I admit having a past with this film; saw it on TV several millennia ago, well, a Christmas as a child of maybe 10, after having been shown it at Junior School prior to the end of term in December. You see, for me this is the film I most strongly associate with the Christmas period. Curious, I know; this isn't a 'great' film, and hasn't particularly been given popular acclaim. What better a time than last evening for me to watch this; the north-east of England practically frozen over in a snow-scape.
I think how deep an impression this at-times-clumsy, over-egged musical take on the Dickens story is felt in how I have received other versions. A few Christmases back, I saw the Alastair Sim-starring version - much more acclaimed - yet found it lacking in, shall we say, spirit...? Now just what is it about this version, then? A gusto and willingness to wring all of the absurdity, profundity and sentimental pathos out of Dickens, I would hazard. Albert Finney's performance is stylised, but he just seems so good a choice to play Scrooge; the actor's well-documented aversion to 'charm' allows his Scrooge a rascally chilliness. And what a sublime contrast in his playing of the younger Scrooges in the Christmas-Past sequences? A restrained, tight-lipped quality pervades even the scenes of idyllic happiness with Isabelle - all flutes, forests and punting on the willowy river, yet with a telling, jarring air of fatefulness in Finney's inscrutable features as the Young Scrooge.
Need it be said how effective the various ghosts are? The British film veteran Kenneth More playing an acid-tongued, man-mountain of a bounteous spirit; the 'Ghost of Christmas Future' a "Seventh Seal" sceptre; Edith Evans an admirably underplayed, tactful 'Ghost of Christmas Past'. These earliest recollections include the moving "let's go back to your childhood, childhood, childhood, childhood..." (to quote Vivian Stanshall) sequences, with 'the solitary boy' that is the youngest Scrooge, shown adrift, friendless, cut off from an uncaring family; alone, death-dealt in the classroom. The Dickensian association of childhood with death is further evoked with the poignancy of Bob Cratchitt (played with jocular, earnest aplomb by the fine David Collings), by Tiny Tim's grave in the future. A tableau prefaced by a tracking shot of the graveyard, Tiny Tim's sentimental song - heard earlier - echoing forlornly in the studio frost.
Complementing Finney is the astoundingly good, undervalued turn of Alec Guinness, as the Ghost of Jacob Marley. Lithe, threateningly airy, this Marley seems a conjurer's trick, and that conjurer is clearly Guinness. Playing with an air of sinister camp I have rarely seen in him, he endows his lines with a world-weary playfulness; he is a sprite weighed down by those metaphysical chains. Far, far better than Michael Hordern in the 1950 version, who was merely reasonable, as a croaking, browbeaten Marley. This Ghost is both haunting and droll, dispensing loaded rebukes and dryly slithering around the place. Guinness's physicality is a joy; it reminds one of the influence he was on Peter Sellers before he was sentenced to dullard 'straight' roles in David Lean epics, or indeed "Star Wars", which the great actor rightly perceived as a millstone round his neck in later years. In Marley's guise here he has the chance to mine the seam of eternal torment, and the fastidious, repressed 'life' that both Scrooge and Marley lived. And what about that moment where he scares Scrooge into believing that his apparition is real? Genuinely odd...
While there is much to praise, there are likewise weaker areas; it is no towering classic of film-making overall. Admittedly, some of the songs are shoe-horned in; there's a lack of witticism in the lyrics and a clunking way syntax: lines are ended on non-sonorous non-rhymes, or the most obvious rhymes. Many words are packed into the lines, but not dexterously, in the Sondheim manner, say. However, set designs are spot-on, and the seasoned Ronald Neame's direction is fundamentally solid, enabling a liveliness, if never any great ingenuity - even though I reserve some fondness for the hell scenes, and those concerning the graveyard and childhood mentioned above.
The whole ending sequence really did warm the heart, watching as a child; and it does now, in the sense that it is such exaggerated 'happiness' that it nears the level of lunacy. Scrooge bounding about like a madman; played with a manic silliness by Finney that defies critical analysis of any sort! Crowds of Victorian Londoners singing the one truly winning song of the film, "Thank You Very Much", and what's more, prancing around as if their choreographed lives depended on it.
This mass-prancing mirrors an earlier scene which, while obvious in its joke, gets me every time, and crystallises why I like the film so: Ghost of Christmas Future at his arm, Scrooge witnesses and unwittingly partakes in a celebratory funeral procession - for himself. One chancer of a cockney character actually does an absurd, lunatic dance to the London music-hall pastiche of "Thank You Very Much" on top of Scrooge's coffin, and is joined by others. And all the time, the hapless Scrooge thinks they are celebrating some unknown act on his part; he does not see the coffin. It plays as an overplayed bit of black comedy that somehow works, despite itself.
