Title:
An American
Christmas Carol
Format:
TV movie
Country:
USA
Production
company:
Stanley Chase
Productions / Smith-Hemion Productions, for ABC
Year:
1979 (first
broadcast on ABC in the USA on December 16th that year)
Length:
97 minutes
Setting:
1930s United
States – specifically, Christmas Eve 1933 in Concord, New Hampshire
Background:
A one-off TV
movie made for the ABC network in the United States, this is perhaps rather
unusual in that although it’s set in the past, it isn’t set in the time or
country of the story’s origin. Instead, it transplants the story of the Carol
to America during the time of the Great Depression, making it one of the few
adaptations of the Carol to be explicitly set in the USA, or indeed
outside of either Britain or some imagined fantasy world.
Cast and crew:
In 1979, star
Henry Winkler was mid-way through his run as the Fonz on the sitcom Happy
Days, a role which embedded him in the popular culture of the time in
several countries around the world, giving him a degree of star power which
doubtless made him an attractive choice as lead here as Benjamin Slade, this
production’s equivalent of Ebenezer Scrooge.
Although made for
American television, the production was shot in Canada and much of the rest of
the cast are Canadian. Cec Linder, who appears in a very brief bit-part as th
auctioneer auctioneer, will be familiar to many for his roles in Goldfinger,
Quatermass and the Pit and Lolita.
The setting of
the 1930s Depression-era United States is very evocatively American, but as
well as a Canadian cast and crew the film had a British director in the form of
Eric Till, who’d emigrated from the UK to Canada some years earlier. Scriptwriter
Jerome Coopersmith is suitably American, however, and a lauded one too. He’d
been working in television since the late 1940s and wrote extensively for US
television as well as for the stage.
 |
| From a modern perspective at least, Winkler's make-up doesn't entirely convince. |
Underdone Potato:
The first section
of the production is spent setting out just what an unsympathetic character Slade
is – indeed, while Scrooge’s actions may have brought people misery in the
book, he’s never as directly involved in their misfortune as Slade is here.
After a rather
odd early scene in which he sends a group of carol singers away with copies of
a pamphlet he has had printed about great figures of American history who
worked their way up in life without any hand-outs from anybody, we see various
scene of Slade and his Cratchit equivalent, Thatcher, going around repossessing
goods from various people. He takes various goods from a farmer, Reeves, a
piano from Jessop who now runs the orphanage Slade himself was once in and
where the carol singers from earlier came from, and finally the whole stock of
books from a local bookseller.
One of these
books is A Christmas Carol, which shows that Dickens’s original story
exists in this universe despite this itself being a version of it. Slade does
seem to have some familiarity with the story as we go through, knowing which
ghosts to expect – but as often happens in these instances, despite claiming it
“won’t work” on him, it of course does.
As happens to
Cratchit in one or two other versions, Thatcher gets fired by Slade at close of
business here, for daring to plead the case of the former local quarry workers
who want Slade to use his money to re-open the quarry and help ease the effects
of the Great Depression. Thatcher has to go home and confess having lost his
job – at home, as well as his wife there are a son and daughter, the son being
on crutches but called Jonathan rather than Tim.
As for Slade, he
gets a ghostly visit from his former business partner, Jack Latham. This
unfortunately highlights one of the problems with the production – the make-up
on Winkler is not entirely successful, and it’s shown up here with the contrast
between someone who is about the age Slade is supposed to be, and how different
they look. If anything, Slade looks much older than he really ought to, as
we’ll come to shortly.
Past:
This is the
longest section of visions, and is effectively one long version with the
Fezziwig section of the original. The Fezziwig version here is a local
businessman called Nathanial Brewster, who picks the young Slade out of the
orphanage to come and be his new apprentice at his carpentry business.
The Ghost showing
Slade all of this has appeared in the form of the bookshop owner from earlier,
and whom Slade initially assumes him to be. However, he quickly proves himself
to be a more otherworldly figure, with the suggestion being that he has
heavenly origins, dropping a hint that he was involved in the fall of the walls
of Jericho.
