The Rerun Review: The one with George C. Scott

 

Title: A Christmas Carol

What Year?: 1984

Classification: Weird Sequel

Rating: Pretty Good! (5/5)

 

As I write this, I’m going into the final week of my second year with this blog, and confronted with the fact that I still haven’t turned any of this into things that would either reach a wider audience or earn actual money. Still, because OCD tendencies are the only reason I get anything done, I want to get in one more full week before I withdraw and reevaluate. In the process, I decided it was time to get back to something I had previously considered as a feature, with a name that actually made sense. Here is the reboot of Space 1999, which in turn was the abortive spinoff to Space 1979, and the first up is my favorite version of the most overadapted work in the history of modern media. I present A Christmas Carol, the George C. Scott edition, which a lot of people seem to forget was originally a TV movie.

Our story begins with the familiar figure of Scrooge, meaner and more rightwing than usual as he abuses his employees and refuses charity to his fellow man. Things take a turn for the odd when his former partner Jacob Marley appears, and as the introduction reminds us, Marley is dead (though he still uses the door). Marley warns Scrooge that his miserly ways have earned the sentence of existentialist damnation, wandering the Earth burdened by the chains of his ill-used wealth. Yet the unspecified forces of the universe have given him one chance for redemption; he is to be visited by three spirits that will show him the past, present and a bleak possible future. We all know the ending, but it’s all in the journey as Scrooge learns the price of greed and the power of Christmas!

A Christmas Carol was a 1984 film directed by Clive Donner, a veteran British filmmaker who had previously worked on the 1951 Alistair Sims adaptation Scrooge. The production was made by Entertainment Partners Limited and aired by CBS, with sponsorship from IBM; Fox subsidiary 20^th Century Studios was credited as distributor. The film starred the late George C. Scott as Scrooge and Time Bandits’ David Warner as Bob Cratchit, with Nigel Davenport (see… Phase IV?) as Scrooge’s father and Edward Woodward (d. 2009) as the Ghost of Christmas Present. Much of the filming took place on location in the English town of Shrewsbury. The film aired to very positive reviews, and received numerous further TV airings as well as VHS and later DVD releases. The rights to the film were retained by George C. Scott and later his estate, which reportedly limited its TV distribution to syndication on local stations prior to its first airing by AMC in 2009. The rights are believed to be currently held by Disney (make your own joke). The movie is currently available on Blu Ray and in digital format.

For my experiences, my strongest memory is that even as a kid, I was getting tired of it. I had been exposed to the original Dickens text, and loved it. I had seen what was then the “classic” treatment starring Sims, and had no complaints. I was already starting to be influenced by it in my interests and my own fiction. But there were so many other mediocre and flat-out bad treatments, especially in media supposedly for kids, that I found the tale as much of a humbug as Scrooge did Christmas. As far as I can further recall, I encountered the present version at a fairly late date in the middling 1990s, and in hindsight, I think this was what redeemed the story for me. As I have seen its stature grow greatly in the years since, I’ve come to suspect that the viewing public went through the same cycle. The current generation may not remember just how oversaturated the market was by my time (and I’ll give further credit to the Muppets adaptation as a “kids’” version that doesn’t insult the source material or the kids’ intelligence), but this movie still remains as one that stood the test of time better than many lesser and some equal treatments of the same story.

Moving forward, one thing more I will say is that I got in the viewing for this one as a Christmas Eve “tradition” with an old tape, so I was adapting to kaka off the bat. What really stands out from the start is that this by all means “looks” like a TV movie, though the shots and production values are certainly well above average. I have to say, if one were to judge by the opening sequence, one would easily expect a very mediocre treatment among many. The music in particular is solidly in sentimental, second-hand nostalgia territory, and it will not get better. What merit there is comes from the genuine English town and the impressively somber weather. This will remain representative of the movie’s relative strengths and weaknesses, most noticeably in the visions of Christmas Past. There is power and authenticity here, straining against the familiarity of nostalgia several generations removed.

Meanwhile, the obvious driving force is Scrooge, suitably matched by the ghosts. Scott’s performance is so fierce as not to need further comment, beyond the particular emphasis on the deliberate references to Malthus and Spencer, truly the fascists and pseudoprogressives of Dickens’ day (see ZPG for my representative rant). What gets the story in gear and keeps it strong is the spirits. We get an early highlight with Marley, played to the hilt by Albert Finlay; I find it particularly amusing to compare his entrance with the very odd revenants of An American Werewolf In London. The Ghost of Christmas Present (played by Angela Pleasance, the daughter of Donald) remains strong through a sequence that otherwise slows things down a bit, while Woodward fully holds his own as the middle ghost. The finale reaches a point where many adaptations either excel or start to grind the gears, with the almost science-fictional/ dystopian vision of the future.  (Am I the only person to think the Ghost of Christmas Future and the Terminator are kind of the same thing?) Here, in my assessment, the story just holds its momentum, which is more than good enough. The ghost itself is vaguely cliched, though the counterpart that stands out the most to me is the obviously far later Witch King of Lord of the Rings (see my review/ rant on the cartoon). What keeps things moving is Scott, acting surely far more oblivious than the character really is as he is brought face to face with his fate.

That already brings me to the “one scene”, and I’m going to go with the savage high point of the vision of Christmas Present. We’re already well into the fine and forceful performance by Woodward, evidently a stage and actor and musician who extended his talents to a career as a TV/ character actor. His contribution is aided throughout by a strong physical presence, which gets unsettling if you try to figure out of there’s some practical effect trick to his height. (Apparently, he and Scott were about the same height.) In the midst of the Cratchits’ merry Christmas dinner, Scrooge asks the spirit if Tiny Tim will live. When the spirit matter-of-factly prophecies that Tim will not live to see another Christmas, Scrooge is clearly moved and distressed, incidentally showing that he isn’t entirely without emotion or empathy. The Ghost counters with his own Malthusian line about surplus population. Then he gets as in-your-face as a political comedian as he warns the rich man about judging who is “surplus”, with a line I can picture coming straight from the Evil Possum: “It may be that in the sight of heaven, you are more worthless and less deserving of life than millions like this poor man’s child!”

In closing, what I really come back to is the impact of the story on my own writings, and whether I’ve been in the camp that Scrooge represents. A major part of the story’s “point” is that even before his redemption, Scrooge is not so monstrous as to let his social-Darwinist leanings suppress empathy for humanity. But then the flipside is that short-term charity and half-hearted liberalism are as destructive as any philosophy that would oppose them; in short, it is a polemic against hypocrisy. For myself, I conceived the tales of the Evil Possum and the exotroopers as anti-war and anti-eugenics, whether or not they succeeded as such. (I don’t know if I could recreate or even reconstruct how sadistic, banal and utterly terrible the Possum’s original enemies were.) But then, I did all of it while voting straight Republican right up to relatively recent developments. Maybe I’ve changed, maybe I’ve just gotten less apologetic about being complicated, and my further self-defense is that the old-time eugenicists and modern-day reactionaries both hardly cared about consistency or coherence in their ideas or actions. At least it can be said that people do indeed change, for better or for worse, even if few if any do so as totally as Scrooge. And with that, I’m done for another day.

Image credit Countdown Until Christmas.