A Christmas Carol

Update: The Scrooges at YouTube have erased this video and all versions of the Sims' movie you don't have to pay for one way or another.  Bah, humbug!

The modern Christmas story has to be Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.  First of all he wrote it just as the kind of Christmas traditions we observe today were becoming standard.  That includes Christmas carols themselves.  The first collection of now familiar carols was published less than a decade before he wrote this, and it would still be another 30 years or so before they were widely sung--by the Salvation Army on the streets first, and then in churches.

It's a classic story, even apart from Christmas.  Some writers and critics have tried to reduce the number of story plots to a basic minimum.  Author Robert Heinlein chose three plots to which all stories adhere, and the exemplar of one is A Christmas Carol--by being confronted with harsh or inspiring facts, the protagonist changes.

Dickens wrote it in 1843, the first of his annual Christmas stories, although he wrote about Christmas--and ghosts--throughout his career.  He depicted a Christmas celebration in his first serialized novel, The Pickwick Papers, which made him famous.

Ghost stories were an even older tradition of the season, probably a remnant of the winter storytelling of the ancestors that was part of Indigenous cultures.  Dickens combined them with a particular social conscience about the gap between rich and poor, and the huge difference in their lives in London.  It was a feature of the industrial age that we have inherited, adding new elements of it to what's being called income inequality in our time--as well as poverty and homelessness.

The shared responsibility to deal with this systematic suffering was becoming a Dickens passion in the 1840s.  He was working on his novel on the theme of selfishness, Martin Chuzzlewit, at the time he wrote A Christmas Carol.  But in Scrooge's memories of his childhood, Dickens worked with memories from his own childhood that he would write about more specifically in a later novel, the celebrated David Copperfield.

There have been many dramatizations of the story, which often turn the empathetic elements into sentimentality. Still, some movie versions do better than others, or have some overriding feature that sets them apart.

Probably the most famous adaptation is the 1951 Scrooge with the most famous performance of the title character by Alastair Sims.  It's the YouTube film at the top of this column, in a very good black and white print.

The most recent retelling I know of is the Disney animation of a few years ago, which I have not seen.  I'm partial to Patrick Stewart's 1999 movie, which I've got on tape but can't find in a decent version on the net for free.  The 1984 George C. Scott version is pretty good.  Scott starts out as a familiar modern Scrooge, with the awful charm of the ruthless businessman--it's not coincidence it was made in the 1980s.

David Warner brings some credibility to Bob Cratchit in this version, and though much of the storytelling is pedestrian, it's all worth Scott jumping on the bed when he realizes he has been given a second chance.  It's not really up to the Sims version but it has its moments.

This video below is the best I could find on YouTube.  You have to deal with periods of commentary (by two western Pennsylvania dudes with the accents I know so well) and there's some distortion in the picture but overall it's a pretty good print with excellent sound. Merry Christmas everyone.