A Christmas Carol

For me it's hard not to think of Christmas without thinking of Charles Dickens. Has there been a more beloved writer? If you haven't read a word of Dickens, you no doubt know his most popular stories. "Great Expectations", "Oliver Twist", "A Tale of Two Cities", and "David Copperfield" have all made there way into our popular culture, and are national treasures in England, where Dickens is probably only second to Shakespeare in that country's pantheon of great writers.

Dickens and the movies have enjoyed a long relationship together, his books have been adapted over and over again, and they probably will continue to do so, because people just can't get enough of them. But I would also say, Dickens wrote in a very cinematic way, so much so, he would've had a great career as a screenwriter had he lived during the advent of film.

Dickens was probably most descriptive when it came to vivid characters, and locations, and they were purposely episodic since his novels were published as serials, this made them perfect fodder of film.

But let's face it, there is one story that eclipses all of his books in popularity and pure pop sentimentalism. When "A Christmas Carol" was first published, it was mostly responsible for making Christmas popular again, it in fact saved the traditions we still today hold very near and dear.

"A Christmas Carol" has been adapted for the screen for what seems like a million times, but the real McCoy remains the 1951 version starring Alistair Sim. Watching the film, I can't say it's much of a complex or even visually compelling film. A lot of it is static, and reminds me more an old BBC teleplay rather than anything that's cinematic, yet, I am sucked into the story each time I watch it, I would even say it's one of the most unabashedly moving films I have ever seen, and most of that has to do with Sim's performance as Ebeneezer Scrooge.

Let's focus on this performance shall we? "A Christmas Carol" is the kind of story that lives or dies based on who's playing the main character. Scrooge is the type of character that I can see many aged actors wanting to play, his arc from penny pinching miser, to a reformed merchant remains one of the greatest transformations in literature.

Yet Scrooge is a much more complicated character than most people give him credit for. It's easy to indulge of the caricature quality of Dickens' descriptions of Scrooge, but that would risk losing any relation to the story. What Sim does so brilliantly is make Scrooge into a real human being, we see his fall from grace, and in fact the film adds a few episodes of his past which aren't in the book that add a few more shades of grey to Scrooge.

Sim's depiction adds a certain melancholy to Scrooge, he makes us empathize with this man who has become hardened by the coldness of life, and we can see him slowly open up as he interacts with the three ghosts which show him his past, present, and future. But one thing that's so refreshing comes from Sim's humor in the character. The fact that Scrooge remains so sourly, and grim springs out some funny occasions. Take his reaction when we finds out from Jacob Marley he's going to be visited by three spirits. "In that case nevermind" he says, as if he couldn't be bothered with the saving of his soul.

But along with this, Sim is able to find the Pathos, and sadness of the character, and he makes the most of the uplifting finale. One of my personal favorite moments of the film comes near the end when Scrooge goes to visit his estranged nephew and meets his young wife for the first time. His face is one of humbleness, but of a man who finally understands how his happiness has eluded him all these years.

The rest of the film is full of the kind of performances that can only be described as classic british film acting, but Sim seems to have transcended all of this, and makes his character perfectly natural and very modern. Even modern actors haven't been able to touch the magic that Sim was able to conjure in this film.

Alistair Sim was actually a very well known character actor in Britain, very often playing in comedies, he even stole the show from Marlene Deitrich, in Alfred Hitchcock's "Stage Fright", but I suppose he will always be remembered as Scrooge, it's really he who has made this "A Christmas Carol" into a classic film, and one that remains cherished to this day.

Incidentally this is in fact the only British film version of "A Christmas Carol" I have seen, the others I've seen were produced in Hollywood and remain much more artificial and losing the darkness of the story. Perhaps it took the British to truly adapt Dickens and who understood the darkness of his stories. Dickens was one of those writers who understood that darkness always had to come before the light.

Merry Christmas from Jeremy and The Movies