Review Essay:

Cheers to you, friends, and thanks for sticking around through most of a blog season, at this point.  The end (and Christmas!) is in sight.  It’s the last of this year’s Christmas Carol Sundays at FFTH and I knew from months ago where I wanted to finish up this sequence.  My first year as a holiday movie blogger, I wanted to finish the quartet of Christmas Carol adaptations with my personal favorite of the many I’ve seen (the Muppets), and this year, I wanted to pay homage to the one I grew up on, my mother’s favorite, the 1951 film, Scrooge, starring Alastair Sim.  I hadn’t seen it in many years, but I remembered that in my childhood, whenever it was on television, it was important to my mom to watch it, and my memory was that I’d really liked it.  I added it to the schedule and hoped it would meet my high expectations, and the great news is, I feel like it fully did so.

Every really good adaptation of Dickens’s novella has some kind of thematic hook—a way of reading his story that, both in what they include or exclude from the original tale as well as in what they choose to add to the narrative, shows what the filmmakers believe is central to its message.  The hook for this film is fear, and I think one of the things that surprised me most (in a great way) is how much the exploration of that fear turns out to be a key that unlocks a lot of really interesting elements in characters and scenes I know so well that sometimes it feels a bit silly to keep coming back to new adaptations thinking I’ll find something here.

For this incredibly faithful rendering of Dickens’s text, the first emergence of fear as a central preoccupation is in Alastair Sim’s magnetic performance as Scrooge.  Where other Scrooges on film tend to push other kinds of emotions forward—anger, for instance, or cruelty, or arrogance—Sim’s old moneylender looks haunted from the moment he appears on screen.  Some of this is just the hand Sim was dealt by time and fate: his huge, hooded eyes (reminiscent in some ways of Peter Lorre’s) are, by the early 1950s, better at expressing that kind of paralyzed anxiety than they would be most other kinds of emotion.  But let’s not sell Sim short: he’s doing a lot of work, too, as a performer to evoke the sense of his fear.  We see him darting away from interactions (startled by the man on the steps of the Exchange, for instance, or quietly but firmly insistent that the child carolers move on from the sidewalk outside his office), and indeed, the one flash of his anger early in the story only emerges in response to the touch of his nephew Fred’s cheerful, welcoming hand on his shoulder.  Scrooge lashes out in response, pounding the desk and shouting, as though it’s that kind of intimate human contact that frightens and upsets him more than anything else in the world.  Other than that, though, the Scrooge we get in these sequences is softer of voice, more restrained than many Scrooges—still a covetous old sinner, to be clear, but it’s apparent that he’s been made the way he is, somehow, by his experience of fear.  He seems baffled by Fred’s happy, impoverished marriage more than he is wrathful about it, as though it’s not possible for him to make sense of a life lived outside of the fear of not having his wealth to protect him, and in one sad moment at dinner on Christmas Eve, we see him retract his request for extra bread with his meal once he realizes it will cost a haypenny.  It’s a reminder that Scrooge’s severity isn’t just for people under his thumb—he’s just as severe with himself.  The miserly impulses of his heart are less a cage he’s trying to trap the poor inside, and more a prison he feels chained within, as well.

Scrooge’s fears are amplified by a number of decisions made by the screenplay that I think add a lot of texture to the story: Ebenezer, in this film, had been the means of his mother’s death as she died in childbirth, and he’d lived a remote and deprived life after his father rejected him.  When his older sister (in this version), Fan, comes to get him from school, he tells her how overjoyed he is to be with her again, and she promises him that he will never be lonely again, “as long as I shall live.”  But of course Fan does not live; she dies bearing Fred as Scrooge’s mother died bearing him.  He opened up his heart once before and lost the one safe harbor in his whole world—no wonder he shrinks from humanity, and from Fred’s kind hand in particular.  Furthermore, we learn over the course of the Christmas Past sequence that Scrooge’s whole life is a kind of haunting: his pinched, chilly office was once the warm, friendly office belonging to Mr. Fezziwig, an office that young Scrooge and his partner Marley basically forced Fezziwig out of, years ago.  Scrooge’s life, too, is lived in a shadow—he inherited Marley’s house and furniture upon Jacob’s death, which means that of COURSE Marley’s haunting him here, this is literally the man’s home, and the bed from which Scrooge rises to see the first two spirits is the bed that Marley died in.  To me, this enriches the film so much: I understand better both why Scrooge doubts the apparitions he at first encounters, and why he comes to believe in them so fully.

