The prospect helps me overcome my deep seated
dislike for the corporate bacchanalia of Christmas. The one exception to my antipathy is lifelong my love of
TV holiday specials and Christmas movies.
I’m particularly fond
of A Christmas Carol in just about
any of its film or television adaptations. But my
hands-down, all-time favorite of these is the 1951 film Scrooge starring Alastair Sim.
Scrooge was a popular holiday programming staple when I was a kid in the Seventies. I don’t think it’s seen as much nowadays, despite the wide variety of broadcast, cable, and online outlets. But you can find just about any old movie on YouTube, and so the other day I watched Scrooge for the first time in many years.
What stood out for me, what I hadn’t noticed
in past viewings, was that the film’s emotional impact stems not so much from
its evocation of Christmas cheer and hearth and home typical of nearly all
holiday stories but from its emphasis on Charles Dickens’ not-so-implicit
critique of early capitalism.
For all its atmospheric shadow and fog and Alastair Sim’s rubber-faced
mugging at the camera and for all the heavy-handed simplicity of the familiar
redemption tale, where Scrooge differs
from other adaptations of A Christmas
Carol is the supplementary exposition screenwriter Noel Langley and
director Brian Desmond Hurst added to the plot.
The vignettes Ebenezer Scrooge revisits with
the Ghost of Christmas Past are such convincing antecedents to the man that one
must remember that half of them were never part of the novel. Certainly, the dialogue reveals the social
Darwinism which characterized the Victorian age. When young Scrooge and young Jacob Marley agree
that society would soon undergo rapid and violent changes and that only the
strong would survive, they concisely sum up the worldview of the new merchant
elites on both sides of the Atlantic.
I suspect that one reason for the embellished
backstory was the temper of the times in Britain when Scrooge was made. Although
much of the luster of socialism’s promise tarnished in the six years following Labour's 1945 election victory, it appeared
that the inherent evils of capitalism had at
least been checked. Perhaps it’s no
coincidence that the film’s popularity declined in the era of Thatcher
and Reagan. To imply there’s something
wrong with unbridled capitalism is a secular heresy nowadays. (In the immortal words of Maggie Herself, “There
is no alternative” to the free market, and “There is no such thing as society,
only individuals and families.”) When
the most elemental gains of 20th century social democracy such as
social insurance and the right of workers to organize are presently threatened, a
reminder of how bad the good old days were might have a salutary effect.
On the other hand, the message can be too obvious at moments. Consider the scene in
which Mr. Jorkin (Jack Warner), a character invented for the film, is
confronted with his embezzlement of company funds by his business
partners. Lines such as Jorkin’s “We’re
all cutthroats under this finery” and the partners’ willingness to accept
Scrooge and Marley’s bailout offer to avoid scandal can touch a
sensitive nerve or two in the context of recent events. Nevertheless, the exploits of Scrooge and his colleagues,
both in novel and in Desmond Hurst’s film, raise questions about the
relationship between virtue and wealth.
When Mr. Fezziwig loses his family firm to the rise of the new “vested
interests,” one reflexively thinks of the small businesses crushed whenever
big-box retailers such as Wal-Mart come to a new town. At one point Langley’s screenplay has Fezziwig
deliver an earnest oration on trade as a way of life rather than as mere pursuit
of material gain. It's unlikely such sentiments rest in the hearts of today's b-school graduates.
Despite the moralism of his tale I think Dickens pulled a punch or two, perhaps in deference to the sensibilities of his well-heeled readers. After all, Bob Cratchit did not toil in the dark Satanic mills of the early Industrial Revolution. His compensation of 15 shillings a week (or £39 a year) was a fair wage for the time, and it did enable him to support a large family and send his eldest daughter away to school. Living in a pre-consumer economy where most monetary transactions concerned food, shelter, and raiment meant that Bob’s pay could provide a decent life even if it wasn’t necessarily a life of leisure.
If Dickens intended to illustrate the
hardships of economicl inequality, he would have done far better making Cratchit
a mill worker or coal miner living in a hovel with his ill-clad and underfed
progeny. The various film renditions of A Christmas Carol inevitably carry over this flaw in the dramatis personae. Scrooge succeeds partly due to director of photography C. M.
Pennington-Richard’s use of shadowy atmospherics to evoke a seedy London
cloaked in a miasma of fog and coal smoke.
(Had he wanted to add verisimilitude he could have moved filming off the
Renown Pictures soundstage onto the streets of postwar London and probably achieved
the same effect.) Visuals aside, the
film’s characters (save Scrooge) tend to be quaint
cut-out caricatures drawn largely to impart the warmth of an archetypal old-time Christmas.
Similarly, the Cockney of supporting characters
such as that of Scrooge’s charwoman seems calculated to evoke nostalgia for a
time and place none of us have lived in.
Listening to Kathleen Harrison’s aitch-dropping,
fingernails-on-a-chalkboard screech, I was strangely reminded of Dick Van Dyke
in Mary Poppins. I don't mean as a literal comparison, but in the sense
that both make us think of the Victorian years as a time of cloying charm rather
than pointing up the rough, often brutish lives experienced by England’s
proletariat.
That said, perhaps I’m analyzing too
much. Watch the movie when you have the
chance. Happy holidays.
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