Scrooge (1935)
Somewhere in Hollywood at this very moment, on some Warner Bros executive’s desk, there sits a treatment for a gritty, modern re-imagining of A Christmas Carol. Zack Snyder will soon get the green-light to produce a whole Cinematic Universe centered around this idea. First up, a dark tragicomic satire from Adam McKay in which Scrooge is the only sane man in an insane world—an austere, prudent, and conservation-minded man who eventually succumbs to the pressures of our gluttonous, planet-destroying culture and dumps his nest-egg into Bob Cratchit’s start-up, a data-hoovering Consensual Mistletoe hookup app whose underlying code architecture is also used to bring automated algorithmic efficiency to all Toys for Tots donations for just a nominal graft off the top. They secure hundreds of millions in venture capital funding and cash out for billions more after the initial public offering, despite never having turned a profit. The movie ends with a coked-up Scrooge in a hot tub on the top deck of his new yacht—a ship he has christened The Ignorance and Want—weeping as he insists to two topless nineteen-year-olds that they must always keep Christmas in their hearts. “Uh-huh,” they say, as they watch Tiny Tim, SoundCloud rapper, on their phones, #influencing on TikTok with a #GodBlessUsEveryOne #ToysforTots #ad. Next year, of course, comes the Scrooge origin story, starring a digitally de-aged Casey Affleck as an incorruptible young Ebenezer in his first year out of college working ninety hours a week on Wall Street, with Daniel Day Lewis coming out of retirement to play Jacob Marley. Marley is the CEO of a world-ordering financial firm, and he knows the terrible truth—that Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol at the behest of his creditors, an international banking concern who just so happened to have a controlling financial interest in half-a-dozen or more multinational superconglomerates, including massive turkey and goose factory-farms, sprawling virgin fraser fir forests, and Big Egg Nog.
I drink your peppermint candy cane milkshake! I drink it up!
I mention all of the above not so that I can sue for a story credit when the Carol-verse inevitably gets the Joker treatment—with Donald Trump, Jr. tweeting that “Actually, Scrooge is a genious [sic] businessman who gets #cancelled by #triggered liberal snowflakes,”—but because the opening few minutes of 1935’s Scrooge made me think that maybe ol’ Ebenezer was onto something with his “Humbug!”-this, and his “Bah!”-that.
Watch the whole film above via YouTube, or on Amazon Prime, where they also have a shortened, colorized version, which I did not watch.
The film opens on the streets of snowy and dark mid-19th-century London. Through the frigid industrial haze the viewer can vaguely make out the hunched figures of the worst street band ever assembled, painfully plodding and squeaking their way through The First Noel at approximately one-eighth speed. Working away at his desk inside his office, Scrooge endures this infernal Christmas-y dirge, played as though by a de-tuned fourth-grade orchestra that is also half drunk.
If that’s not bad enough, right in the middle of a busy work day a couple of people just barge into the office, walk-in cold-callers demanding money for the poor. As usual, the hired help is bitching about the thermostat—because of course, they don’t pay the utility bill, do they?—and muttering under their breath about management. To top it all off, a few actual, filthy street urchins start singing at the window, begging for godknowswhat.
FUN FACT: The dead eyes of the tall urchin inspired Chris Columbus to cast Macauley Culkin in Home Alone, and if you stare at the small urchin for more than a few seconds your insides get all cold.
What I’m saying is, Scrooge isn’t necessarily wrong to be a bit annoyed by his environs, as presented in this movie. Not that this justifies his treatment of his sole employee like trash, or his stiffing of his server when he goes out to dinner after work, or his telling of his relentlessly cheerful nephew that he’d sooner see him dead than share a Christmas meal with him. But sometimes, there really are kids on the lawn—trampling the petunias, making a muddy mess of everything—and the only sensible course of action is to grab a nearby threatening instrument, open the front door, and start shouting at them to get off the goddamn lawn.
Which is not to say that Dickens himself doesn’t offer a punishing portrait of London at Christmastime in 1843.