The writing, then, is a real strength: I’ll say that, for me, the acting is a slightly more mixed bag.  Sim himself as Scrooge is really wonderful, expressive in almost every scene at a level that engages me.  Some of the supporting cast rise to his level, but others feel a little stiff or amateurish, which probably reflects just the relatively limited budget and simple approach of this small British production in the 1950s.  Maybe the worst of the offenders, for me, is the Ghost of Christmas Past, about whom my complaint really is that he’s forgettable: there’s just not that much personality here on a level that would make his work with Scrooge more memorable.  This fault is amplified slightly by the fact that the movie extends the Christmas Past sequence by quite a bit, adding in scenes to help convey how Scrooge changed over time.  But these are minor complaints: truthfully, the movie committing to a deep exploration of Scrooge’s past is really effective, because it helps me understand how a young clerk who loved the joy of his kindly boss did grow into the walking black hole of this aged Scrooge, towards whom money is drawn and out of whom no good human emotion seems likely to emerge.  And the other side benefit of this long exploration is that it gives the old Scrooge time to make sense of things—he starts to anticipate what each next scene will reveal, and he pleads not to have to face them.  This is true in a lot of adaptations, but I think Sim more than any other Scrooge I’ve seen manages to persuade me that by the time the Past section is done, he’s basically been convinced of what he’s done wrong in life.  The key to Sim’s version of the man, then, is that even knowing he’s done wrong, he’s still not ready to change, and that brings us back around to fear: Scrooge pleads with both Christmas Present and Christmas Yet to Come that he is simply too old, too far gone.  He begs them to leave him in peace as a lost cause and go find “some younger, more promising creature” to transform.  This is a Scrooge whose depression has so chained down his heart that even when he knows he is a bad man, he cannot believe himself capable of good.  And so the Present and Yet to Come sequences become less about punishing Scrooge and more about forcing him to understand that he has ample opportunity to have an impact, right now and before he’s in the cold ground.  It’s marvelously effective.

As a result we get a different vision of the Present than most adaptations supply: we see far more about the whole Cratchit family (and not just Tiny Tim), who really are poised to be helped by a man who can create wealth and opportunity for a bunch of young people on the verge of adulthood.  Our glimpse of Fred’s party skips the guessing game entirely (no need to skewer Scrooge further) in exchange for a longer conversation between the partygoers in which Fred can defend his belief that Ebenezer has the capacity to change, and show up as a guest someday.  Again, that party’s full of exactly the kind of young people Scrooge was once, people who, as I think he must understand, are about to make the same choices he once made, and maybe could live differently than he has.  And most poignantly (here departing again from Dickens), Scrooge’s once-betrothed, here named Alice instead of Belle, is a woman working at one of those poorhouses Ebenezer’s such a big fan of—an angel of mercy to those in desperate need.  I said critically of Scrooged that I thought giving him a love interest to reconnect with was too cheap, because it reduces Scrooge’s reforming to being transactional, something he’s doing to “get the girl”.  So what I love here is that Alice is never mentioned again—we understand, as Ebenezer surely does, that she’s out there.  That a more compassionate, more loving man might even find a bridge of connection to her, in the future.  But there’s no guarantee of this, and I think it’s quite possible he never even sought her out: that he understood that the Spirits’ message was not “hey….guess who’s still single?” but rather “you jerk, the only good thing about the poorhouse is the kindness of people too good to stand in a room with you: it’s time to grow up.”

