Scrooge - 1970, film

Title:
Scrooge
 
Format:
Colour musical feature film
 
Country:
UK (although made with American money)
 
Production company:
Westbury Films, for Cinema Centre Productions
 
Year:
1970
 
Length:
113 minutes
 
Setting:
Victorian – specifically, 1860

Background:
In 1968, Dickens’s work had seen enormous success on the big screen with the release of Oliver!, a literally all-singing, all-dancing colour spectacular, adapted from the equally-successful stage musical version of 1960 by Lionel Bart. The success of Oliver! must have made the idea of creating a musical film from another of Dickens’s best-known works almost irresistible, although in this case the film was made directly for the screen. In fact, in something of a reversal of the way in which these things usually work, Scrooge was adapted into a stage musical in the early 1990s, and has often been revived since.
 
While Scrooge didn’t go on to achieve quite the same impact as Oliver!, it was certainly successful, being nominated for four Academy Awards. This included a nomination in the Best Original Song category for the showstopping Thank You Very Much, which is probably the song from the film which made the biggest impact and is its best-known number. The film itself turns up on British television every Christmas, often on one of the major channels, and is probably one of the most widely-known and best-loved versions of the story in the UK.
 
As is not uncommon with adaptations of the Carol, although this was made in England with a British cast and crew, the film was backed with American finance and produced for an American company. This rather works in its favour, though, having the authentic feeling of something made in the Carol’s home country, but with the budget to provide the spectacle you’d expect from a full-scale Hollywood musical.
 
Cast and crew:
One of the reasons for the great success of the film and its standing the test of time is surely down to the fact that it contains some of the absolute cream of British acting talent available at the time.
 
The cast is led by Albert Finney as Scrooge – as he was only 33 here, he’s aged-up surprisingly well for most of the scenes, but is also able to play the younger Scrooge in the Christmas Past section more convincingly than is usually the case when the same actor does both. Finney had come to prominence as part of the ‘Angry Young Man’ new wave of young British actors of the 1960s, starring in the likes of The Entertainer, Saturday Night, Sunday Morning and Tom Jones. One of his co-stars in the latter was Dame Edith Evans, a three-time Academy Award nominee and a Victorian by birth herself, who here appears as a rather different, matronly interpretation of the Ghost of Christmas Past.

There are some hugely esteemed names in other ghostly parts as well, with none other than Sir Alec Guinness seeming to enjoy himself hugely with a rather sarcastic and mischievous Marley. The Ghost of Christmas Present is played with the customary gusto by Kenneth More, who’d been the foursquare hero of black-and-white war films such as Reach for the Sky and Sink the Bismarck, as well as the acclaimed Titanic drama A Night to Remember. A major UK star of the fifties and early sixties, More was just past the peak of his movie fame here, but had recently enjoyed something of a renaissance as one of the leads of the enormously popular BBC television adaptation of The Forsyte Saga.
 
Speaking of British television, many of the supporting parts are filled with faces which will be familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of some of its most popular programmes of the late 20^th century. David Collings is well-remembered for his supporting roles in a huge number of popular drama series, including the likes of Doctor Who and Blake’s 7, and his recurring part of Silver in Sapphire and Steel. Catweazle’s Geoffrey Bayldon appears as toyshop owner Pringle, while renowned comic actor Roy Kinnear is one of the two Charitable Gentlemen.

 
Anton Rodgers appears as Tom Jenkins, a character not featured in the book, a hot soup seller who owes Scrooge money. Rodgers would later achieve TV fame as the star of sitcoms Fresh Fields and May to December, but his role here in Scrooge stands out as it’s he who gets the memorable Thank You Very Much number.
 
In fact, you could name pretty much anyone who has a speaking part as being a memorable turn from some other British film or television programme – Mary Peach, for example, as the wife of Scrooge’s nephew, who these days is well-remembered by Doctor Who fans for her role as Astrid Ferrier in the serial The Enemy of the World. 
 
Behind the cameras, Leslie Bricusse was responsible for the music and lyrics and also for the film’s screenplay as a whole. By this point, Bricusse had a strong reputation for his success with musical feature films. He’d provided the songs for the 1969 musical version of Goodbye, Mr Chips, and as with Scrooge had taken on screenplay duties in addition to the songs for the 1967 version of Doctor Dolittle. Bricusse won an Oscar for his work on Dolittle, and had also co-written the James Bond themes Goldfinger and You Only Live Twice – so he certainly had the sort of pedigree needed for the job of turning one of English literature’s best-loved stories into a musical.
 
Director Ronald Neame was by this point nearly sixty, and had enjoyed a long and successful career in film, initially as a cinematographer and then a producer. In the latter role he had experience of success with Dickens adaptations, having produced David Lean’s versions of Great Expectations and Oliver Twist in 1946 and 1948 respectively. Neame had turned to directing in the 1950s, notably helming the war film The Man Who Never Was, and after Scrooge went on to direct the Hollywood disaster movie The Poseidon Adventure. Coming into Scrooge, his previous film had been The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which had won a Best Actress Oscar for Maggie Smith.
 
Underdone Potato:
One issue with making a musical version is that you have to compress some of the other elements to make way for the songs. While there is nothing major or important missing from this version of the story, some nice bits are slimmed down – for example, the visit of Scrooge’s nephew, Harry in this version, loses some of the best bits of dialogue from the book.

Right from the very off, however, Finney’s, snivelling, sneering, meticulously coin-counting performance as Scrooge dominates and delights. It could, perhaps, risk falling into a kind of cartoon caricature, but Finney is far too fine an actor for that. All the little bits of business around his coins and his keys and his safes simply add flourishes, rather than detracting or distracting from what’s at hand.
 
