Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol

[Serial_Apologist]

Not imho to be missed is the British 1951 filmed version of the story, "Scrooge", starring Alastair Sim, showing on Channel 5 at 1 pm this coming Sunday. Some say no one has bettered AS in this role.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Not imho to be missed is the British 1951 filmed version of the story, "Scrooge", starring Alastair Sim, showing on Channel 5 at 1 pm this coming Sunday. Some say no one has bettered AS in this role.

... but isn't this the "coloured" version rather than the far more atmospheric (to my mind) monochrome original?

[Serial_Apologist]

... but isn't this the "coloured" version rather than the far more atmospheric (to my mind) monochrome original?

RT presents two different stories on that one, ferney, so I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

[Caliban]

Not imho to be missed is the British 1951 filmed version of the story, "Scrooge", starring Alastair Sim, showing on Channel 5 at 1 pm this coming Sunday. Some say no one has bettered AS in this role.

I have been struggling to find time to contribute to this thread, and was going to add an enthusistic for the film. Yes, the colourised one is not as good but you can reset your telly to black and white for the duration. I am one who would say the fantastic Sim has never been bettered in the role! The sequence near the end where he shocks his housekeeper with his cheerfulness is matchless (her reactions are perfect too - I was almost sick as a child laughing at her shrieking and throwing her apron over her face)

The book is wonderful and oft-read in the Season. The scene of the Cratchits' Christmas meal - the goose, the pudding - is one of my favourites in all Dickens's output, the pathos applied deftly (e.g. the word 'cheapness' in "There never was such a goose. Bob said he didn't believe there ever was such a goose cooked. Its tenderness and flavour, size and cheapness, were the themes of universal admiration.")

[aeolium]

I think it's a very imaginative ghost story and all the ghosts, including Marley, are wonderfully depicted (especially the last silent ghost with the eloquent finger). I think I still prefer The Haunted Man from his Christmas Books, and The Signalman as a ghost story. Alastair Sim is the only possible screen Scrooge.

BUT

Does Dickens bear a heavy responsibility for evangelising and bringing about the kind of Christmas that can make the heart sink: the heaps of food, the relentless jollity, the huge family gatherings (all there in the descriptions in the visitation by the Ghost of Christmas Present)? The kind of Christmas lampooned by Tom Lehrer in his Christmas Carol:

Christmas time is here, by golly,
Disapproval would be folly,
Deck the halls with hunks of holly,
Fill the cup and don't say "when."
Kill the turkeys, ducks and chickens,
Mix the punch, drag out the Dickens,
Even though the prospect sickens,
Brother, here we go again.

Dickens' story was intended as a broadside against the hard-hearted rich, and in defence of the neglected poor, but his social concern was never that consistent. It was the helpless, particularly poor and helpless children, that he really felt for (he had been one), but once they were able to cope for themselves then his attitude could be quite different. The crippled Tiny Tim could easily have grown up into a kind of Silas Wegg, who is first an object of humour and then of contempt. Dickens pleads for education to guard against the boy Ignorance in the last haunting, but a poor boy who with difficulty raises himself through education becomes the obsessive stalker and eventual murderer Bradley Headstone in Our Mutual Friend.

I think it's for the powers of invention and description, and the characters that A Christmas Carol is to be remembered - not the message.

[Norfolk Born]

[QUOTE=Mary Chambers;111278]Emlyn Williams.....does anyone know of him now?
I was watching him just a few days ago in an episode of 'Rumpole Of The Bailey'.