by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film I wanted to watch
last night was Scrooge, a 1935 British version of
Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol that I wished to screen before we got too far away from the end of the
holiday season, and which frankly I didn’t have much hope for. It was produced
at Twickenham Studios, where Arthur Wontner made all but one of his five films
as Sherlock Holmes (the reason for the fear was that the one non-Twickenham Holmes film with Wontner, the 1932 Sign
of the Four, was quite the best of
them), and the director was Henry Edwards, previously known to me only for Juggernaut, a 1936 mad-scientist melodrama with Boris Karloff
that was simply dull. Well, I got surprised: Scrooge turned out to be a quite tough-minded version of
the Dickens story, which by removing most of the sentimentality and virtually
all the comic relief, made the tale seem considerably more radical —
politically — than it usually does in screen adaptations.
The Scrooge was
Seymour Hicks, a veteran British actor who had first played the role in a
silent version as early as 1913 (!) and would remain active until his death in
1949, and though he didn’t have the comic chops of Alastair Sim he’s quite
convincing in the role — particularly in the chilling (literally and figuratively) moment in which he catches Bob
Cratchit trying to sneak a few more lumps of coal onto the heater in his outer
office. Cratchit is intriguingly cast: Donald Calthrop, usually an actor who played
slimy villains (he’s best known as the blackmailer in Hitchcock’s Blackmail and as Boris Karloff’s crippled assistant in The
Man Who Changed His Mind, the good mad-scientist movie Karloff made in his native
England in 1936 just before Juggernaut). There are a few odd corners cut — the ghost of Jacob Marley doesn’t
make an on-screen appearance at all (he’s just a disembodied voice) and the
Ghost of Christmas Past is literally a “ghostly” presence (of the three, only
the Ghost of Christmas Present shows up the way Dickens described him) — and
the “Past” sequence doesn’t include the heart-rending scenes of Scrooge as a
lonely boy at school, or his apprenticeship with Mr. Fezziwig (just where did Dickens come up with these bonkers character
names?), and the one scene from Scrooge’s past we do get (the kiss-off from his girlfriend Belle,
played by Mary Glynne) is so overwrought — Glynne literally screams at him — that we’re liable to think, “Good
riddance,” instead of regarding that as the turning point for Scrooge’s
character.
But overall this is a quite good adaptation, one of the best ever
made of this oft-filmed story, particularly strong in cinematic atmosphere.
Some of that may be due to the involvement of John Brahm, German expat who
would eventually head for Hollywood and become a director himself (of such
atmospheric British-set horror-mysteries as The Undying Monster, the 1944 version of The Lodger, and Hangover Square), who’s credited here as “production supervisor”
and may have goosed up Edwards and cinematographers Sydney Blythe and William
Luff into coming up with a marvelously Gothic atmosphere for the tale. There
are a few inconsistencies, less within the film than between it and my
imagination of the tale (I always thought the goose the Cratchits ate on
Christmas Eve was considerably smaller than it’s shown here, and the prize
turkey the reformed Scrooge buys them on Christmas Day was much larger), and
somehow Seymour Hicks is a good deal less convincing as Scrooge
post-transformation than he was pre-transformation (though I liked the touch of
him shaving his scraggly beard to indicate his change), but overall the 1935 Scrooge is a worthwhile film, vividly directed, mostly
well written by H. Fowler Mear (though I regretted the omission of Marley’s mea
culpa), finely acted (Calthrop’s
Cratchit is a triumph of anti-type casting) and staged in sets that look
credible as 19th century London (the story is set in 1843, the year
Dickens wrote the original) but also provide an appropriately Gothic atmosphere
for what Dickens, in his preface to the original book, called “a ghostly tale.”
Incidentally, apropos of A
Christmas Carol and its politics, Dickens
was clearly a liberal rather than a radical — the message of A Christmas
Carol is that the problems of industrial
society could be solved by a moral appeal to the capitalists themselves to
change their ways and treat their workers and customers more fairly — and I’m
surprised nobody but me ever seems to have noticed that Scrooge’s character
arc, from unscrupulous money-maker in the first half of his life to generous
philanthropist in the second half (giving away much of the money he made by
being so hard and mean in the first place!), has been lived by quite a few
real-life super-rich people, from John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie a
century ago to Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and George Soros in our own time.