David Collings makes for a much more charming and less wet and insipid Bob Cratchit than is often the case, and the same can be said for Richard Beaumont’s performance as Tim, who while having a boyish innocence to him is again stopped from being too sickly both by the acting and the scripting. He gets an early appearance in the story here, joining his father and one of his sisters on the walk home, a song number through the Christmas shopping. The walk home’s a bit harsh on Mrs Cratchit though, as we see him buying a Christmas pudding rather than her own home-made one being a triumph as described in the book. When Bob first meets them they are busy peering into the window of a toy shop, in a scene which makes me wonder if it may have been inspired by Tim also doing so in the 1951 version.

If you think fourpence is a bit steep for it, then you ought
to have let your wife make one like she does in the book!

 
Scrooge also gets a song on the way home, a journey upon which he checks up on various of his debtors. Even against the Christmas Carol opening and Father Christmas taunting of him by the carol singers, his song is perhaps the best of the opening section. It seems an odd choice in an uplifting Christmas family musical to have a song called I Hate People, perhaps, but it feels appropriate particularly to a British audience as you can easily imagine the song being performed by the main villain in a traditional festive pantomime.
 
Scrooge encounters the charitable gentlemen on his walk home rather than in the office on this occasion, but his dialogue with them is substantially similar. We then get one of the big name actors in supporting parts, as no less than Alec Guinness turns up clearly enjoying himself immensely as quite a darkly comic and at times even camp Jacob Marley.

Past:
Edith Evans is, of course, absolutely nothing at all like the Ghost of Christmas Past as described in the book. But her performance as the gently nagging, matronly ghost is such good fun that I find I can forgive it.

 
The school scenes are comparatively brief, although there is an interesting change in that one of the children happily leaving the school for the Christmas holidays is Scrooge’s sister, Fan, which makes you wonder how they’d both been sent away to the same school together, and then she was allowed home but he was not. We do then get the scene from a later Christmas where she comes and takes him back home. She refers to him here as “Ebbie”, which is mildly distracting if you’ve seen a later version where that’s the name of a female Scrooge!

Much of this section, however, concentrates on the Fezziwig party, with a riotous depiction of the festivities at their Christmas party accompanied by the jolly December the 25^th song. As is common – almost usual, really, for adaptations – Belle is present at the party. Less commonly, she’s also made the Fezziwigs’ daughter in this version – it a rare but not absolutely unheard-of change, with Jack Thorne also having done it in his stage version, for example.

 
Belle is actually referred to as Isabelle throughout, and there’s a bit of a cheat here – we drift away from the Christmas party to see Scrooge’s memories of being with her at sunnier times of year, boating and carriage-riding. Much of this is in the presumably chaperoning company of Mr and Mrs Fezziwig, presumably standing in for the function of the second Belle scene, which isn’t present – showing Scrooge the married life he could have had through their example, rather than through Belle’s actual marriage to another man.

 
Having Finney young enough to play the young Scrooge is a definite example here, and works particularly well in the scene where Belle eventually leaves him. Finney’s putting on a voice for the older Scrooge, and is half-way to it in the scene where she leaves him, giving a more convincing link between the older and younger versions than is often the case in adaptations where it’s a different actor involved – or where you’ve got Seymour Hicks trying to get away with pretending to be several decades younger than he actually is!

Finney also does a terrific job as the Scrooge saddened and even crushed by what he’s seen, telling the Spirit to remove him from the place where Belle has left him as he can stand it no longer. He has some heavyweight competition from the likes of Caine and Stewart, of course, but it’s possible he could be the best actor ever to have portrayed Ebenezer on screen. I would go that far.
 
Present:
Speaking of terrific actors, however, we’re treated to another one as one of the great British film stars of the mid-20^th century, Kenneth More, pops in for a turn as the Ghost of Christmas Present, looking and being introduced pretty much exactly as described in the book, at the head of a enormous pile of Christmas treats and delicacies.

There’s a longer sequence than in the book of the Spirit and Scrooge within Scrooge’s rooms before they go out and about, due to the Spirit – unlike the past – having its own musical number, I Like Life, which is great fun and one of the more memorable songs from the film. He also has a line I’ve always really liked which is specific to this film and not in the book, where he calls Scrooge a “weird little man” – something about the way More delivers this always tickles me.
 
After they do eventually get out and about, we have the two main scenes usually present in this section, of the Cratchits’ Christmas and Scrooge’s nephew’s Christmas party. There’s an interesting line, given, the circumstances, added here about the nephew being “haunted” by his Uncle Ebenezer, which is technically true in this instance! They do a really good job of showing it to be the jolly party of the book, however, relating what Dickens describes as Scrooge’s excitement at joining in with the games being played.

There’s then a touch of what comes out on a few occasions through the film and works very effectively, even after his later redemption – the melancholia of Scrooge, when he’s shown the error of his ways. The time and the opportunities wasted, and the inability to ever get those chances back again, shown here as he drifts off into a reverie about those long-ago Fezziwig Christmases as his nephew’s guest say their farewells at the end of the evening.
 
There’s no reference to the ageing of the Spirit, and Ignorance and Want do not appear, although there is a nice bit of new dialogue from the Spirit where he tells Scrooge that you can’t do everything that you want in life, but it’s important to do as much as you can in the time that you have.

Yet to Come:
There’s a decent little scare from the figure of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come being suddenly and silently present in Scrooge’s rooms, with its sleeves covering its arms so that even its traditional pointing finger does not emerge, rendering is very mysterious and enigmatic indeed.