"Scrooge" captures a good deal of Dickens's rampant emotionalism; a mix of heightened melancholy and boisterous good cheer. The whole thing is a construct-Victorian London of the ripest order, but the basic power of the original shines through. All this and Guinness's Marley too...
I think how deep an impression this at-times-clumsy, over-egged musical take on the Dickens story is felt in how I have received other versions. A few Christmases back, I saw the Alastair Sim-starring version - much more acclaimed - yet found it lacking in, shall we say, spirit...? Now just what is it about this version, then? A gusto and willingness to wring all of the absurdity, profundity and sentimental pathos out of Dickens, I would hazard. Albert Finney's performance is stylised, but he just seems so good a choice to play Scrooge; the actor's well-documented aversion to 'charm' allows his Scrooge a rascally chilliness. And what a sublime contrast in his playing of the younger Scrooges in the Christmas-Past sequences? A restrained, tight-lipped quality pervades even the scenes of idyllic happiness with Isabelle - all flutes, forests and punting on the willowy river, yet with a telling, jarring air of fatefulness in Finney's inscrutable features as the Young Scrooge.
Need it be said how effective the various ghosts are? The British film veteran Kenneth More playing an acid-tongued, man-mountain of a bounteous spirit; the 'Ghost of Christmas Future' a "Seventh Seal" sceptre; Edith Evans an admirably underplayed, tactful 'Ghost of Christmas Past'. These earliest recollections include the moving "let's go back to your childhood, childhood, childhood, childhood..." (to quote Vivian Stanshall) sequences, with 'the solitary boy' that is the youngest Scrooge, shown adrift, friendless, cut off from an uncaring family; alone, death-dealt in the classroom. The Dickensian association of childhood with death is further evoked with the poignancy of Bob Cratchitt (played with jocular, earnest aplomb by the fine David Collings), by Tiny Tim's grave in the future. A tableau prefaced by a tracking shot of the graveyard, Tiny Tim's sentimental song - heard earlier - echoing forlornly in the studio frost.
Complementing Finney is the astoundingly good, undervalued turn of Alec Guinness, as the Ghost of Jacob Marley. Lithe, threateningly airy, this Marley seems a conjurer's trick, and that conjurer is clearly Guinness. Playing with an air of sinister camp I have rarely seen in him, he endows his lines with a world-weary playfulness; he is a sprite weighed down by those metaphysical chains. Far, far better than Michael Hordern in the 1950 version, who was merely reasonable, as a croaking, browbeaten Marley. This Ghost is both haunting and droll, dispensing loaded rebukes and dryly slithering around the place. Guinness's physicality is a joy; it reminds one of the influence he was on Peter Sellers before he was sentenced to dullard 'straight' roles in David Lean epics, or indeed "Star Wars", which the great actor rightly perceived as a millstone round his neck in later years. In Marley's guise here he has the chance to mine the seam of eternal torment, and the fastidious, repressed 'life' that both Scrooge and Marley lived. And what about that moment where he scares Scrooge into believing that his apparition is real? Genuinely odd...
While there is much to praise, there are likewise weaker areas; it is no towering classic of film-making overall. Admittedly, some of the songs are shoe-horned in; there's a lack of witticism in the lyrics and a clunking way syntax: lines are ended on non-sonorous non-rhymes, or the most obvious rhymes. Many words are packed into the lines, but not dexterously, in the Sondheim manner, say. However, set designs are spot-on, and the seasoned Ronald Neame's direction is fundamentally solid, enabling a liveliness, if never any great ingenuity - even though I reserve some fondness for the hell scenes, and those concerning the graveyard and childhood mentioned above.
The whole ending sequence really did warm the heart, watching as a child; and it does now, in the sense that it is such exaggerated 'happiness' that it nears the level of lunacy. Scrooge bounding about like a madman; played with a manic silliness by Finney that defies critical analysis of any sort! Crowds of Victorian Londoners singing the one truly winning song of the film, "Thank You Very Much", and what's more, prancing around as if their choreographed lives depended on it.
This mass-prancing mirrors an earlier scene which, while obvious in its joke, gets me every time, and crystallises why I like the film so: Ghost of Christmas Future at his arm, Scrooge witnesses and unwittingly partakes in a celebratory funeral procession - for himself. One chancer of a cockney character actually does an absurd, lunatic dance to the London music-hall pastiche of "Thank You Very Much" on top of Scrooge's coffin, and is joined by others. And all the time, the hapless Scrooge thinks they are celebrating some unknown act on his part; he does not see the coffin. It plays as an overplayed bit of black comedy that somehow works, despite itself.
"Scrooge" captures a good deal of Dickens's rampant emotionalism; a mix of heightened melancholy and boisterous good cheer. The whole thing is a construct-Victorian London of the ripest order, but the basic power of the original shines through. All this and Guinness's Marley too...