I rewatched the Alistair Sim (1950s) movie of A Christmas Carol tonight and wanted to jot down some thoughts.
The first part of the movie, up to and including Marley’s Ghost, is extremely faithful to the book - to the point of replicating most of the original dualogue, and also adding some of the lines from Dickens’ narration to the dialogue. About the only addition is Scrooge harshly refusing a debtor who begs for a few more days to pay, something which is in line with Scrooge’s typical behaviour - as shown by the couple in the Christmas Yet to Come part of the book, who are relieved by his death because they are unlikely to meet with another creditor who is so merciless - but which is not directly depicted in the book. There’s even a scene where a blind man’s dog pulls him up an alley away from Scrooge, like the narration in the book describes! And the change in music from Bob Cratchit joyfully heading home on Christmas Eve to Scrooge taking his “melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern” perfectly conveys the change in mood in the book between those two scenes. The ghosts mourning that they cannot help the poor woman, at the end of the Marley sequence, are also included.
Oh, the other addition in that section is Scrooge’s statement that his nephew married “against his [Scrooge’s] will”, which is not specifically from the book.
The Christmas Past section is the part where the adaptation makes the most changes. Fan is an adult (or at least is, like Scrooge, in her late teens) when she comes to get Scrooge from the school; his relationship with her is given more centrality as he says she is the only one who ever cared about him, and that if he is not to be lonely then she must live forever. She is also shown dying after giving birth to Fred, and it is said that Scrooge’s mother also died giving birth to him, which his father resented him for. Also, Fan on her deathbed asks Scooge to look after Fred, but only after he’s left the room, so he doesn’t hear her; the moment he hears it is when we see the present-day Scrooge express real remorse. None of this is from the book - Scrooge’s mother clearly did not die giving birth to him in the book, as his sister Fan is much younger than him there. (Also, like all other adaptations I have seen, Scrooge’s memories of the joy he found in reading during his lonely Christmases at school are omitted.)
Scrooge’s business career is also expanded upon, with him (after Fan’s death, which is thereby implied to have embittered him) leaving Fezziwig’s employ for that of an unscrupulous man who also employs Mr. Marley; Fezziwig going out of business; and Scrooge later buying a controlling share in his unscrupulous employer’s company. I can see why the movie does this. The change lets it more dramatically show Scrooge’s change from the young man who worked for Fezziwig to the harsher, more ambitious, more avaricious man he became, rather than us hearing that only from his fiancée. For this reason, I’m more okay with this expansion than I am with the changes around Fan; I think the latter too heavily frames Scrooge’s later mindset as due to grief turned to bitterness, whereas in the book it’s more about greed borne of the desire for worldly respect and prestige.
Likewise, like The Muppet Christmas Carol, the movie shows Scrooge and his later-fiancée (here called Alice, not Belle) at Fezziwig’s party - a change which lets us see more of the relationship than just its end.
We also get a (rather unnecessary, IMO) deathbed-repentance scene from Marley, where hetells Scrooge they were wrong and to save himself, but Scrooge does not understand. There is nothing of the sort in the book.
There’s also another interesting shift. In the movie, Fezziwig says he’d rather go out of business than adopt the “new methods” of doing business, and then he in fact does go out of business. Alice says that when she became engaged to “they were both poor and content to be so,” full stop. In the book she says, “we were both poor and content to be so, until we could improve our fortunes by patient industry”. In a way, this feels like the movie grappling with a question surrounding the book - can one run a successful business in an ethical way? can one become well-off ethically? - that the book itself does not take up; but the movie ends without returning to the question and Scrooge’s later reformation indicates that yes, one can. Also in this vein, where the book shows Scrooge’s fiancée later on happily married with a houseful of children, the movie shows her caring for poor people on Christmas in something like a homeless shelter/food kitchen, which further dramatizes the differences between the paths they have chosen, that of avarice and that of charity.
The section with Christmas Present is very close to the book - the Cratchit family dinner again uses much of the original dialogue, and also integrates parts of Dickens’ narration into the dialogue. Christmas Present is almost exactly as the book describes him, and as the original illustrations in the book shown him, and even the celebration of the “miners, who labour in the bowels of the earth” is shown. Fred’s Christmas party is shown, and even the minor characters of Tupper and the woman he’s courting from the book (though in the book she is described as the ‘fat sister’ and here she is not fat). Fred’s joke about Scrooge is omitted and his goodwill to him is emphasized (the opposite of Muppet Christmas Carol, which focuses on the joke and on no one liking Scrooge; I think this versiondoes better in that respect).
The section with Christmas Yet To Come is similar to the book (though it starts off with Tiny Tim’s death - a good choice, I think, as it keeps all the material surrounding Scrooge’s death as a single sequence). The debtor family who are relieved at Scrooge’s death are left out, but the rest is similar to the book, and the rage-and-bone shop scene conserves a lot of the origibal dialogue word-for-word. This movie is where Mrs. Dilber as the charwoman - a small change from the book - and the expansion of her character comes from, and she is a good comic character with several great lines. The scene in the bedroom with the body is omitted, which I think is a necessity of film - even if Scrooge failed to recognize his own charwoman and his own curtains, film would make it too implausible that he could fail to recognize his own room.
Muppet Christmas Carol has a much better and spookier Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come than the 1951 film has - the faceless void is very unsettling, whereas in 1951 the spirit is clearly just a person with a black sheet of fabric over them (in one scene you can see the person’s face through the fabric). But that’s the difference between special effects in the 1950s and the 1990s.
Scrooge’s delight at finding he is still alive is dramatic verging on hysterical and gives some more funny moments, and, as in the book, he sends the turkey to the Cratchits’ anonymously and then goes to visit his nephew’s party (rather than showing up at the Cratchits’ with the turkey in person as in the Muppet version’s crowd song). And the depuction of him chuckling as he sends the turkey and writes the note is direct from the book. His apology to Fred’s wife feels like it has too much emotional emphasis given that he has never met her before; it’s as though the movie is treating her as a proxy for the apologies he would like to make to Fan and to Alice. But the scene on the whole is lovely, and the ending with Bob Cratchit is very good.
On the whole, this is a good adaptation - better than the Muppet one in some ways (particularly the Christmas Present scene, where it focuses on others’ celebrations as well as how Scrooge has made the Cratchits’ lives harder, whereas the Muppet one focuses on Scrooge being disliked). Its main weaknesses in my opinion are 1) an overemphasis on the role of Fan’s death in the younger Scrooge’s downward moral trajectory; and 2) Scrooge’s desire to change not coming until very later in the film, when he sees the callous reaction to his death.
I would recommend this adaptation to anyone who hasn’t seen it - it’s up there with the Muppet one as one of the best that has been made, and I was amazed at how many lines from the narration they had added to the dialogue, and how much of the atmosphere of the narration they captured (as one example, Bob is actually shown trying to warm himself at the candle). It’s available both in black and white and in a colourized version (as in, they later came along and physically coloured in the film reels; I can’t imagine how much work that must have been!).