We’re transported to the future, and to perhaps the best-known moment of the film and certainly its best-remembered musical number. Tom Jenkins, the hot soup man who was one of several characters we met near the start who owe Scrooge money, leads an all-singing, all-dancing spectacular chorus in the anthemic Thank You Very Much – which sounds cheery enough when you hear the song in isolation, but of course in the context of the film they’re all delighted that Scrooge has died. So I suppose really it’s an alternative to the scene of the relieved young couple in the book.

After that, there’s the comedown of a visit to the Cratchits, although no Bob – instead we travel to the graveyard to see him tending Tim’s grave, before Scrooge is shown his own. There’s a bit of a misstep here as the intended jump scare reveal of the Spirit’s skull face and skeleton hands as Scrooge falls into the grave looks more comic than anything, the Spirit looking a bit too much like a cheap Halloween toy.
 
There’s a radical departure from the novel here as we see Scrooge’s descent into hell, where Marley and a lot of sweaty, muscular, topless devils carrying his chain are waiting for him. It’s perhaps a bit much, but when you have as big a star as Alec Guinness then I suppose of course you want to make the most of him. I do like the way he does the same little wave through the closing door as he did when leaving Scrooge’s room earlier in the film.

What’s To-Day:
The final section is a sort of ‘Greatest Hits’ of reprises of some of the big hooks from earlier in the film – Father Christmas and of course Thank You Very Much, although when Scrooge first awakes from his night with the Spirits he has a nice, slower number about having the chance to begin again.
 
The boy who Scrooge meets – standing at his doorway rather than shouting down from the window on this occasion – gets a slightly bigger role here, having a sled with him on which he helps convey Scrooge and his purchases around the snowy streets on the way to the Cratchits’ house. With all the song-and-dance numbers there’s no time for a visit to his nephew’s house before the end of the film, but there is a meeting with him and his wife in the street, when he says he’ll come for dinner later – and he charitable gentlemen get their donation, too.

 
After buying a Father Christmas costume and half a toyshop, Scrooge finally arrives at the Cratchits to deliver their gifts. It may be pathetically soppy of me, but I always get a little twinge at the moment where he pretends to have forgotten a toy for Tiny Tim – then gives him the carousel he’d been admiring in the toyshop window near the start of the film. Nice line from Tim, too, again just about undercutting any sickliness – “you didn’t steal it, did you?”
 
I do also love the very end of the whole thing, which unlike most versions doesn’t go for some sort of version of the book’s closing passage as narration. Instead, as the singing and dancing continues off into to the distance, an exhausted but happy Scrooge steps away towards his house, and the melancholy feeling the film offers up at various moments returns. Scrooge is redeemed, and happy, but there is a kind of bittersweet moment to it. He gives an earnest, almost desperate-seeming “Merry Christmas!” to those around him who no longer seem to have any consciousness of him as they dance and whirl away.
 
There’s a sense of the regret, and the wasted years… But there’s still that happiness in it all, as he puts his Father Christmas hat and beard onto the doorknocker and tells Jacob Marley that they finally made a Merry Christmas after all.

 
Review:
I have to admit that this wasn’t exactly an adaptation I was coming into blind. It’s a version of A Christmas Carol which I have watched many times and loved ever since I first saw it when it was shown on BBC1 one Christmas when I was a very young child – I can’t say for sure exactly how old, but it must have either been the 1991 showing on the 22^nd of December when I was seven, or perhaps even the 1989 Boxing Day showing when I was five.
 
Either way, in my young mind it became – along with the 1984 George C. Scott version – one of the two default ‘proper’ versions of the Carol, and I’m not sure I’ve ever quite shifted from that opinion. For one thing, it perhaps has the greatest cast of any adaptation yet made. Finney is wonderful as both the miserly Scrooge and the one full of joy at the end. The breadth and depth of the casting is perhaps shown by the scene in the toyshop after Scrooge’s redemption, with Geoffrey Bayldon doing a superb job as the bemused toyshop owner and Finney throwing himself into it as the manic Scrooge who seems obsessed with buying up everything. Both star turn and bit-part player actors of great calibre, and the whole film is absolutely stuffed through with such quality.

However, if I wasn’t coming into it blind, nor am I absolutely blind to its faults. It does some of the things I’ve always been critical of other versions of the story for on here, namely making changes that seem to be for change’s sake, rather than for any particular reason. So, setting the story in 1860 rather than 1843, and calling Scrooge’s nephew Harry instead of Fred. Why?
 
Something more substantial which you could genuinely take exception to is Marley’s reappearance towards the end, with Scrooge’s descent into hell. But for some reason, I have a hard time getting upset about this. Perhaps because it’s nice to have a chance to see Alec Guinness pop up again as one of the best screen Marleys. But perhaps it’s also because – as with the Muppet version – when the whole film is taking place within a heightened reality anyway, in this case as a musical, it’s perhaps easier to forgive the story being messed about with than it is in a supposedly ‘straight’ adaptation.

Speaking of it being musical, while not every single song is a classic, there are plenty of anthemic numbers to really lift you up – particularly the opening Christmas Carol overture, and I Like Life, and the justly-lauded Thank You Very Much, which has very much become the film’s signature song. Bricusse hits just the right festive note with the songs, Neame has assembled an absolutely stellar cast, and on the whole this is a terrifically cheerful and uplifting Christmas film. A joy from the first peel of bells to the closing title card.
 
In a nutshell:
Obviously it depends on whether or not you enjoy musicals. But if you do, then this is very much one of the finest and most enjoyable adaptations of the Carol that you could possibly hope to see.
 
Links:
Wikipedia
IMDb

Mickey's Christmas Carol

Title:

Mickey’s Christmas Carol
 
Format:
Animated short film
 
Country:
USA
 
Production company:
Walt Disney Pictures
 
Year:
1983
 
Length:
26 minutes
 
Setting:
Fantasy Victorian

Background:
By the 1980s the idea of making short animated features for theatrical release had almost entirely disappeared. Even cartoon feature films were not at their height at this period, a few years away from the Disney Renaissance and then the rise of CGI with the likes of Toy Story in the 1980s.
 
