The 1951 Scrooge starring Alaister Sim is often considered the definitive film version of Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Its rendering of Victorian winter is the coldest and the cruelest and is, especially in some of its early moments, the scariest. At age three, this is also one of the first movies I ever saw, one night when TV viewing selection was left in the hands of a babysitter who should have known better. Revisiting it all these years later, key images were uprooted in my psyche--a door-knocker taking on the apparition of Jacob Marley's face, spectres of the homeless dead, Sim's frightened and elated hysterics.
But if this is the least forgiving Scrooge, it goes in hand that its journey to light is also the most rewarding. Sim plays the title role first as a man valuing the sound of his own witticisms over the destitute lives those words reprimand, and then, as he's guided on a tour of his life by three spirits, as a wreck of fear and remorse. The dialogue is often caustic and funny. Scrooge doesn't act this way without precedence. Like the Michael Myers of the Rob Zombie Halloween movies, he had a hard life, enduring both the untimely death of his sister, and his father's condemnation for his mother not surviving his birth. As always, we have the choice of whether to allow hardships to define us (what the film phrases as being "changed by the harshness of the world") and then, in what manner.
Ebenezer Scrooge, like a lot of mean people, has accumulated great intelligence, but not wisdom. His intellect is flaunted at the expense of others, an icy vanity.
Scrooge McDuck fills the role in Mickey's Christmas Carol. Where Sim plays the part bug-eyed, and baring crooked teeth, as though even his aggression is confused, the team at Disney paint Scrooge as a shrewd miser, the corporate unapproachable and unreasonable money-man stationed behind a desk in Coen Brothers films. It's a beautifully animated piece, as it should be. Debuting before the 1983 re-release of The Rescuers, Mickey's Christmas Carol was an event in itself: the first theatrical Mickey Mouse cartoon in over 30 years.
As this is a family engagement, it's Dickens-light, and that approach tends to disservice this material. The familiar and largely anthropomorphic cast gives a strange flavour to a moment when The Ghost of Christmas Present salivates over a roasted pig. What, Donald Duck has hierarchical precedence because he wears a hat?!
There's a real spirit at work, though, helped largely by the yuletide glow of the theme song, "Oh, What a Merry Christmas Day!" If there's an image from this short that has stuck with me through the years, it's of Mickey's Bob Cratchit cutting a single pea with a knife and fork and dividing it among his family members. It's as exemplary a comic-tragic portrait of destitution as Chaplin eating his own boots in The Gold Rush. Mickey's Christmas Carol is a soft Scrooge tale, but it's also a dark Disney cartoon, and that's an interesting alchemy.
I began this series as an alternative to 31 Days of Halloween blogs, wherein a different horror movie is watched and written about over every day in October. Christmas movies are more specific, and I approached this as a challenging way to find some understanding of what these films represent and mean to me personally. It's possible to see this voyage as a Scrooge story in its own right. I love Christmas, but having to write about the holy spirit for twenty-five days in a row does something to a man. I've always approached movie writing as a way to write about humanity as well as aesthetics, but even this was a challenge. I hope everyone has enjoyed it. Now save yourselves!
