Friday, 13 December 2019

Scrooge - 1913, film

Title card for the retitled 1926 edit.

Title:
Scrooge (also known as Old Scrooge)

Format:
Silent film

Country:
UK

Production company:
Zenith Film Company

Year:
1913 / 1926

Length:
40 minutes (approximately)

Setting:
Victorian

Background:
Zenith, the company behind this adaptation, were founded in 1913 and then purchased by British Empire Films Ltd two years later, before eventually being dissolved in 1922. Their offices were based in Westminster, and they apparently used a studio at Whetstone in North London. This wasn’t the only literary adaptation they made; they were also responsible for an early version of Ivanhoe.

This film was re-released in the USA by Pathe in 1926, when it was retitled Old Scrooge. It was this version which I was able to get hold of a copy of, and it wasn’t simply a retitling. Comparing what I was able to watch to the synopses of the 1913 version on the British Film Institute’s website and in the Illustrated Films Monthly at the time of the original version’s release, it’s clear that several narrative changes had been made to the 1920s version, and I’ll try and note the main differences below.

Seymour Hicks as Scrooge - looking very like The Grinch!
Cast and crew:
Seymour Hicks stars as Scrooge, a part he’d already been playing for many years on stage, and would continue to reprise in the theatre for many years after this. He also returned to the role on screen in the sound era, taking the lead in the 1935 film version. Clearly regarded as something of an expert on the character, interestingly the BFI website also credits him as having been responsible for writing the adaptation here.

The director Leedham Bantock is a very interesting figure. He was the boss of Zenith Films, but had previously primarily been a stage actor who then moved into film. His most notable credit is being the first person known to have played Father Christmas on screen, in the 1912 film Santa Claus. He also appears in the cast here, although as there aren’t full credits available it’s difficult to tell as who.

Of the rest of the cast, William Lugg had been a successful stage actor of the Victorian era, and JC Buckstone, like Hicks, had some history with the Carol. He’d written a stage version in 1901, which he’d then adapted for the very first known screen adaptation of the Carol that same year. Ellaline Terriss had been born in the Falkland Islands and lived to be 100, dying in 1971. Her presence here may be a bit of a case of insider dealing, as she was Seymour Hicks’s wife.

Underdone Potato:
Both versions of the film begin with an introductory device of Scrooge coming up with the idea for A Christmas Carol, and settling down to write it. The BFI’s Screenonline website suggests this seems designed to show that Dickens himself would have approved of this adaptation, although to me it feels more like a lesson or a lecture, especially with the 1926 version’s intertitles, setting out the background to the story before showing the tale itself. When Scrooge is first mentioned, however, there is a nice portrait-type shot of him, glaring and glowering into the camera.

The first major difference between the two versions occurs early on – the 1913 version show’s nephew Fred, given the surname Wyland here, giving money to children on the street, but in the 1926 edit he doesn’t appear until later on. In common with some other versions, we do see Tim earlier than we do in the book here, as his father carries him to work before seemingly abandoning him in the street for the day when he goes inside.

Quite a lot of time is spent on the scenes up to Marley’s arrival, more so than any other aspect of the story. Indeed, it’s even extended somewhat from the book with scenes of “carol singers” (they look like meddlesome kids to me!) throwing snowballs at Scrooge, and the parts of the two charitable gentlemen being split into two – a poor woman who visits Scrooge first, and then later a Mr Middlemark, ‘a guardian of the poor’.

There’s another difference between the two versions here – in the UK original, we have a cutaway to a scene of Middlemark handing out food to the poor, and then going to see Scrooge when there is none left. The 1926 US edit omits this, and just has Middlemark turn up after Fred’s visit.

Perhaps understandingly given the restrictions of time, space and budget, Scrooge doesn’t go home but just settles down to sleep in an armchair in his office, where he’s visited by the spirit of Marley – perhaps hinting, more so than in most other versions, that the whole thing is ‘just a dream’? Marley appears translucently in an impressive example of special effects, not simply standing still but moving around the set and interacting with Scrooge, although he lacks something in not being chained in this version.

Ah yes, that's it! Dickens comes up with the idea...
Past:
Marley says that he has come as the representative of the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come – so in common with the 1901 version, it’s Marley who presents all of the visions here. Not so much representing them as doing all of their work for them, the lazy sods. Perhaps there was a lot of haunting that needed doing this particular Christmas!