Short cartoons at this point were almost entirely made for television broadcast, and although Mickey’s Christmas Carol did go out on television in the USA the following year, for its 1983 release it was made for the cinema. Presumably it was designed as an extra incentive to drive audiences to the re-releases of some existing Disney films – it was paired with a re-release of The Jungle Book in the UK in October, and The Rescuers in the USA in December.
 
Mickey Mouse is, of course, one of the most famous animated characters ever to have been created, the iconic emblem of Disney itself. This, however, was the first time in thirty years that a cartoon starring the character had been produced for the cinema. It was adapted from an audio version of the story which Disneyland Records had put out in 1974, and was a critical success – Mickey’s Christmas Carol was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1984.

Cast and crew:
There is only one original voice of a Disney character present in the line-up – Clarence Nash as Donald Duck, the final time he would voice the character. There is, however, also a first here – Alan Young as the voice of Scrooge McDuck, who it will surprise nobody to know takes the role of Ebenezer in this version. He would go on to voice McDuck for many years, most notably in the successful DuckTales series.
 
Burny Mattinson both produced and directed the short. He’d started work at Disney as an eighteen-year-old in the mail room in 1953, and worked his way up to become an animator and storyboarder. He would later get to direct a full-blown feature for Disney with The Great Mouse Detective in 1986, and helped to write several of their hugely successful 1990s classics.
 
He also collaborated on the story here, along with voice artist Young, actor and writer Alan Dinehart, writer Tony Marino, and animators Ed Gombert and Don Griffith.
 
Underdone Potato:
I was surprised to find that almost all of the characters are referred to by their actual character names from the book, rather than their Disney character names – an early indication of how surprisingly close to the source material this version runs.
 
Close to other versions at times, too, with Scrooge having a gag here about Cratchit having had a lump of coal the previous week which was also present in the Loony Tunes version of just a few years beforehand.

 
Donald Duck turns up in the role of Nephew Fred, relentlessly cheerful even when sent packing by Scrooge. Two characters I didn’t recognise but are apparently Disney versions of Ratty and Moley from The Wind in the Willows play the charitable gentlemen, who get equally short shrift from Scrooge, and there’s a version of the usual “you’ll want the whole day tomorrow,” exchange with Cratchit.
 
The one piece of ‘casting’ I didn’t feel really worked was Goofy as Jacob Marley – he just seems too stupid for this Scrooge to have wanted to have anything to do with. Perhaps he had inherited loads of money which Scrooge swindled him out of? Who knows, but there is a nice bit of animation in this sequence, as Marley’s shadow follows Scrooge up the stairs once he arrives home.
 
Past:
The Ghost of Christmas Past comes in the form of Jiminy Cricket of Pinocchio fame. There’s nothing of Scrooge’s schooldays; instead, we go straight to his time as an apprentice with ‘Fezzywig’.

As is probably even usual, Belle is at the party – although oddly, more formally known as ‘Isabelle’ in this version, and played by Daisy Duck. He see her and Scrooge dancing, but a very specific ten years later it all comes to an end as he repossesses the ‘Honeymoon cottage’ she’s been waiting for him with because her last payment was an hour late!
 
Present:
‘Willie the Giant’ – no, no idea – plays the Ghost of Christmas Present, and there’s some fun material of him being so big that he opens up the roofs of houses as if they were toys; Scrooge’s to climb out of, and others to look into.

 

As with other versions starring anthropomorphic animals, there are moral questions ignored by the presence of the likes of roast turkey and suckling pig among the Christmas goodies laid out on the ghost’s table when Scrooge first meets him.
 
Rather less of a Christmas feast is to be had at the Cratchits, the one scene the Spirit shows Scrooge – with a mute Minnie Mouse playing Mrs Cratchit, and two other Cratchit children in addition to Tiny Tim, who does get the ominous ‘I see a vacant seat…’ line hanging over him.
 
Yet to Come:
I didn’t recognise the cigar-smoking stock villain who plays the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, but evidently he is called Pete and is a regular adversary used across many Disney cartoons. The cigar-smoking is relevant as there’s quite a nice touch where the mist which accompanies him on his arrival is revealed to be the smoke from his cigar.

Again this is quite a brief segment, which Scrooge showing the Cratchits mourning the death of Tim. As happens in one or two other versions, they are mourning him not at home but at his gravestone – and we pan across to see that it’s in the same graveyard as that of Scrooge, who is cast down into it and evidently into the fires of hell, with a touch of the 1970 version perhaps.
 
What’s To-Day:
There’s no boy at the window for Scrooge to shout down to, but he does meet the two charitable gentlemen outside, and showers them with money. After meeting Fred in the street and assuring him he is going to come round for Christmas dinner, he goes and buys up a lot of toys and, in a change made in several versions, goes around to the Cratchits’ house. In a scene which the Muppet version would later so very similarly, he initially pretends to be cross with Cratchit, before revealing his transformation and all ends happily.

Review:
I was struggling to think whether or not I’d ever actually seen a Mickey Mouse cartoon before this, although I eventually remembered that we’d been shown Fantasia at primary school once, so that counts. Really, though, I think Mickey is far more famous as a corporate symbol than he is as an actual character – far more people can tell you what he looks like than can actually tell you anything about him.
 
It’s a bit unfair that he gets top – indeed, eponymous – billing here too, given that he’s at best a supporting character, too. Surprisingly hard to take seriously given his voice, as well. To my modern ears, it just sounds like someone doing a parodied impression of the way that Michael Jackson used to speak.