Slade becomes a
success under Brewster and romantically involved with the daughter of the
family, Helen – the Belle of this adaptation. However, when Brewster refuses to
listen to Slade’s ideas for how the business should modernise and go to
production line working, Slade leaves for another firm. He eventually returns
to Concord – with an impressive new moustache – to set up his own firm. This
comes just as an accident sees Brewster’s workshop go up in flames, and Slade
convinces local businessman Jack Latham to fund his new venture rather than
help Brewster rebuild. Poor old Brewster then dies of a heart attack.
 |
| Some impressive facial furniture from The Fonz! |
Present:
The Ghost of
Christmas Present appears in the form of Jessop from the orphanage, occasionally
with the children in tow, too. One interesting tweak here is that we get a
version of the scene from the book showing Belle happily married with her own family,
but it’s moved sections. In the book, it takes place in the past section, as
Marley is dying seven years before the main events of the story. Here it’s a
vision of the present which Slade is shown.
While this is
nice, it does highlight the problem of both Helen and Slade looking far too old
in 1933 – at least 30 years older than their 1918 versions from the end of the
previous section. It’s always a nice idea having a younger actor as Scrooge and
ageing him up, so he can appear as his younger self in the past sections – it’s
what the Albert Finney version does, of course – but as mentioned above, Slade
just ends up looking too old here, probably due to the limitations of
what they could go with make-up at the time.
The only other
scene from the present we see is the Thatchers’ house, where we learn that
young Jonathan needs to go to Australia for treatment for his illness. In one
of the few really direct lifts from A Christmas Carol in terms of
dialogue, we get a version of the “carefully preserved” exchange as Slade asks
if the boy will live.
Yet to Come:
In an interesting
twist on the norm, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is a version of Reeves,
the farmer whose possessions were being taken by Slade at the start of the film
– but dressed in what was then contemporary clothing, arriving after Slade has
heard ‘modern’ music on the radio. Of course, forty years on the effect is
rather lost on us, given we’re as distant from the seventies as they were from
the time this was set, and of course the Ghost just looks very 70s retro.
He shows Slade’s
possessions being auctioned off and then burned, and then takes Slade to the
local graveyard, where the remaining Thatcher family are gathered around
Jonathan’s grave. Slade notices a new but untended grave over to one side of
the cemetery, and of course there are no prizes for guessing whose name is
written there.
 |
| Slade and the very seventies-looking Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. |
What’s To-Day:
Slade wakes up a
changed man, and leans out of his window to ask not one but a passing pair of
boys what day it is, much to their amusement. Slade then goes to the Thatchers’
house where he gives Thatcher his job back, and distributes various gifts –
including tickets to Australia for Jonathan’s treatment. Quite where, when and
how he managed to sort all of this on Christmas morning isn’t made clear, but
perhaps the spirits somehow oiled the wheels a little.
The little
exchange between Slade and… um… Mrs Thatcher as I suppose one must call her is
quite oddly moving, and there is a nice little joke when Slade points out just
how long the new, large turkey he’s bought them will take to cook. He then goes
around with Thatcher giving everybody back their possessions, along with some
extra gifts, and tells Thatcher he is going to re-open the quarry to provide
work for the local men.
Finally he stops
at the orphanage to return their piano and distribute some presents. He spots a
boy lurking at the back, as we’d seen him do as a child when Brewster came to
visit, and he takes the boy on as his own apprentice and even goes to the
remains of Brewster’s old business, telling the boy they’re going to rebuild
and reopen it as he parallels he scene of Brewster taking him there for the
first time forty-odd years before.
 |
| A traditional moment in a very different version. |
Review:
It must have been
quite a surprise for audiences to see Winkler, at the height of his Fonz fame,
suddenly acting not just his age but much older. He is very good here though,
and dodgy make-up aside really doesn’t leave you thinking of The Fonz even
once, even when he doesn’t have the make-up on and is being shown in his
younger days.
It’s an
interesting and not often done idea to take the Carol and set it not in
either the Victorian era or the present day, but instead in another period
setting entirely. The Great Depression works very well as a background for the
moral of the tale, and this distance also grants it a lot more leeway to
interpret the story in a looser manner. I know I’m often critical of versions
which muck about with the story too much, but when you’re explicitly
doing something different with it, like this, rather than just doing a
Victorian version badly, I think it can be very good.
If I had a
criticism, I’d say that perhaps the past section seems to dominate, and here
could perhaps have been a little more balance between the three different eras.
But overall this is very well done, and so refreshing to find a different take
on the tale that doesn’t just feel like someone getting the whole thing wrong.
In a nutshell:
Not a faithful
adaptation by any means, but as something consciously trying to put a different
spin on it, it works very well indeed.
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