It was cold, bleak, biting weather, foggy withal, and he could hear the people in the court outside go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them. The city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already—it had not been light all day—and candles were flaring in the windows of the neighboring offices, like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air.
But this comes after three full pages of Dickens’ description of Scrooge, a lengthy account of the wintry weather whipping about—and indeed arising from—his withered soul.
Oh! but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!
[…]
No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty.
[…]
But what did Scrooge care? It was the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance…
Dickens leaves no room to mistake the source and depth of the old curmudgeon’s misanthropy—Scrooge is who he is, no matter what’s happening all around him. Anyway, it’s a quibble, but it’s a point that speaks to the advantage the book holds over any adaptation—the book can lead with character, while the movie, almost by the nature of the medium, leads with place.
Scrooge 1935 does a fairly faithful adaptation of the introductory scene, in which Scrooge’s nephew Fred and the charity-seekers pay him a visit—though the movie reverses the order of the visits, to no perceivable benefit to the story. The very first bit of dialogue in the book is from an extremely upbeat Fred.
“A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!” cried a cheerful voice. It was the voice of Scrooge’s nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was the first intimation he had of his approach.
“Bah!” said Scrooge. “Humbug!”
They proceed to lay out, in a quick back-and-forth, the foundational conflict of the story. Christmas is just some bullshit, Scrooge insists. Christmas is good, actually, Fred protests. Though it may have never “put a scrap of gold or silver” in his pocket, Fred loves the season because Christmastime is the only time “in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”
Fred’s exhortation that Christmas is a time to recognize the common humanity of all people, regardless of class or station, is the heart of the book. We’re all going to die! Whatever else keeps us apart, there’s no denying the reality that we are all just humans on the way to the end—whether employee or employer, banker or beggar, Queen or commoner.
Brief Aside: Speaking of the Queen, Scrooge then leaves Scrooge and shows us a giant banquet hall, in which the mayor of London leads a couple hundred people enjoying a Christmas Eve feast in a stirring rendition of God Save the Queen. What seems incredibly strange and out of place to the modern sensibility I assume was a necessary condition of all British cinema at the time, as normal as the Blue Angels flying over the Rose Bowl.
It’s worth noting that Scrooge doesn’t offer a counterargument to his nephew’s impassioned defense of Christmas and the spirit of the season. Rather, he tells him that he’s such “a powerful speaker” that perhaps he should be a politician. This is a pretty sick burn, but it’s not an argument.
But I want to get back to the seemingly minor point about the reversal of the visits. In the book, Fred leaves and the “portly gentlemen, pleasant to behold” come in to ask Scrooge to donate to charity. With Fred’s visit, Dickens establishes that Scrooge’s miserliness is rooted in a paucity of the soul, not in purely political or economic motivations. Scrooge rejects his family on Christmas before he rejects entreaties on behalf of the poor and destitute. I think this is an important distinction, and one that the movie eschews for reasons that aren’t clear.
Further, Fred enters to fanfare and upbeat music—perfectly suited to both his character and the exuberance for the season that he shares with everyone who isn’t named Ebenezer. This is how the movie should start! Not with the funereal First Noel, but with the gaiety that Fred brings, only to have it summarily dismissed by Scrooge.
I’ll offer one more substantive criticism before moving along. In the movie, when the Ghost of Christmas Past takes Scrooge to the past, they arrive at his office to witness him refusing to allow a desperate couple any more time to repay a loan. He’s going to foreclose on them, and he defends his seeming heartlessness—to his fiancee, who witnessed the encounter—as simply good business. She dumps him, and then Scrooge is transported to another scene, in which he sees his former fiancee living a happy life surrounded by happy children and a happy partner. The scene ends abruptly, and Scrooge awakens in his bed to find the Ghost of Christmas Present in his sitting room. The entire Past interlude takes all of five minutes, and reveals nothing more about who Scrooge was before he became the miserable old cur that he is when we meet him.
