December 20, 2009
“Waiter!” Scrooge demands. “More bread,”
“It’s a ha’penny extra, sir,” says the waiter, apologetically, emerging from the gloomy shadows of a dreary public house.
“No more bread,” grunts Scrooge, waving him away.
Ah, Scrooge! Pinched and mean and narrow, the enduring symbol of greed!
“Oh, but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge!” cries Charles Dickens. “A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice.”
Oh, but he was a brilliant and blistering writer, Dickens! His prose soars and drives and hammers, sparkles and plunges, seizes us by the elbow and hurries us on. His books are classics not because some authority declared them masterpieces, but because they provide experiences as vital and moving and powerful as those of life itself. Such novels expand our world, putting us inside the skins of other people, propelling us into battles and triumphs that we will never know ourselves.
And great films can do the same.
It is a tradition at our house, every Christmas Eve, to watch Scrooge, the 1951 adaptation of A Christmas Carol starring Alastair Sim. By now we know entire scenes by heart — including the brief moment with the waiter, which doesn’t exist in the book. Indeed, numerous episodes and characters in the film have been inferred from the story, but are not in the book — the charming embezzler Mr. Jorkin, the deathbed scenes of Scrooge’s sister and his partner, most of the scenes with Scrooge’s Cockney charwoman, Mrs. Dilber.
And yet the book and the film perfectly match one another.
The Sim version is by no means the only dramatic adaptation of A Christmas Carol. Along with innumerable versions for radio, television, the stage and the opera, at least 20 film versions have been made, most recently the current Disney version with Jim Carrey as a memorable Scrooge. But the 1951 version is still arguably the best, largely because of Alastair Sim.
Smug, sly, grim and sneering, Sim has the perfect reaction to every event in the story. His self-satisfaction is as sharp as the smell of sage and onions, and he can convert the mere act of pulling on his gloves into a glittering expression of the joys of avarice. When he is afraid, his round eyes become rippled pools of terror, like two little targets bracketing his nose. In his final scenes, giddy and ecstatic, he capers about his chambers on legs so skinny they barely seem adequate to support the violence of his joy.
Our videotape of Scrooge has been “colourized” from its original black-and-white format, and the result of that operation — and of the rather primitive set construction of 1951 — is to give the film a remarkable period charm. The beautifully-composed frames look like animated oil paintings, soft-focussed and tinted as if by time. The “colourizing” ages the story perfectly.
A Christmas Carol could be called — and has been called — a slight and sentimental piece of work. In fact, it is a powerful myth, and an important myth for a culture obsessed by profit and gain. Fundamentally, this is a familiar saga of redemption, made vivid by the talent and passion of its author.
Redemption is at the core of the most influential religion in the western world, and we all want to believe in it — especially in the middle of winter. In the cold and the darkness, we explode into the greatest festival of our year, and we swear — don’t we? — that next year we will be different and better people. We will lose weight, take exercise, conquer selfishness, find more time for the people we love.
In the most profound darkness of the winter, we foresee the renewal of the light. And perhaps that represents the best of what we are, the essential human quality that justifies our lives and gives us hope.
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