And then Scrooge’s Christmas Day here is such a moving and happy celebration: Sim, who has played the man’s fear so successfully, can unleash the relief of this unlikely chance to live a better life with incredible joy.  I like the elevation of his servant, the “charlady” as she calls herself, in prominence as a character here, so that he can have an extended dialogue about how he’s feeling and what he’s thinking about, and apply his generosity directly to the woman he’s frightening.  And because this is a story of how a fearful man found the courage to trust other people instead of hiding from them, Scrooge’s arrival at Fred’s house has never hit me with more emotion.  Everything about it, from how gingerly he steps across the threshold to the gentle encouragement he gets from the maid at the door to Fred’s wife getting up to extend her arms to him in welcome, and lead him in a merry little dance, is so fully expressive of the gladness of complete redemption.  Scrooge can change because loving community is possible, and because (to follow the logic of Dickens’s original tale) in Christmas we are given a holiday that asks us to create that kind of welcome for others.  Even if in some ways it feels a little too easy for the old moneylender, in other ways that’s just the dream the story asks us to believe in.  As Scrooge himself comments in nearly the film’s final scene, “I don’t deserve to be happy.  But I can’t help it!”  What better description of grace could there be?

I Know That Face: Kathleen Harrison, who here appears as Scrooge’s charlady servant, is in IMDB’s credits for the 1974 TV movie Charles Dickens’ World of Christmas, but I have no idea what role she played.  Michael Hordern, who portrays Jacob Marley (both living and dead), is the voice of the narrator for the British TV series Paddington Bear, which includes the 1976 episode, “Paddington and the Christmas Shopping”.  Hordern also voices Badger in the 1980s stop-motion animated series The Wind in the Willows which aired several lovely Christmas-themed episodes, and the man wasn’t done with Dickens by a long shot, it seems, since he voices Jacob Marley again in the award-winning animated 1971 film A Christmas Carol (which I will definitely get to on the blog someday), and he appears in live action as Ebenezer Scrooge in a 1977 TV movie A Christmas Carol, one of dozens of such productions that I’ve simply never heard of.  Hordern’s joined in 1971 by Alastair Sim, in fact, who voices Scrooge in that film, reprising his role in this one.  And I learned to my surprise, in digging into this cast, that there’s a crossover I hadn’t spotted with another earlier film this year: Roddy Hughes, who here plays good-natured old Fezziwig, has I think a single line as a chemist dispensing medicine in The Crowded Day.

Spirit of Christmas Carol Present: This is a fairly comprehensive version of the original tale, including a lot of things I love to see.  A couple in particular caught my ear and eye: not many productions leave in the comment by Marley that he’s procured this chance for Scrooge, with Ebenezer replying, “Thank ‘ee, Jacob.”  It’s a sweet note of grace early on.  This is one of the very few adaptations that manage to leave in Scrooge being taken by Christmas Present to a coal mine where the workers are singing carols together (alas, we don’t also get their visit to a lighthouse, as in the original).  And Christmas Present here gives us a brief glimpse of those starving, near-feral children, Ignorance and Want—less unsettling than the Disney version I watched earlier this year, and I think therefore more affecting?

Spirit of Christmas Carol Absent: As I mentioned, we don’t get the guessing game at Fred’s where the company’s meaner to Scrooge than they are earlier in the evening: it’s an unusual cut, but like I noted, I think I get why emotionally the filmmakers wanted something else.  We also don’t get the young couple rejoicing because Scrooge’s death may give them a chance of keeping their home, exchanging that time instead for a very long dialogue scene with “Old Joe” the ragpicker, who’s buying up whatever the dead have left behind.

Christmas Carol Vibes (10/10): The evocation of the original tale, and this time and place, is so effective.  There are adjustments, as any adaptation would have to make, but here they’re so in line with the tone of the novella that I had to double check a couple of these innovations to make sure they weren’t in there and I’d forgotten them.  If you want the feeling of reading the book, this will suit you to a T.

