KYMM'S 365 DAY MOVIE CHALLENGE #47: Scrooge (1935), A Flinstones Christmas Carol (1994), Scrooged (1988)

So, watching and writing about twelve Halloween movies in October not being challenging enough, I have decided to watch as many versions of A Christmas Carol as I can this month, because I am crazy.

Also because I truly love A Christmas Carol. I grew up with a record album where the story was read by Sir Ralph Richardson that I listened to a thousand times before I ever saw a filmed version, and then I became obsessed with them. Weirdly, though, there are some very famous versions that I have never seen, and now is the time to rectify that terrible error.

They can be musical, animated, traditional, and non-traditional, and sometimes more than one. I am starting with a baseline of traditional, though, because you can’t go off into the cloud cuckooland of some of these versions without starting pretty close to Dickens. I am not beginning with the Best of All Possible Scrooges, Alistair Sim, though, as I am saving him for last, and I’m going with the first full-length sound version, from 1935, starring Sir Seymour Hicks, who was famous for doing the role onstage, playing it over one thousand times.

After Sir Seymour, it’s all about chance, spinning a Tiny Decisions wheel that I loaded with all of different versions that I could find. So it’s A Christmas Carol Advent!

“My Lord, shall we proceed with your speech, or shall we let the ladies and gentlemen continue to enjoy themselves?”

This is one I have never seen, it’s only 1h 18m, so I’m interested in seeing what was left out and what was included. That’s really what all of these comparisons are about. Is there “This girl is ignorance, this boy is want?” Is there the selling of the bed curtains, rings and all? What game is played at Fred’s party? What dialogue comes directly from Dickens? It’s all about the Christmas Carol nerd in me.

Should I sum up the plot? Will anyone read this who doesn’t know A Christmas Carol in their bones? I cannot assume. Well, Marley was dead, to begin with. Scrooge, the surviving partner in the money lending business, is a mean old miser who treats everyone very poorly. One Christmas Eve, he is visited by Marley’s ghost who tells him to mend his ways, and he subsequently is visited by three more spirits, The Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come. Scrooge learns his lesson and becomes a better man. Fin. Not Fan.

This version begins with a desultory rendition of The First Nowell being played in the street outside of Scrooge’s counting house, where his clerk, Bob Cratchit tries to sneak a little coal on the fire and Scrooge throws twenty fits. Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, shows up and is cheerful at him, Scrooge is not having any of this nonsense. We do NOT have the scene with the men collecting for the poor and the whole “if they want to die they should do it and decrease the surplus population” bit.

Scrooge stomps off home, ignoring all the signs of festive happiness from rich and poor alike. Something I have never seen before, is a big dinner party given by the Lord Mayor of London, contrasted with Scrooge miserably eating gruel on his own in an empty establishment.

He goes home and sees Marley’s face in the knocker, though of course, since we didn’t have the scene in the office mentioned previously, we don’t know that he died seven years ago this very night or anything. He nervously checks the house for spooks, finds none.

When Marley appears, to give Scrooge the rundown, we don’t actually see him. The camera moves around, following where he invisibly is, and Scrooge speaks earnestly to an empty chair. An interesting choice, probably to save special effects money, but it does work.

When The Ghost of Christmas Past appears, we see a glow surrounding an invisible figure, who shows him scenes from his past. We don’t start with his boyhood in the school, no little Fan and father being ever so much kinder, no lovely Fezziwigs, but with Scrooge already a tight miser, but with brown hair, foreclosing on a young couple who are behind on their payments. Or possibly he’s sending them to the poor house? It’s unclear. This is witnessed by Belle, who is disgusted and gives him his ring back. The man, by the way, it played by the world’s youngest Maurice Evans. He was a great Shakespearean actor, but is best remembered today for playing Dr. Zaius in the Planet of the Apes films.

The Ghost of Christmas Present looks a great deal like Sydney Greenstreet, and Scrooge is turning good too fast, but he has to finish in an hour and eighteen minutes, so that doesn’t leave time for faffing around. They aren’t cutting anything from the Cratchit scene, including Martha pretending she wasn’t there, and Mr. Scrooge, the founder of the feast. Interestingly, the Ghost does throw Scrooge’s words back in his face about decreasing the surplus population, though without the original scene to make it make sense, it’s just the Ghost being a dick. I guess it was cut after the fact? Or lost footage?

The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is just a shadow of a pointing finger, with Scrooge appearing as a reflection within a shadow as he goes with it, which is extremely interesting. We see the men at the exchange uncaring about a death, and then we do have the scene with the bed curtains rings and all, much of the dialogue taken right from the story. Then we see something that is never ever in the films, Tiny Tim lying dead upstairs in the Cratchit house. The scenes with the family are extremely affecting.

Then Scrooge wakes in his own bed, a changed man. His bouncing around crying hooray is terribly funny and sweet. They didn’t have the scene at Fred’s in the Ghost of Christmas Present section, but we don’t need it to appreciate it when he comes to dinner with them.

My number one favourite scene in all of the versions is when Bob comes to work the next morning and Scrooge has to pretend to be his old self. Sir Seymour is completely adorable giggling at his own playacting.

Sir Seymour was 64 when he played Scrooge, so he isn’t aged up much, though he first played him onstage in 1901, at the age of only 30, so there must have been a good amount of greasepaint involved. He is extremely good in the role, very subtle and naturalistic, surprisingly so for the time, not to mention the fact that he had been performing it onstage for 34 years, presumably to the back of the rafters. He gets less subtle as the Ghosts come, but you really can’t play that casually.All in all, an auspicious beginning. What will be next?