This is a serious departure from the source material. The Ghost of Christmas Past takes up a full fifth of the story, in the book. The spirit takes Scrooge to a couple of his childhood Christmases, and he weeps for the innocent child that he was and expresses regret for the man he has become. He sees himself reading alone, abandoned by his peers, and recognizes in his young self something that reminds him of a boy singing at his window earlier that night, and wishes he’d offered the urchin some money or a kind word. The tears flow early and freely—practically upon mere recognition of his familiar surroundings.
The Ghost takes Scrooge to witness a Christmas party put on by a former employer of his, Fezziwig, and marvels at the joy and gratitude created by such a minimal output of resources.
“[Fezziwig] has the power to render us happy or unhappy, to make our service light or burdensome, a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks, in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count ‘em up; what then? The happiness he gives is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.”
He felt the Spirit’s glance, and stopped.
“What is the matter?” asked the Ghost.
“Nothing particular,” said Scrooge.
“Something, I think?” the Ghost insisted.
“No,” said Scrooge—“no. I should like to be able to say a word or two to my clerk just now. That’s all.”
Only then is Scrooge transported to witness the end of his last, non-business-oriented relationship. His fiancee offers this assessment of Scrooge’s character upon breaking their engagement: “You fear the world too much,” she says. “All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach.”
What a wonderful and devastating way of expressing the perils of growing old and closing oneself off from the world, that sentence is. Everything you ever wanted has been subsumed by your fear, hope calcified into a wall, built so that this fallen world will not be able to reach you, and find you lacking. And it happens after a tour through Scrooge’s own youth, spotted with sadness and melancholy, yes—but also the light and promise of the unwritten future, and joy, as well.
And it happens practically right away! Scrooge perhaps shortchanges the Ghost of Christmas Past because they want to hold the big emotional transition for the third act, which is a natural enough instinct, from a storytelling standpoint, I suppose—but I can’t help but feel that something essential is stripped away. To withhold Scrooge’s emotional catharsis for so long, until he sees his own grave in the future—it heightens the melodrama while foregoing the real human emotion that Dickens generates in the text. The movie wants to build to a singular moment of epiphany, rather than allowing Scrooge the night of punishing penitence that he needs to achieve a chance at absolution.
But maybe that’s just, you know, the movies!
How It Ranks, Because That’s What’s Important
This is a perfectly acceptable adaptation of A Christmas Carol. I give it 3 “Bah!(s) Humbug!” on the patented Brain Iron A Christmas Carol Bah!(s) Humbug! Rating Scale.
Future entries in this series will rank the various character adaptations against one another. Since this is the first entry, no such rankings yet exist.
Ebenezer Scrooge
Easily the highlight of the cast. A good Scrooge, most easily believed in the first twenty minutes or so, when he really gets to let the bastard out. The delivery of the line “You’ll keep your Christmas by losing your situation!” is unlikely to be topped.
Bob Cratchit
This is not a good Bob Cratchit. Carries with him little of the quiet dignity required of such a role. Just a meek weirdo, who seems like a bit of an idiot.
Nephew Fred
Fred is good. Appropriately gay. Tis the season, etc.
The Ghosts
Marley — Just a voice! Lame!
Past — Just a bright light! — Lame.
Present — Pretty good.
Future — Just a shadow around Scrooge’s head. Lame.
Tiny Tim
As the embodiment of the ideal Scrooge wants to revive in himself and protect going forward, there may be no more important element to get right, after Scrooge himself, than Tiny Tim. Scrooge’s Tiny Tim is just fine, a little wisp of a British boy whose delivery of the crucial line I don’t have to repeat here is almost something of a lament. His irrepressible “It’s a beautiful, BEAUTIFUL pudding!” upon dessert service is far better.
Join us next time, when we discuss at not inconsiderable length the strengths and failings of Mickey’s Christmas Carol, a 23-minute cartoon from like 37 years ago, because I am a deeply weird person. It is available to stream from the House of Mouse on Disney Plus.
Lead image source: IMDB