Actual Quality (9.5/10): Thanks to a well-paced screenplay and a really effective performer in the role of Scrooge, this is a nearly perfect film to immerse ourselves in.  Sure, I complained about a couple of semi-flat performances, but really, you hardly notice: the rest of the film keeps chugging along with great skill.  I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to revisit it, since it deserves more attention than I’ve given it.

Scrooge? Sim is tremendously successful at imbuing him with humanity: making Scrooge a fearful person instead of a furious one unlocks a way of understanding him as a victim as well as a villain.  He’s younger than he looks, too—a mere 51 when this was released—and as a result he has the physical energy to be able to really leap about giddily on Christmas morning, enough that we can believe his housekeeper was rattled.  Definitely a top tier performance, and one that is the secret to the movie’s success.

Supporting Cast? This is a slightly more mixed bag—Mervyn Johns is genial but less memorable as Bob Cratchit, and I’d say both the Spirits with speaking lines are just a little underwhelming.  Glyn Dearman does a good job with a Tiny Tim who’s right on the edge of being too perfect for even this heightened fable, though, and Rona Anderson probably gives the best performance I’ve ever seen of Scrooge’s betrothed (with apologies to Meredith Braun, who does such a lovely job as Belle in the Muppet version, but Rona’s been handed more dialogue and more screen time, and that makes a difference).  Also, as I note, we get a lot more “Christmas Past” time here, which means that we see a lot of Marley and Fezziwig we wouldn’t normally (as well as the actor playing a young Ebenezer), and all of that goes really well.  I’d say that this isn’t really the movie’s strength but there’s plenty to enjoy in it.

Recommended Frequency? I haven’t been watching this version every year, given how well I knew it from my childhood, but this viewing made me feel like it really ought to make it into my annual rotation.  Sim is so good at the role, and the emotion of the story hit home for me as a result.

You can watch this film pretty easily, if you like: Tubi has a copy, as does Plex, if you don’t mind the ads.  If you’d rather pay for an ad-free experience, you can rent it from Amazon Prime.  I own a digital copy from Amazon (which I assume is the same version they stream) and I’ll mention that the audio levels are slightly off in some sections: if you notice that kind of thing more than others, I figure it’s best to be forewarned.  The film is available under its alternate title of A Christmas Carol (I wonder where they got that?) on disc at Barnes and Noble, and though it’s not as universally accessible as some films, it’s in several hundred libraries, according to Worldcat, and therefore I hope you can borrow a copy for free that way, if you so desire.

Review Essay:

At the outset, I’ll remind you that Sundays at FTTH are Christmas Carol days.  Each Sunday, as I did last year, I’ll be bringing you a different adaptation of Dickens’s absolutely timeless classic.  Like last year also, I’m aiming for a mix of versions, some of them more traditional and some more experimental: today’s film, a 1964 television movie entitled Carol for Another Christmas, definitely belongs in the latter camp.  Anyone familiar with The Twilight Zone will immediately recognize the layered depth of a Rod Serling screenplay, as one of the masters of television suspense and speculative fiction creates something uniquely American out of the classic English story.  And you may notice as the film progresses that it feels a lot more cinematic than television movies normally would, especially those of this era: that’s because this is a film directed by four-time Academy Award winner Joseph L. Mankiewicz, director of The Philadelphia Story, of All About Eve, and, maybe most crucially for our purposes, of 1938’s A Christmas Carol, a faithful and widely-beloved adaptation of Dickens’s novella starring Reginald Owen.  Mankiewicz, who never directed another TV movie, knows the right ways to evoke the spirit of the tale even as this version of it does away with almost all of the trappings we normally expect from this story, and what remains here is truly powerful, even unsettling, on a level that I think everyone should watch, and maybe especially every American living in 2025 should.

