Ian McNeice, with Annette Badland giving good value as Mrs Fezziwig.

As is often the case Belle gets to come to the Fezziwigs’ party, and there’s a nice transition as we see her and Scrooge dancing alone with snow falling around them in the Fezziwigs’ business, before we move on to the Christmas when she left him. As happens in some other versions, the watching older Scrooge implores his younger self to ‘Go after her!’, to no avail. Sadly there’s no second Belle scene at the Christmas of Marley’s death here.

Again keeping close to what’s described in the book, Scrooge uses the spirit’s cap to angrily snuff it out at the end of the section.

Present:

Desmond Barrit – who I once met when he came in to be interviewed at the radio station where I work – is in fine traditional form as the Ghost of Christmas Present. We see him spreading his festive cheer and even get visits to some of the places it’s mentioned the Spirit takes Scrooge in the book, but which are not always seen – the lighthouse, the ship and see and the mine, but also a prison, which has only the very briefest of mentions in the original story.

The two main scenes, however, are the ones you’d expect – at the Cratchits’ and at Nephew Fred’s house. The Cratchit scene perhaps goes on for a touch too long, but does a nice job of conveying a homely, happy family Christmas, bustling and busy and full of cheer. We then switch from family to friends at Fred’s, with Topper just about staying on the right side of sleazy and poor Celia Imrie as another of their friend’s being saddled with a truly dreadful original line about Scrooge – ‘he leaves a bad taste in people’s eyes’. They also play blind man’s ‘bluff’ rather than ‘buff’, but apparently this is an existing linguistic corruption rather than a mistake on writer Peter Barnes’s part.

At the end we see Barrit suitably aged as the fading spirit, and he does a nice line in righteous anger when he presents Scrooge with Ignorance and Want. The two children themselves looking suitably repulsive.

Yet to Come:

There’s an unintentionally comic start to this section as it almost looks as if the spirit is rolling up on wheels as it approaches Scrooge. The eyes burning out of the hood, rather than it simply being blank, also add to the slightly laughable appearance of the ghost, probably the least successful of all the versions of the spirits in this adaptation.

As well as the businessmen and their discussion of the death of Scrooge and his possible funeral arrangements, we also get a pretty much complete version of the Old Joe section, which is often skipped over or shortened in other versions.

We have the Cratchits mourning Tim’s death as usual, but we are also given another of the scenes which is usually left out – the young couple being glad that Scrooge’s death now gives them the time to repay their debt.

We end the section, as you’d expect, with Scrooge’s grave, and he even falls into his own coffin, tumbling through eternity clutching his own corpse before waking up in bed, alone, on Christmas morning.

What’s To-Day:

Stewart does a good turn trying to convey Dickens’s description of Scrooge’s first laugh for a very long time. The bright light of the morning does the outside street set no favours, though – especially when later in this section you get the contrast of a suitably-dressed real street when Scrooge goes to visit Fred, and it looks so much better.

The boy outside Scrooge’s in this version seems rather mercenary, mostly interested in the money he’s going to get! Speaking of the money, however, I do like Stewart’s last dying moments of the old Scrooge as he at first seems reluctant to offer a shilling, but then cheerfully decides to offer him two if he’s back in less than five minutes. Bit stingy for this version, though – the offer was half a crown in the original, a whole sixpence more!

As the cheerful Scrooge walks through the set – sorry, street – he gets some snowballs thrown at him by a group of children. As he returns fire, I couldn’t help but think it seemed slightly forced, rather like the bit in Groudhog Day when Bill Murray’s character rather maniacally tries to show how much he loves children by becoming involved in a snowball fight, trying to recreate what was a more natural moment in one of his previous loops around the day.

When Scrooge goes make it into Fred’s, he tells the maid – after rather creepily delivering the line where Scrooge calls her ‘my love’ – that he knows the way through to the dining room. This isn’t in he book, and how would Scrooge know the way if he’d never been there before? Unless of course it was his mother’s house which Fred inherited, perhaps.

The end strikes a bit of an odd note. Fred gets the closing narration, as we see Scrooge welcoming the Cratchits into his house – as he stands on the doorstep and the camera pans across them looking up at him, it feels rather uncomfortably like a scene of adoring worshippers staring up at a Christ-like saviour.

Review:

This isn’t completely and utterly faithful to the book in every single respect and line of dialogue. But it is probably the closet to the book of all the full-cast dramatisations of the story. If you’re a Dickens purist, then this is almost certainly the version which you will find the most satisfying.

It helps that it’s absolutely stuffed-full of fantastic acting talent, with familiar faces – to British viewers, at least – even in some of the very small roles. Grant may not totally convince at Cratchit, and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come may risk looking rather comical, but apart from that every character is pretty much spot-on.

It may not have the budget and scale of something like the 1970 musical version, but it’s not a story where you necessarily need vast, sweeping feature film vistas and hundreds of extras. It has everything you might want – good script, good cast and everyone seemingly working together to present as authentic a version of the Carol as they can.

I don’t have one absolute favourite version of the story, as I think there are a few which are excellent, and no single one has ever quite managed to capture everything which makes the book great. Such a thing probably isn’t even possible. But here, at least, they gave it a decent try.

In a nutshell:

A truly excellent version of the book that will surely satisfy any Dickens fan. One of the very best screen versions of A Christmas Carol.

Links:

Wikipedia

IMDb