“Didn’t you see that red light back there?”

“I’m a star! I was rehearsing!”

“I’ll let you off this time, Fred, but you’d better get the stars out of your eyes and watch where you’re going!”

“I know where I’m going, straight to Broadrock!”

Well, in a big change from Sir Seymour, next we have A Flintstones Christmas Carol!

In a rather fun twist, in this version Fred Flintstone plays Scrooge in a Bedrock Community Theatre production of A Christmas Carol, and his having the lead role goes straight to his head. He can think of nothing but rehearsing and the fact that he is a star!

You’d think that constantly rehearsing would be a good thing, except for the fact that he doesn’t remember to do a single other thing, including pick up Pebbles from cavecare, or buy Christmas presents, and he is terribly rude and unthinking of anyone else, which is pretty apt for Scrooge, of course. By the time curtain goes up, everyone has Had It with Fred, especially Wilma.

Interestingly, the play within the movie keeps a good deal of Dickens’ dialogue left out of the ‘35 version, beginning with Marley being dead to begin with, though in this version he is Marbley. And, of course, nephew Fred is called Ned so as not to be all confusing with the One True Fred. The scene where Fan comes to get Scrooge at school actually brought me to tears, not to mention the death of Tiny Tim. Not that that is particularly difficult, but it shows that they actually did the Dickens right, in the middle of the framing story about Fred being a jackass.

All in all, this was an extremely good version of Dickens, I’d put it ahead of the ‘35 version in terms of keeping to the story as originally written, even with dinosaurs and actors getting sick with the Bedrock Bug, and Wilma, the stage manager, having to step in, etc. Who knew?

“Ten o’clock, IBC presents, live, via satellite, from New York, Bethlehem, Helsinki, West Berlin, and the Great Barrier Reef, Charles Dickens’ immortal Christmas classic, Scrooge. Starring Buddy Hackett, Jamie Farr, the Solid Gold dancers, and Mary Lou Retton as Tiny Tim!”

Okay, so there are two extremely popular versions of A Christmas Carol that it makes not the slightest lick of sense that I have never seen, and Scrooged is the first of them.

I mean, I love Bill Murray, and saw most of his films of the era, and obviously I am a Christmas Carol superfan, so how is this film 33 years old and I’m only just getting around to it now? The world may never know.

I know it’s a modern version of the story, but it’s keeping me on my toes by starting at Santa’s workshop, so it’s not just the Ghost of Christmas Past driving a taxi that is making this version different.

Santa and the elves are plugging along with the toy making, when suddenly they are attacked with missiles, and they all pull out their automatic weapons, and then Lee Majors appears to save the day, and I’m starting to think that this might be a movie within the movie, or I have been sorely misled as to the nature of this film! Man, nothing puts this more solidly in the ‘80s than Lee Majors and his toupee showing up as the hero.

Yes, it turns out to be promos for Christmas programming for the IBC network, run by Bill Murray as Frank Cross, who seems pretty Scrooge-y to me. The trembling executives (including a baby infant Bobcat Goldthwait) show the promos to Frank, including one for a live version of Scrooge, which he hates and thinks it’s boring, showing them his version of the promo, involving shooting up heroin, international terrorism, and freeway shootings. From this we gather that Frank Cross is a terrible person, or possibly an ordinary television executive.

We see him fire Bobcat and have him thrown out of the building for being sweet and earnest, tell his secretary (the great Alfre Woodard as the modern version of Bob Cratchit) to give everyone, including herself, towels from him for Christmas, and that she has to work late and not take her son to the doctor, be dismissive of Christmas to his brother (John Murray, another Murray brother besides Brian Doyle!), and…receive a humanitarian award. He goes back to the office, and then he is visited by the ghost of his former boss (John Forsythe) who says he will be visited by three ghosts! Quelle surprise!I love the cast of this film, it’s so Attack of the ‘80s. It’s like being visited by old friends. Karen Allen as the Belle equivalent, Carol Kane and David “Buster Poindexter” Johansen as the Ghosts of Present and Past, the ubiquitous Brian Doyle-Murray as Frank’s dad, John Glover, classic ‘80s slimeball as, well, a classic ‘80s slimeball, it’s all really more of a special treat now than it would have been had I seen this in a timely manner.

The scenes from the past with Karen Allen and Bill in a hippie wig are charming and adorable, and you really regret watching him screw it all up. Hopefully, an hour from now, he’ll have fixed it. Because otherwise there can be no happy ending. Holding Christmas in your heart all the year round is one thing, doing it without Karen Allen by your side is another thing altogether.

Here’s the thing I never noticed before, how much Groundhog Day is a Scrooge story. It took seeing Bill Murray in a similar character, not to mention when Frank sees the dead homeless guy, it reminded me so much as when Phil tries to make the day go perfectly so that the homeless guy in Groundhog Day lives.

I am really surprised to read that some of the reviews for Scrooged were so poor. Roger Ebert wrote that this was the worst version of A Christmas Carol that he had ever seen, which I think is madness. It is funny and charming, the performances are excellent, and all in all, I’m glad I finally watched it.

Kymm Zuckert is an actor/writer/native Angelino. When Kymm was a child, her parents would take her to see anything, which means that sometimes she will see a film today and say, “I saw that when I was eight, I don’t remember any of that inappropriate sex stuff!” Check out her entire 365 day blog @ https://365filmsin365days.movie.blog