The premise of this film unfolds in the following way: wealthy American industrialist Dan Grudge is essentially alone in his enormous mansion on Christmas Eve, attended only by a couple of servants who know to steer clear of him in his current bleak mood.  He is mourning, as he seemingly always does, the loss of his beloved son, Marley Grudge, who died serving in WWII on Christmas Eve, 1944, and whose spirit hovers underneath this film even if he does not make himself visible and audible as an apparition in the way we might expect.  A knock at the front door brings a visitor—Dan’s nephew Fred, who mourns his cousin also—and Dan and Fred find themselves immediately at odds as two people who agree on nothing but their fondness for the absent Marley.  Fred is a liberal idealist, someone working for international cooperation and peace, which Dan dismisses as dangerous foolishness.  Grudge thinks the world can go hang itself, and let America take care of Americans…are you getting restless, yet?  Rod Serling’s not going to let you off the hook here, politically—to the contrary, the politics of all this are its point.  Dan acts and speaks like someone who thinks America belongs to him and not to Fred; that, moreover, America needs someone like Dan to protect itself from Fred.  When Fred tries to soften his uncle by wishing him a “merry Christmas,” Dan’s reply is that he is “in no mood for the brotherhood of man.”  Each man is sure that the other one’s ideology will lead to conflict, to global war, to the calamity that threatens the lives of the whole world’s peoples.  And while Fred does not issue any ominous prophecies—much like Dickens’s nephew Fred, he merely leaves with words of compassion and hope—something about the exchange ignites the visitations that will haunt Grudge this night (and haunt him they do).  Fred leaves and Dan suddenly thinks he can see his son’s reflection in a window.  There is a figure who disappears the moment Dan tries to focus on him.  The record player in Marley’s room fires up the Andrews Sisters, whose harmonious glee is suddenly eerie, almost unearthly…only, when Grudge runs upstairs to turn it off, he finds that it is all in his head.  The player is silent.  And then we are in the fog, with him.

The Past / Present / Future structure of the story is retained, but each sequence is radically altered from what we know in Dickens.  In the past, Grudge finds himself on a naval transport ship in an endless dark mist-covered ocean, a vessel carrying the bodies of the dead.  The vessel’s pilot is the only other seemingly living soul aboard, played by a young Steve Lawrence in maybe the only dramatic role he ever took, but he’s cast well here.  His youthful face and voice take Dan back to the end of WWI, a war that he’s still angry about as one that killed a bunch of “suckers” we sent to die for democracy.  When the Ghost asks him if Marley was a “sucker”, Dan is startled into understanding the meaning of what he’s been saying.  He backs down a little but struggles to explain what he really thinks, and he and the Ghost argue over what really led to a second global conflict, and what he thinks will keep us from a third.  The solemn, mournful reality of the dead soldiers around them contextualizes everything they say, and ultimately it’s too much for Dan, who leaves the ship, only to find that the Ghost has brought him to his own past more directly….to Dan Grudge, a commander in the U.S. Navy, with his WAVE driver, a young woman named Lt. Gibson, at Hiroshima in September 1945, one month after the bomb fell.  Haunting doesn’t begin to cover how intense and horrifying it is to watch Grudge confront his own memories of the Japanese school girls he encounters there, bandaged and faceless, so wrapped in gauze they resemble mummies, if not the shrouded dead on the transport he just left.  He and Gibson, both profoundly shaken by what they are seeing and hearing, argue over the morality of what has happened here, with Grudge defending the necessity, even the morality, of the A-Bomb, and Gibson demanding that he set aside his “simple arithmetic” and deal with the human cost of the conflagration, even quoting the Bible at him in her desperate attempt to waken him into sharing her outrage.

