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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
G.K. Chesterton wrote that "A Christmas Carol" "owes much of its hilarity to the fact of it being a tale of winter, and a very wintry winter." Dickens puts dead center the barren December landscape of Scrooge's soul -- which paradoxically makes his story more exciting, more humorous and even more comforting than Capra's.
The contrast of Scrooge's gruel causes Dickens' Christmastide pleasures to seem infinitely inviting: lavish food and drink, toasty family reunions, even genteel flirtations amid games of blindman's buff. The spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come stress the importance of generosity and kindness year-round. No organized religion can be found to turn off nonbelievers in this story. What Dickens calls for is fellow feeling, right on earth. His combination of high-mindedness and heartiness, of social realism and aesthetic gaiety, suffuses the fabric and texture of the story. Gusto clings to every detail, like the boy-size turkey that Scrooge buys for the Cratchits' Christmas dinner.
In his entry in "You've Got to Read This: Contemporary American Writers Introduce Stories That Held Them in Awe," John Irving, an inspired follower of Dickens, notes, "Each Christmas, we are assaulted with a new carol; indeed, we're fortunate if all we see is the delightful Alastair Sim."
Irving is right: The best big-screen "Christmas Carol" is the 1951 British production starring Sim as Scrooge, directed by Brian Desmond Hurst and written by Noel Langley (who co-wrote "The Wizard of Oz"). It's true to Dickens' brusque theatricality. For all the joyousness and pathos of the sights the ghosts show Scrooge, he's never allowed to linger over them. The spirits force him onto an emotional whirligig that doesn't stop until Christmas Eve is over. His giddy recognition of his change rings in delightful concert with the chimes that sound on Christmas morning.
The actor playing Scrooge sets the pitch of every "Christmas Carol," and Sim in this version is tiptop and irrepressible. Comically grotesque at the beginning and infectiously silly at the end, his performance is a stylish caricature of a man who exacts passionate satisfaction from tightness and meanness. When he sees his ex-partner Marley's ghost, he looks more afraid of having his evening ruined and his smallness revealed than of the specter. Though kids laugh at Sim's vicious glee and the way he masticates his lines, they hate his Scrooge until he is transformed. Sim's cleverness and panache amuse adults throughout.
The film contains one soaring, lyrical moment reminiscent of John Huston's great "The Dead." In Dickens, when Scrooge attends his neglected nephew's Christmas party, the man's wife, whom Scrooge has shunned, sings a "simple air" that melts his heart. In this movie, the simple air is "Barbara Allen" -- a song that the movie's composer, Richard Addinsell, has already linked with Scrooge's frail, beloved sister. The shifts of expression in Sim's face and the melancholy pull of the ballad turn the scene into a tour de force of plaintiveness.
While the British movie chronicles Scrooge's gradual hardening and gold lust and consequent loss of sentiment and romance, the 1938 MGM production gives its fullest attention to such frivolities as street sliding. The studio's smooth, plush blandness muffles the story's vitality. This version takes a giant leap from Scrooge's youth to his miserhood: Producer Joseph Mankiewicz must have calculated that American audiences wouldn't accept Scrooge as an eligible young man. Hugo Butler's script (directed by Edwin Marin) leaves out many of Dickens' stirring sermons, such as the Spirit of Christmas Present's description of the two emaciated children hiding under his robes: "This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy." Maybe MGM thought Depression audiences would reverse the Spirit's priorities.
The people who come through here for Dickens are the costume designers. Reginald Owen is an uninspired Scrooge, but his pinched pants and tight waistcoat force him into a hunchbacked, bowlegged crouch; he has an amusing profile, like a grasshopper in fancy dress. But you'll find more fervent expressions of Christmas spirit not just in the Sim "Christmas Carol" but in movies derived from Dickens' masterworks that aren't Christmas specific: David Lean's "Great Expectations" and "Oliver Twist," Carol Reed's "Oliver!" Alberto Cavalcanti's "Nicholas Nickleby," Noel Langley's "The Pickwick Papers" (yes, the same Noel Langley who adapted Sim's Scrooge) and the David Selznick-Jack Conway production of "A Tale of Two Cities." Each draws on Dickens' comedic or melodramatic zing and satiric inventiveness -- and, often, his blend of moral uplift and social outrage.