 
That aside, I enjoyed this a great deal more than I had expected to. It’s a surprisingly faithful retelling of the story – compressed, of course, but with many of the main moments represented, and certainly not shy of tackling the issues of death in the original which other more child-friendly versions often try and shy away from.
 
As you’d expect from Disney, too, the whole thing has a touch to class and polish to the production which lifts it way, way above dross like the 1997 and 2001 animated versions, for example. I’m sure if you’re more of a Disney fan than I am, you’ll also enjoy spotting all kinds of cameos and guest appearances along the way as well.
 
In a nutshell:
Surprisingly good – a nice little version of the story.
 
Links:
Wikipedia
IMDb

A Christmas Carol - 2019, film

Title:
A Christmas Carol
 
Format:
Digitally-released feature film for online streaming
 
Country:
USA
 
Production company:
Salgado Studios
 
Year:
2019
 
Length:
73 minutes
 
Setting:
Contemporary Miami
 
Background:
Like many of the low-budget versions made available direct to online streaming services, this seems to have been made due to the driving force of one person – in this case, director and production company owner Steven Salgado. Salgado and his company are based in Miami, Florida, which is where this version is set and that actually works well to its advantage as something a bit different, especially with a predominantly Hispanic cast.

Cast and crew:
Very unusually and commendably for one of these things, despite also being an actor according to his website, Salgado didn’t succumb to the temptation to give himself a role here. Also according to the self-same website, he’s also a children’s author in addition to his acting and directing.
 
The opening titles for the film give a “story by” credit to one Charles Wendel, “based on characters created by Charles Dickens”, which is a bit bloody cheeky given that, no, it really is the same story, updated. Wendel appears to only have this credit on his CV and nothing else, to go by his IMDb page, anyway.
 
None of the cast are particularly known or have any big credits to their names, although Scrooge actress Kate Katzman had appeared in the Walt Disney biopic Walt Before Mickey as his wife, Lillian Disney.
 
Underdone Potato:
Our female Scrooge on this occasion is one Ellen Scrooge, owner of the successful drugs company Scrooge & Hernandez, which she founded with her partner Marley Hernandez who is now deceased, having died one year ago rather than the usual seven. The opening sequences show a very sparse and spartan existence for Scrooge, which I thought might be a budgetary and practical thing but the film did open out a little as it went along, so I think it was more of a stylistic choice to show the coldness and isolation of her life, which certainly does come across.

 
We get to know three of the harassed and harried employees at Scrooge’s office – Santiago, Gabe and Roberto, the latter of whom has a sick grandson called Tim. I did half-wonder whether Gabe might be named in honour of the original Scrooge prototype, Gabriel Grub, but I suspect it’s probably actually just coincidence.
 
There’s quite a lot of non-specific pseudo-business talk about “the numbers” which doesn’t really convince. From a 2020 perspective there is a certain resonance in Scrooge cynically wanting to know what the biggest-growing diseases are so they can be telling the most profitable drugs with which to treat them. She’d have loved the covid vaccine scramble!
 
The version of Nephew Fred here is Ellen’s sister, Jennifer, who calls her to invite her to Christmas dinner but is casually dismissed. There is a sort of version of the two charitable gentlemen, too, with Ellen pretending to make a phone call to avoid a charity worker in an elf outfit selling candy canes in the lift of the building where her company has offices.

The Marley sequence runs a little closer to the original – ‘runs’ being the operative word, as Scrooge is confronted with his spirit while out jogging at night. It’s quite a brutal scene in some ways, with Marley grabbing and squeezing her around the neck, which does feel quite jarring and I’m not sure really suits the style of the film at all.
 
Past:
The Ghost of Christmas Past arrives almost immediately after Scrooge’s traumatic encounter with Marley – he’s an Uber driver, or perhaps more accurately a fellow passenger in what appears to be a driverless Uber. Very modern.
 
We see some scenes of Ellen’s childhood, firstly a happy Christmas with her mother and father and then a less happy one when her mother has died after having her sister, and her father is struggling with the young Ellen’s anger and resentment about it all.
 

We also see the founding of her drugs company with Marley, and her romance with a man named Jack – the Belle equivalent here. Ellen seems to have some sort of superpower in this scene, when she gets home from work and says she’s going to freshen up in the shower, and is all done and made-up and in a different dress in about 10 seconds flat!
 
Jack asks her to marry him, but she is horrified by the idea and the whole relationship ends. There’s no version of the second Belle scene, but Scrooge does tell the ghost that she heard Jack got married and had children.
 
Present:
Ellen wakes up after her visions of the past thinking it was all a bad dream – but as she gets out of bed and walks through her flat getting ready for work, the Ghost of Christmas Present – a young man in a suit – is sitting on her couch waiting for her. She resigns herself to the fact that there are now going to be further visions.

 
We see her sister and her sister’s partner Carlos, with him trying to point out to her that it’s no good waiting for Ellen to change her ways; Jennifer will always be disappointed and let down by her. We also learn more about Roberto, Santiago and Gabe. The latter two come back to the office midway through a Christmas Eve drinking session because Santiago’s left his wallet there, and end up having a fight over whether Santiago is in love with Ellen.
 
Roberto we see caring for Tim, who we learn is a mad soccer fan – or “football” as he refers to it, which surprised me for an American production, but perhaps that’s more common in the Hispanic community there or else he’s just a stickler for terminology! The Spirit tells Ellen that Tim could be treated by a drug Roberto can’t afford – one her company took off the market because it wasn’t profitable enough.
 
Yet-to-Come
This is by far the most striking of the ghostly visitations, with the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come realised as a masked, goggled figure all in black, like some kind of sophisticated home intruder or SWAT team member.