I don’t want to narrate the whole film to you because I want you to watch it – to encounter it with eyes and ears that are ready for (but not guarded against) what Serling and Mankiewicz are trying to say.  Dan Grudge, in an attempt to escape the horrors of the past, finds his way to the Present and a new Ghost….but only by walking through the doorway at Hiroshima that led into the room where the Japanese children were being housed.  The film rarely misses an opportunity for symbolism of this kind—we can only understand the present by literally walking through the doorway of the horrors committed in the past.  The Ghost of Christmas Present takes Dan to the realities of an America in the 1960s that, my friend, I wish I could tell you did not feel like America in 2025.  It is a sobering and troubling experience to understand how little our society learned from the 1960s, as Dan encounters the world’s needs and is forced to make sense of how little is being done about them.  He and the new Ghost find themselves just as at odds as he was in the Past, with the narrative of a wealthy American man repeatedly wrecking itself on the truth of the reality he has chosen to ignore.  It was powerfully convicting stuff, for me.  And the Future is maybe the most audacious reimagining possible, as a new Ghost leads him into a post-nuclear-conflict America, where the town meeting hall Grudge knows well is now a shattered ruin, inhabited only by the Cult of the Imperial Me, a sect devoted to the “truth” that there is only one person who matters, and it is Me.  The Me at the head of all these disheveled, chattering Mes is played by Peter Sellers at that level of manic, malicious energy that maybe only he could have delivered in 1964—the performance is astonishing, as is the world Serling imagines.  Dan Grudge has to reckon with the chaos and violence of a world in which “looking out for yourself” has become the one watchword of humankind—a hellscape so bleak that, when one character unexpectedly advances the argument that we can have law and ethics and honor and decency because “these things were not destroyed by the bomb”, the appeal is not only laughable to the other survivors, they find the suggestion that humanity can be good so insane that it amounts to treason against the “non-government” of the Me People.  The violent conclusion of this sequence is not visually graphic (this is a TV movie from 1964, after all), but in emotional terms it could hardly be more unsettling.  Grudge is so tormented by what he has seen and heard that he throws himself at the Ghost of Christmas Future’s feet, begging to know what happened to him in this desolate future and whether these events could be altered or whether Fate had already committed the world to this end.  And then he is looking up at the curtains, and the picture of his son Marley.  The bells are ringing.  It is Christmas morning.

In the same way that the film thus far has been a dramatically altered version of the Dickensian events, the conclusion to the film is different also—Grudge is not a gleeful, celebratory presence in this epilogue as much as he is a chastened, bewildered, shaken version of himself, a man still reconstructing his own sense of himself and his world in the unexpectedly gentle morning light.  We do not entirely see beneath his surface, but it is clear from what little he says and does that something has happened to him, and that something is happening to him, still.  Perhaps the same thing that Serling and Mankiewicz hope is happening to us, the viewers, as we reflect on what we have just experienced.  The film offers no easy answers, but the door that Serling holds open to the future is clearly one that assumes Fred has won the argument with Dan about what it will take for the world to live in true and lasting peace.

What, then, is this American Christmas Carol in another guise—who is it for?  My feeling is that it’s for all of us.  In a way, I think Serling has given us what we no longer really encounter in the Dickens versions of this story—a genuinely convicting and unsettling understanding that WE are being haunted by these ghosts also, that the message of peace and brotherhood is not some easygoing “let’s all hug at Christmas” lark but a truly daunting and monumental undertaking that demands more from us than we might ever otherwise be willing to give.  This version of the story, unlike so many others, offers us very little in the way of transformation and hope because Serling does not know from the vantage point of 1964 whether we really will transform ourselves, and therefore cannot offer us too much in the way of encouragement that it will, in fact, all work out for the good.  Speaking from the vantage point of 2025, I think perhaps his reluctance was warranted.  We learned too little from the 20th Century, and much of what we “learned” as a society was, I think, clearly the wrong lesson, something that has led us into what I will euphemistically call our current predicament.  There is an honesty to this version of the story that is not always easy to sit with, but perhaps the time has come again (as it did in 1964) for us to sit with the honesty that art can give us and ask, what next?  What now?  Will we learn, as Scrooge does in the original novella, to let “the Spirits of Past, Present, and Future strive within me,” so that “the shadows of the things that would have been may be dispelled”?  I think we can, and that, muted as it is, this version of the story expresses the kind of hope that we can really believe in—the conviction that all of us, or at least enough of us, may be able to change the course of the future, and bring a better Christmas into being than we would otherwise receive.