There’s no Fezziwig, but we do have the other main ‘past’ visions usually shown – Scrooge at school, and Belle setting him free. There’s a change from the book here, in he intertitles for the US version at least, with Marley reminding Scrooge that he later ‘abandoned’ Fan, rather than her having died young as in the story. We do see an actor playing the young Scrooge at school, but fortunately unlike in the 1935 version there’s no attempt to pass off Hicks as a younger version, and he’s unseen in the sequence with Belle, with only her being shown.

Present:
We see a little of the Cratchits’ Christmas celebration, with the toast to Scrooge, and there’s a detail I quite liked where Tim, made up to look ‘ill’ with panda-like eye make-up, stares hauntingly out at us, directly into the camera.

Rather than the little taste of foreknowledge the Ghost of Christmas Present usually shares about an empty space and a crutch without an owner, Marley shows Scrooge an actual full-blown vision of Tim’s deathbed, and the moment of his expiring. As is done all-too-often, Scrooge’s redemption seems to have come rather too early, as he declares ‘what a fool I’ve been!’ before we’ve even had the vision of the future.

Marley is responsible for all of the visions in this version.
Yet to Come:
Having said that, there isn’t a great deal of the future to see – just a gravestone bearing the words ‘Ebenezer Scrooge – He Lived and Died Without a Friend,’ which is rather on-the-nose but seems to have done the trick. I doubt you’d be allowed to put that on a gravestone in the real world, however!

What’s To-Day:
There is where the 1913 and 1926 versions seems to be intriguingly different, at least comparing what I watched to the synopsis available in the Illustrated Films Monthly from 1913. In the UK original, Scrooge awakes on Christmas morning, and goes to visit the Cratchit family, joining in with their Christmas celebrations and even soliciting a kiss from Mrs Cratchit under the mistletoe.

However, in the version I watched, it’s still Christmas Eve when Scrooge awakes. After sending the boy for the bird (who comes into his office in this version, or rather is pulled in rather roughly, and knows Tiny Tim – Scrooge asks if the boy is still alive, and the bird-boy replies that yes, he saw him earlier in the evening), he then merely settles down to ‘imagine’ what it would be like if he spent Christmas Day with the Cratchits. We then get his vision of kissing Mrs Cratchit, etc.

The 1926 version then does the bit from the book of Scrooge pretending to be cross with Cratchit on boxing day – which wouldn’t make sense of Scrooge had gone there on Christmas Day. So was this an alternative ending using footage shot for but not used in the 1913 original? If so, how did they get hold of it 13 years later? Or did the original intertitles perhaps suggest Cratchit feared Scrooge had had a change of heart? Or are the available synopses of the 1913 version simply wrong?

Sadly, without going to the BFI to view the copy of the 1913 version they apparently hold, which perhaps I may try someday, there’s no way to answer this at the moment.

Scrooge asks Mrs Cratchit for a kiss!
Review:
There is a lot to like here. The location shooting outside Scrooge’s office looks very good, and I genuinely can’t tell if it’s real or fake snow being used. In the 1926 version, at least, there are some nice tinting effects going on, with a cold blue for the outdoor scenes and then a drab brown once we inside Scrooge’s mean abode. It’s just a shame they didn’t even try to make the window for the set of Scrooge’s office at least vaguely resemble the one he’s seen calling Cratchit in through in the location footage.

It’s certainly much more ambitious and expansive than the 1901 or 1910 silent versions, although it does perhaps waste too much of its running time on the pre-ghost sequences, and rather throws away or rushes through much of the rest of the story.

The intertitles do include a fair amount of Dickens’s original text as and when they can, although they’re also interspersed with all sorts of weird additions, such as acknowledging that children really shouldn’t throw snowballs at old men. I’m fairly sure the intertitles I saw were made for the 1926 version, however – we have Fred’s good ‘humor’ spelt the American way, and also a reference to a ‘corner store’ which feels rather transatlantic, so I don’t know how much they might differ from the 1913 ones.

Hicks certainly looks great as Scrooge – and weirdly, he also seems to quite closely resemble another figure from a well-known Christmas story, the Grinch. I wonder if Dr Seuss had ever seen this? He’d have been 22 when it came out in the US in 1926 – a bit of a stretch, though, admittedly!

In a nutshell:
It feels like an ambitious production for its time, but an imbalanced one – too much time it spent on the earliest sections, given an uneven and ultimately unsatisfying feel.

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