The latter feeling comes across from the green night vision-type lighting the whole section is done in, while the former comes from the aggressive and frightening way in which the Spirit suddenly enters Ellen’s home an basically abducts her into the visions. Indeed, so shocking and violent is its attack that the Spirit grips its hand tightly around her throat at one point, which like Marley doing the same earlier feels unnecessarily violent and out-of-step with the rest of the film.
 
Once it’s dragged her away – literally – it shows her a vision of a weeping Roberto about to kill himself after Tim’s death, and Santiago crying in the company’s office because she has died. This was one part of the film which I found a little frustrating, as we weren’t given any reason or explanation for why Scrooge might have died at such a young age.
 
What’s To-Day:
Perhaps unsurprisingly after such a violent final visit, Scrooge wakes up on Christmas morning a thoroughly changed woman. She puts on a bright red dress and goes to visit her sister, where she learns that Jennifer is pregnant and she is thus going to be an aunt.

 
The following day she goes into the office and gives Santiago and Gabe raises, as well as starting a programme to try and get drugs to those in need more fairly and cheaply. She also gives Roberto another week to do the work she’d set him, and somehow she’s managed to buy some football tickets from somewhere for Roberto to be able to take Tim to what is presumably a big game.
 
There’s also the little implication that romance might, perhaps, blossom between her and Santiago, as they have rather a sweet little moment where she says she drinks beer sometimes, and he tells her that he knows a place which has some good ones.
 
Review:
In my review of the 2012 Irish version, I mentioned how easy it is for a low-budget version to simply get lost and ignored among all the others, and how in my view they would have been much better off doing something more distinctive. Rather than attempting to make it a Victorian English version, they should have taken advantage of their location and made an actual Irish-set version of the Carol.
 
This is something which this version gets absolutely right. Okay, so there are a fair few contemporary US-set versions with female leads. But this adaptation’s Miami setting and predominantly Hispanic cast and characters definitely gives it a unique flavour.

 

It’s also a cut above the 2012 Irish version and others of the Amazon Prime monstrosities by actually looking and feeling like a proper film. The picture quality is good, and while the camerawork is occasionally a little too shaky above and beyond the calls of naturalism, the performances – with the exception of Reinaldo Gonzales as Roberto, who I found quite wooden – are generally good and overall it’s a polished production for its level of budget.

The script is mostly decent, although it is a little clunky at times and could have done with another pair of eyes over it. Ellen’s sister referring to her as such so the audience knows who they are is one example, as is Marley explaining their company’s entire business plan to her in the Christmas Past section, when you presume she would already have known all that!
 
Tonally the only misstep is, I think, the violence of the attacks against Ellen from Marley and from the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. I think even in a version with a male lead, Scrooge being gripped so aggressively around the throat would have seemed a bit much, and here it’s a very uncomfortable shift in tone from most of what’s around it.
 
But overall, this is certainly an enjoyable watch for a contemporary version with a bit of a difference to it. While I certainly couldn’t place it in the first rank of adaptations, if you’ve seen quite a few versions in the past and want to try something you haven’t watched before, then you could do far worse than to give this one a try.
 
In a nutshell:
A good stab at doing a contemporary version on a low budget. Very watchable.
 
Links:
Amazon Prime
IMDb

The Smurfs: A Christmas Carol

Title:

The Smurfs: A Christmas Carol
 
Format:
Animated straight-to-DVD short film
 
Country:
USA
 
Production company:
Sony Pictures Imageworks and Duck Studios, for Sony Pictures Animation
 
Year:
2011
 
Length:
22 minutes
 
Setting:
Fantasy
 
Background:
The titular Smurfs have a long history in the popular cultures of many countries around the world, having been created as comic book characters by the Belgian artist Peyo in the late 1950s. Their international popularity resulted in a 1980s animated TV series, and even when new stories were not appearing their distinctive appearance meant that they remained regular cultural touchstones.
 
Sony had released a Smurfs feature film in 2011, and this short special was commissioned to be released as an extra feature on the DVD release of the film in December that year. In a nice nod to the past, while the Smurfs are CGI as in the 2011 film in the framing story here, the main part of the story is done in traditional hand-drawn animated, harking back to the 1980s TV version.

Cast and crew:
Given the nature of its production, many of the same actors who provided voices for the 2011 cinema film are on duty again here. George Lopez stars as the Scrooge-like ‘Grouchy Smurf’; a stand-up comedian and American sitcom star, I have to confess he was not someone of whom I’d previously heard.
 
Probably the best-known names internationally are Hank Azaria as Garmagel and Anton Yelchin as ‘Clumsy Smurf’. Azaria has voiced a variety of regular characters in The Simpsons throughout that show’s history, while Yelchin found all-too-brief fame as Checkov in the Star Trek movie reboots, before his tragic early death in 2016.
 
On the production side, director Troy Quane gained his first such credit here, although he’d been working as an animator since the 1990s, including on various direct-to-video spin-offs from big animated feature films. Writer Todd Berger seems to have a primary career as an actor, but had credits on various animations since the year 2000 – like Quane, he’d also previously worked on such spin-offs from cinema animated cinema films.

Underdone Potato:
We begin with the CGI Smurfs singing their way through Christmas Eve and enjoying all the decorations around their village, until they get to Grouchy Smurf’s house and find he hasn’t decorated at all. Smurfette, in particular, reacts to this as if they have just come across the scene of a murder.
 
