Scrooge (1951)

by Robbo

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Posted on 19 December 2021

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Scrooge (released as A Christmas Carol in the United States) is a 1951 British Christmas fantasy drama film and an adaptation of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. It stars Alastair Sim as Ebenezer Scrooge, and was produced and directed by Brian Desmond Hurst, with a screenplay by Noel Langley.

I think that by now everybody should know the story of A Christmas Carol as there have been so many adaptations over the years.

It’s Christmas Eve 1843 and miser Ebeneezer Scrooge has no intentions of celebrating Christmas, he refuses an offer to Christmas dinner from his nephew Fred (Worth), angers at being bothered by two gentlemen soliciting chartable donations for the poor, and begrudgingly allows his long suffering clerk, Bob Cratchit (Johns) to have the whole day off on Christmas Day.

Later that evening he is visited by the ghost of his former business partner Jacob Marley (Hordern) and is told that he must mend his ways or his spirit will be forever bound in chains and suffer eternal damnation. Marley tells him he will be visited by three spirits and to expect the first at the stroke of one.

Over the course of the night, Scrooge is visited by the spirits of Christmas past, present and future. We see through Scrooge’s own eyes how he earned his wealth and became consumed by avarice and how he isolated himself from anyone who loved him to become the hate filled loner that he now was.

He is shown that no matter how rich or poor that Christmas is a time where men’s hearts are filled with joy and compassion for all, and that it is a time for family.

Scrooge realises how much he has missed out on and vows to make amends for the many Christmases he had previously ignored becoming ‘as good a man as the old city ever knew’.

I think that this is the definitive adaptation of ‘A Christmas Carol’, and Alistair Sim’s Scrooge is the blueprint for all that came after.

This is a classic that is yet to be surpassed.

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