I Know That Face:

As I mentioned, the young pop singer Steve Lawrence appears as this film’s version of the Ghost of Christmas Past: later in life, he plays Peter Medoff in The Christmas Pageant.  Eva Marie Saint, who in this movie portrays the ethically convicted WAVE, Lt. Gibson, makes appearances as Martha Bundy in 1988’s I’ll Be Home for Christmas (note: ‘90s kids, this is NOT the Jonathan Taylor Thomas flick you’re thinking of) and as Emma Larson in A Christmas to Remember, and IMDB claims that her first ever film role was in 1947’s TV A Christmas Carol, though it gives no indication of her role (I’m assuming one of the Cratchit kids, most likely?).  And Pat Hingle, the irritatingly (to Grudge) persistent Ghost of Christmas Present, will later play the Bus Driver in One Christmas, and Joe Hayden in Sunshine Christmas.

Spirit of Christmas Carol Present:

This is maybe a weird claim to make (given that he never addresses the film’s “Scrooge” aloud, as the character obviously does in the original), but Marley’s initial ghostly haunting is really incredibly effective here, more so than in many more straight adaptations.  It’s obvious why Grudge would be shaken by the manifestations he hears and sees, and it establishes the basis of the ghost story effectively.  To the extent that the original novella is about giving us an emotionally resonant series of confrontations with Scrooge’s underlying moral sense, this movie is knocking it out of the park: at times, honestly, it’s even more affecting than anything Scrooge undergoes, or maybe I should say that I feel the conviction of it more keenly than I do when Scrooge is the one under the microscope.  In a way, then, this adaptation is faithful to the underlying reality of the original story, even if it gets there by making some pretty radical alterations to the text.  And of course we do get the consistency of our “Scrooge” character waking up on Christmas morning, clutching the curtain that had been Future’s robe.

Spirit of Christmas Carol Absent:

I don’t get into this as much in the review because I’m more excited to talk about what works in this adaptation, but I do have to be honest: there are elements missing from the story that I do think hurt it dramatically to some extent.  The moral weight of the dead Marley doesn’t really pay off in the long run here—there’s just not a lot of things for Dan to make amends for in terms of personal harms done, and therefore we don’t really have the sense on Christmas morning that he has a lot of people to settle up accounts with (other than nephew Fred).  If Grudge’s servant Charles (who does appear in some of the ghostly portion of the movie) is this version’s Bob Cratchit, that story’s been shaved a little too lean to make it work.  We don’t have the same thrill of recognition when Charles shows up, and we don’t see much of a reckoning on Christmas morning, since they just don’t have the same relationship dynamic.  And maybe most importantly, one of the most central planks to any Christmas Carol rendering is the idea that Scrooge has some kind of joy in his past (his love of his sister, and his romance with Belle, even just his genuine joy at the overly festive generosity of his old employer Fezziwig) that he can rediscover and re-awaken within himself, which he does on Christmas morning.  But if Dan Grudge was ever more idealistic, we don’t see it, and I think therefore we are less sure of his transformation than we might otherwise have been.  I think the Past section of this screenplay could have been structured to give us more of an idea that Dan had something to recapture about himself, but either Serling doesn’t really believe that about the American avatar he’s writing, or else he dropped the ball.

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Christmas Carol Vibes (6/10): This is a fun adaptation in that it does sit between the really faithful examples and the ones that are borrowing nothing more than a couple of names or moments from the classic story.  We’ve got a rich old guy haunted by someone named Marley and challenged by an idealistic nephew Fred who encounters three ghosts on Christmas Eve and is affected by them – that’s really effective at making it feel like A Christmas Carol.  But the changes to the structure (the loss of the Cratchits in particular as a way of externalizing and dramatizing both the risk and the potential reward of a future that might go one of two ways) and simply the look and feel of the film take it to a very different place.  This is much more comprehensible, in a lot of ways, as a long-form Twilight Zone episode than it is as an adaptation of a work by Charles Dickens.

