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 25th 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-20th 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 22nd 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:
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