It transpires that, perhaps not particularly surprisingly given his name, Grouchy Smurf isn’t interested in celebrating Christmas. He hates everything about it, and that’s that. Rather than simply leaving him be, the other Smurfs decide that Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without Grouchy being cheerful for the day and agreeing to put the Christmas star on top of their tree. Papa Smurf prepares a special potion to… Well, it’s not quite clear whether it gives him actual visions or this is all a dream or what. But it knocks him out, anyway.
 
Past:
When Grouchy Smurf awakes, he is in a world of traditional hand-drawn animation, and pleased to be looking a lot slimmer because of it. Smurfette arrives down his chimney as the Smurf of Christmas Past – also fulfilling the Marley role, as she informs Grouchy that she will be the first of the three spirits to visit him this evening.

She shows him a vision of a past Christmas when he used to enjoy it, only to become frustrated over the years by never receiving the hang-glider he always wanted, and only a new hat each and every year. He eventually becomes so frustrated that he snaps and declares his hatred of Christmas, also discarding the hat he’d been given, much to the upset of Papa Smurf who’d given it to him.
 
Present:
‘Brainy Smurf’ fills the role of ‘Smurf of Christmas Present’. He shows Grouchy that without him to put the star on the top of the tree, Clumsy Smurf had a go at doing it, and set off a chain reaction that ended up with the village tree and Christmas lights all destroyed.

Grouchy also learns that Papa Smurf made all the new hats he gave them every year personally, tailoring each one to the specific tastes of each individual Smurf. He regrets having been so dismissive of the hats he was given in the past.
 
Yet to Come:
‘Hefty Smurf’ – no, me neither – plays the role of Smurf of Christmas Future, initially in the traditional black robe although he soon takes the hood down and wears it rather more casually. He doesn’t show Grouchy very far into the future – just the next day, when the Smurf village is abandoned because they all went to the ‘West Forest’ to try and find a new tree to cheer Grouchy up.

While there, they were captured by the Smurfs’ enemy, Gargamel, who also captured Papa Smurf when he came to look for them. Grouchy realises the error of his ways, but too late as he goes tumbling into the bubbling vat of Gargamel’s cauldron…
 
What’s To-Day:
Grouchy wakes up, back in CGI land, and gets up early to restore all the Smurfs’ Christmas decorations. Everyone’s happy again and Grouchy even enjoys his new hat from Papa Smurf, who apologies for once again not getting him a hang-glider. While at the top of the tree putting the new star he’s made (put of his toy hang-glider, in a nice visual but not stated bit), he realises – or gambles – that if Papa Smurf knew he wanted a hang-glider, and he tailors each hat to its wearer, then his new hat must have some glider-like properties. In something of a brave move, he leaps from the tree, and it does indeed function as a sort of parachute.
 
I wouldn’t have risked it, though!

Review:
The Smurfs are one of those pop culture things that are big enough that I was aware of them and certain things about them, but I’d never actually watched or read any of their adventures before. Seeing them properly in action for the first time, I do have to say that they do rather come across as thinly-veiled knock-offs of the Seven Dwarves from Snow White.
 
There’s an interesting question raised about Smurfette, too. Even glossing over the fact she appears to be the only female member of the tribe, she talks more than once during this about them celebrating Christmas “as a family”. But it’s clear that more than one of the other Smurfs fancies her, and there’s even a gag about loads of them queuing up to kiss her when she’s standing under some mistletoe. Which makes you wonder about what kind of “family” they are, exactly…

 
I’m sure the change from CGI to traditional animation would have been a nice nostalgic touch for those who grew up with the older Smurf cartoons. However, while it is a nice idea to delineate between Grouchy’s ‘real’ and dream worlds, one drawback is that the contrast doesn’t really work in the CGI’s favour. I’m in no way anti-CGI, but here the traditional animation just seems much warmer and better-suited to the style of the Smurfs. They were originally comic book characters, after all.
 
In a nutshell:
Not a bad little production for a straight-to-DVD spin-off, but probably only really worth seeking out if you’re already a fan of the Smurfs.
 
Links:
Wikipedia
IMDb
 

A Sesame Street Christmas Carol

Title:
A Sesame Street Christmas Carol
 
Format:
Multi-camera studio video direct-to-DVD special
 
Country:
USA
 
Production company:
Sesame Workshop
 
Year:
2006 (released on DVD in the US on November 14^th that year)
 
Length:
46 minutes
 
Setting:
A fantasy version of a contemporary urban American city street
 
Background:
Sesame Street is one of the most famous television programmes ever made in the English language, designed as an educational aid to young children. By this point it had been running on the PBS public television network in the USA for nearly forty years, but was also very well-known and sometimes re-versioned around the world.
 
This was actually the second time the Sesame Street characters had been involved in a loose adaptation of the Carol. The theme, with even the same Oscar the Grouch character in the Scrooge part, had previously been explored in a 1978 Christmas special for the commercial CBS network, although this version is more explicitly labelled as being an adaptation of the Dickens tale.
 
Sesame Street, of course, stars various Muppet characters created by Jim Henson, and the Muppets of The Muppet Show had also made their own version in the early 1990s – which is now one of the most famous and beloved of all.

Cast and crew:
Sesame Street stalwart Carroll Spinney stars in his regular role as Oscar the Grouch, who is the central focus here. The various Muppet incarnations are always able to rope in some good guest stars, and here British stage and screen regular Tim Curry has a role as the narrator, having previously starred as Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island in 1996 – although his best known role of all is probably as the star of the 1970s cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Less auspiciously, he’d also voiced Scrooge in the bloody awful 1997 animated version of the story.
 
Director Victor DiNapoli had by this point had a very long and distinguished career on Sesame Street and its associated specials, having begun working on the show as a scenic artist in 197. He worked his way up to become a production designer and a director on the show, while also making a few on-screen cameo appearances when background human characters were required.
 
