Monthly Film Bulletin

Scrooge is of course a film version of Dickens' famous Christmas Carol, the story of a miserly business man, so reluctant to forgo a penny that he can scarcely bring himself to allow his clerk to stay at home with his family even on Christmas Day, and of his conversion by nightmare to normal, or even abnormal, benevolence. We see it all - it is Christmas Eve; first Scrooge in his office with Cratchit, the clerk; his walk home, his doorknocker assuming the face of his dead partner Marley; the appearance of Marley's ghost at his bed-side and then of the Spirits of Christmas, Past, Present and Future, who show him each in turn how his heart has hardened, how he has lost love for money; how happy, though poor, are the Cratchits and his own nephew, whom he has never helped; and, finally, how, unless he mends his ways, death will claim him before Christmas returns.

For all its blatant sentimentality, A Christmas Carol still contrives to be a moving tale. Even Tiny Tim, Cratchit's crippled boy, is not too much for us. Somehow with his knowledge of humanity Dickens manages, here as generally, to create an atmosphere in which we accept what is too good to be true. All depends, therefore, in the making of a film from this story, on the re-creation of this atmosphere in dramatic terms. It cannot be said that Brian Desmond Hurst has been altogether successful in this respect. There is something wrong, for instance, with the appearance, one after another, of the three spirits: we are aware all too clearly of the double exposure involved. The film as a whole lacks style. Nor is Richard Addinsell's score always helpful; the approach of the ghost would surely have been more dreadful if achieved in silence, with a sinister clank of chains.

As for the cast, neither Alistair Sim nor Mervyn Johns seem endowed with quite the appropriate physique. Sim seems less a "tight-fisted, squeezing wrenching miser" than a dour dyspeptic, while a family budget of fifteen shillings a week, even in early Victorian days, would surely have reduced Cratchit to a greater emaciation than can be compassed by Mervyn Johns. Brian Worth, again, looks seedy rather than hearty as the nephew. However, the film may please in its good-natured reminder of Christmas joys, and much praise is due to Kathleen Harrison for her inimitable playing of the true Cockney.