Actual Quality (9/10): In terms of how much this connected with me as an audience member, I’m probably selling it short.  This was a profoundly affecting viewing experience, and one that I think worked on me in exactly the ways Serling intended it to, so as an act of persuasion (some might call it propaganda, even), it’s a 10/10.  In terms of its quality as a dramatic work, I have to rein it in just a little, since if I stop and think about the loose ends, or the ways the Past/Present/Future sequences do or don’t sync up, I can see ways in which I would improve the film.  A fair amount of the dialogue is not especially realistic, as characters argue more as representatives of an ideology or way of thinking than they do as real people with more subtle understanding of the world (though of course the Ghosts are not “real people” per se, so I think that’s less of an issue in this film than it would be elsewhere).  But the difference between a 9 and a 10 here is not all that material—whether or not this is flawless film-making (I don’t think it is), it’s a movie that is not throwing away its shot, and that matters.  And it’s grown in its power the more I’ve thought about it since watching it, which I think is always the sign of a really good work of art.

Scrooge?  As rich American businessman (and former naval officer) Daniel Grudge, Sterling Hayden is playing a role he’s probably born to play, to some extent.  I’d say that in this work, he’s effective but often one-note as a stern, jaw-clenching expression of America First thinking circa 1964.  His performance is pretty restrained, sometimes so much so that he feels a little limited by the writing, but I think it’s also true that the world around him (both the Ghosts themselves and the theatricality of the visions they present to him) impacts the viewer in a stunning way that’s bound to overshadow almost anyone in the Grudge role.

Supporting Cast?  I have to say, I think that all three ghosts are solidly cast and often riveting when they talk.  It’s hard to say how much of that charisma is in the writing versus in the acting but it may not matter that much: it’s certainly true that that’s where the power is here, dramatically speaking.  Charles and Ruby, Grudge’s servants, are almost wasted in roles that feel like they’re either underwritten or else sequences involving them maybe ended up on the cutting room floor.  And nephew Fred is really effective up front as Grudge’s interlocutor and the advocate for a different future, but man, I wish we got more out of him in the finale—either Serling doesn’t know how to use him to draw Grudge out or he just didn’t think that Fred would have done such a thing on Christmas morning, with the bells calling him to his (presumably liberal mainline) church service and testy Uncle Dan seeming unsettled but not anxious for advice.  

Recommended Frequency?  I think that, if we can stand it, everyone ought to watch this film once, and encounter its artful confrontation of America in the world.  It was tough enough to face that one time that I am not sure when I will do it again, but I know that what upsets me as a viewer is not the film, but my own complacency, my fear that in little ways I am a Daniel Grudge who neither thinks enough nor does enough for people suffering in the world, perhaps because I cannot see them from my dinner table in the way that the Ghost of Christmas Present forces Grudge to see them in his vision.  I think that until the lessons of this particular carol have been learned, not just by me but by American society, it will always be a text to which we must return, to ask ourselves how much closer we are to peace and understanding than we were in 1964; to challenge ourselves to learn even better than Scrooge did what it means to honor Christmas in our hearts and try to keep it all the year.
If you’re persuaded (as I hope you are) to take the time this year to watch Carol for Another Christmas, I’m afraid that it’s exclusively licensed for streaming to HBO Max, which of course some folks subscribe to via Hulu or Amazon Prime.  These days I normally offer DVD/Blu-ray links to Barnes and Noble (given some Amazon business practices many of us, I think very fairly, object to), but only Amazon has a DVD version….and the reviews suggest that the audio and video quality are terrible, so you may not want to drop cash on that.  Even more disappointingly, that appears to be the only version available, held on disc (according to Worldcat) by a mere 11 libraries worldwide.  I would never normally suggest accessing the film in other ways, since usually we have lots of options for access, but under the circumstances, perhaps you’ll be glad to know that there are some small accounts (surely illegally) uploading copies of this film on YouTube…I assume the copyright holders will take action sooner or later and that link will break, but for now, it’s there.  I don’t know where they got their copy, but it doesn’t have the video/audio quality issues folks report about the DVD.