Scriptwriter Rickey Boyd had been a puppeteer and voice artist on various Henson company projects since the late 1980s. This linking script is one of only a handful of writing credits he has gained, having mostly continued to work as a performer.

Underdone Potato:
The special begins with a quite a nice, instrumental, Christmas-ified version of the famous Sesame Street theme tune, with some suitably plummy introductory narration from Curry, who’s only really a peripheral presence – he only has a few brief passages at the start and end, but I suppose adds a certain suggestion of old-world Englishness. He also has some interaction with Oscar, doing a bit of fourth-wall breaking.
 
Oscar, as you might expect, declares himself to be not a fan of Christmas, and has decided to sleep through the whole thing and pinned a note on the outside of his trashcan home to tell everyone so. However, he is rudely awoken by ‘Joe Marley’ of the ‘Scaredy Pants Delivery Service’, who has been instructed – we are never told by whom – to deliver three different ‘Ghost-a-Grams’ to Oscar throughout the evening, in order to attempt to cheer him up and introduce him to the Christmas spirit.

Past:
The first ‘Ghost-a-Gram’ is a CGI version of one of Oscar’s… species, I suppose you’d call it? ‘The Grouch of Christmas Past’, a famous grouch from London 1843 – a nice little touch as that was the year when the book was published. There’s a slight mixing of imagery from the book, however, as the character also wears chains – more usually associated with Marley, of course. Why it’s wearing them is not gone into.
 
The Grouch of Christmas Past shows Oscar two visions, although they’re not specifically related to his own life, but more general. It’s here that you realise that, actually, this is quite a cheap-and-cheerful affair, as almost everything Oscar is shown by all of the spirits by which he’s visited consists of archive material from previous Sesame Street productions.

This works well with the very first vision, however, a sweet little lesson about the gift of giving starring Sesame stalwarts Bert and Ernie. It works well because its archive nature is in its favour; it also features Sesame Street’s famous – and by this point long-dead – local store owner Mr Hooper, so would have been a nice little nostalgia-fest for some of the parents watching this with their own children when it came out.
 
The second vision shows Big Bird missing his / her / its best friend Snuffy on Christmas Eve, and singing a song to him / her / it down the phone. Not being particularly well-versed in Sesame Street I wasn’t sure if this was also archive material or newly-shot, although it became clear as things went along that all of the main visions were from previous Sesame Christmas productions.
 
Present:
Specifically labelled as a ‘Ghost’ this time, the Ghost of Christmas Present is a cheery talking Christmas tree which springs from a jack-in-the-box again delivered by Joe Marley. Once again it’s rendered in CGI, which I’m not sure really meshes particularly well with the traditional puppetry of Oscar. Certainly, character of Oscar must be about fifty years old by now, and looks much less dated than the CGI does here.

Anyway, she shows Oscar four more visions. Firstly, a couple of excerpts from an Elmo Christmas special where he meets Father Christmas and then later sings a song about realising it would be rubbish if it were Christmas every day. She then serves up a traditional Sesame Street educational segment, showing two families celebrating Hannukah and Kwanzaa, with a child from each family explaining to the viewer in voiceover a little about the respective festivals.
 
There’s a song to finish with, and Big Bird being reunited with Snuffy in a sequel scene to the one we saw in the ‘Past’ section, clearly lifted from the same previous special.

Yet to Come:
Nothing frightening or imposing here – no black-cloaked figure of death, but instead another cheery CGI creation. This one a sort of flying robotic football, a little reminiscent of those things from Terrahawks.
 
It only shows Oscar one vision, an animated short done in a kind of Hanna-Barbera style, showing a family taking a trip on a kind of theme park ride which shows them what Christmas will be like in the future, with pre-decorated trees and the like. One of the children of the family points out that they already have those.

What’s To-Day:
There’s a brief wrap-up section where Oscar emerges from his trashcan on a bright Christmas morning, and the whole thing appears to have actually been a dream. The ‘Joe Marley’ puppet is recycled as ‘Joey Dickens’, who sort of takes the role of the passing boy Scrooge hails from his window in the book. He’s come to bring Oscar a gift – a big sicky ball of used wrapping paper. Oscar in return gives him a smelly old shoe. It’s interesting to note that Oscar does not appear to have been significantly changed in any particular way by his experience.

Review:
This is an interesting one in the sense that it’s clearly a cut-and-shut job mostly made up of linking material shot on a single set with a very limited number of characters, around already-existing material, and obviously aimed at very young children. And yet in spite of all of that, it remains surprisingly watchable. Throughout the whole thing, Oscar has some nice lines moaning about and generally mocking everything, and the script never takes itself too seriously.
 
There are some nice gags at the expense of modern living, such as Oscar being asked by Joe Marley to rate the service he has received, and the vintage Bert and Ernie sequence is pleasant to see. Perhaps surprising, too, given that an important part of it revolves around a cigar box – an empty one, admittedly, but not something you’d expect a production for very young children to be allowed to make any reference to these days. So I’m pleased they didn’t feel this precluded them from including it.
 
Obviously it’s all very insubstantial, but against the low bar I judge all such child-focused versions against – the 2006 CGI monstrosity – it’s vastly superior. A direct-to-video… I hate to say ‘cash in’, but… Well, anyway, whatever it is, it has at least had a certain amount of care and attention taken with it, as you’d expect from the Sesame Workshop. The only criticism I’d made would be the use of CGI ghosts instead of puppets, and the Hanna Barbera-style animation – neither of which felt as if they sat particularly well alongside the more traditional Sesame Street techniques.
 
In a nutshell:
Better than it needs to be for what it is. But then again, what it is is a direct-to-video linking story around a whole load of old clips.
 
Links:
Muppet Wiki
IMDb