People are voting emotionally.

Best movie ever!

Absolutely Fantastic

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

A George Minter Production for Renown Pictures Corporation. U.K. release through Renown: 4 December 1951. 7,758 feet. 86 minutes. U.S. release title: A CHRISTMAS CAROL. U.K. title: SCROOGE.COMMENT: While the sets and characters have not been modelled on Leech's original illustrations (which are far too grotesque), a commendable effort has been made to give an impression of 1843 London. That impression is more sanitized and less realistic than the 1935 movie but it is still a recognizable and lavishly realized Dickensian world. The "good people" alas are still somewhat wooden and insipid (although Roddy Hughes brings admirable life to Fezziwig), but the less angelic and more eccentric characters are brilliantly portrayed by people like Miles Malleson, Jack Warner, Kathleen Harrison and Ernest Thesiger. I enjoyed Hordern's portrait of the smug Marley, but was less impressed by his way-out exaggerated ghost which would have been more effective had he stolen a few pointers from the 1935 version. Sim enthusiastically both over-acts and over-reacts, but he is still both effective and convincing. Langley's script sticks close to Dickens and even utilizes much of the original dialogue. The movie is not only beautifully photographed but superbly set. By the oddly variable standards of Brian Desmond Hurst (who managed to mix masterpieces like On the Night of the Fire with real clinkers like The Hundred Pound Window during the course of his career), Scrooge definitely ranks as one of his more engaging and skilfully imaginative productions. It's impossible not to be moved by this account of Scrooge's fall and redemption. OTHER VIEWS: Despite the movie's present-day acclaim, contemporary reviews varied widely from the highly enthusiastic (Lionel Collier in Picturegoer, F. Maurice Speed in Film Review) to the damned with faint praise. The Monthly Film Bulletin review was typical of the latter, the critic complaining of Hurst's "not altogether successful" direction as well as the "unhelpful" music score. As for the cast, Kathleen Harrison, as usual, was singled out for universal praise, but many thought that neither Sim nor Johns looked right for their parts. Sim came over as a "dour dyspeptic" rather than as a "wrenching miser" and Johns seemed far too cheery and ebullient for a man reduced to near starvation.

Has A Christmas Carol aged well? That depends on how much you think you can take things like Charles Dickens or early/mid 19th century London, England of the period, or about morality stories involving the rich coming to grips with what they've done in life (which, of course, as I'm sure Dickens was well aware, barely ever happens, so if his story isn't pitched at them it's pitched at us - so we can try and be better people even if someone like Ebeneezer Scrooge cannot). Within this fantasy of the 'Three Spirit' visitations over a night - a hallucination, a dreamscape, a step into the surreal alternate/upside down dimension where time exists forever in the past in the sorta-present (kind of the future too, just within the next several hours), and the future as in not *too* far ahead - we get the ultimate 'guilt trip' story, but in a way that's a good thing. I mean, who wants to be a scrooge on Christmas except... Scrooge himself? Something I wondered seeing this for the first time (though it's not my first time around with this story as I've seen other iterations, mostly done for children, which by the way is interesting as this should be a story geared more for adults): why go into the future? Is there more to see that will suddenly make Scrooge even more set in his ways - should he still choose, I imagine there's ultimately some existential element here, as in he could potentially *not* become a better person starting December 25th - than what he sees in the past and the present? Especially in the past in this segment, we see how much Scrooge experienced actual tragedy, with the death of his mother that brought him into the world (the Tyrian Lannister thing, you know), and then that it happens to his sister as she brings his nephew into the world too. And, naturally, what money does to a person when hurt and pain leaves nothing but material possessions and the promise of the Almighty Dollar does to a man. Goodness, what if it was simply after the *past* that he got shook up? As far as what this particular version goes, by the time the present segment comes up, one could argue "alright, we get it, we GET IT!" A law-of-threes might be what Dickens was working at, however, and that the Greatest Fear (Death itself) is what should drive everyone to be at the least decent to one another. Otherwise, by this point, it's practically overkill as far as how much is laid at Scrooge's way. I think the power of the story is that people can and do look at it in not simply one way, and how people's levels of empathy and sympathy for fellow human beings will come out based on how they see Scrooge and those he interacts with (not to mention the idea of if the "world changes you" or you change the world sort of thing, which Ebeneezer's young could-be-wife says to him when she realizes he has changed).All the while that this film, which moves at a fairly brisk pace at 86 minutes, gives us Alistair Sim. He's a Scrooge who is able to go from being the despicable, cold "Covetous old" character with believability, though he does start to look more stark raving mad when he becomes his 'good' hearted self and is laughing sort of like a British Joker. I think at first the bigness, if one can call it that, of his acting threw me off, but the more the film went on I got into how his performance was going, as well as the supporting players (when the actor who plays Jacob Marley shows up as the ghost... well, make sure your speakers aren't *too* loud for when he does his wails). Perhaps the acting hasn't aged as well as the story, but here too there's spots where there's deliveries of lines and pauses in action (look how the actor playing Cratchett looks when Scrooge offers him a raise near the end) that can keep your attention.What can be said about this that hasn't been said by others? If the movie isn't as timeless as It's a Wonderful Life or, for younger people, A Christmas Story, it has its appeal as being true to its source so strongly that other versions end up paling by adding color or being in widescreen. Lastly, I enjoyed the visual effects, which were done with what was available at the time at that studio or with that budget, such as the simplicity in making a character in the same frame faded out to show he is a ghost, or the image of the sands of time in the hour-glass coming forward as time moves to another period. Even an image like the books showing the passing of years is effective.

This is my favorite Scrooge/A Christmas Carol movie of all. I believe that I have seen them all. Although I would never watch the colorized version of the same.Why do they refuse to make great films like this anymore? I wish that there were Saturday matinees near me, so that I could see some of these bygone pictures up on the big screen! Imagine Alastair Sim on a massive theatre screen in the character of Ebenezer Scrooge! I think that people would flock to see this movie if it were offered today, this week. I would, more than once.If you have the chance to see this movie, please do! Do not deprive yourself of a piece of motion picture history, perfection.Blessings of Christmas to all.

This film has been a part of my life since the first time I saw it about 60 years back. No Christmas season has gone by without my watching it again, sometimes more than once, and with the coming of VHS and DVD, I now view it even more often. Why? Well, I am and have always been a fairly voracious reader, and a highly voracious film viewer, and while I certainly cannot claim to have read even one-twentieth of the novels upon which subsequent films were based, of those I have read there are precious few in which the film version has equaled, or perhaps even slightly surpassed, the original. I could probably count them on the fingers of one hand. This is one of them. (Another is the much underrated - but mainly by critics who have never read the novel - DEATH ON THE NILE, the most perfect realization of an Agatha Christie novel ever filmed, and, because so well-made, perhaps a bit more exciting.) But back to A Christmas CAROL. Dickens is arguably the greatest novelist in the English language, and the characters he creates, the dialog he provides for them, and his general commentary on the most dire or comic situations are indelible and unforgettable to anyone who has indulged in reading him. Possibly because of that, most of his greatest novels have had at least one great film version, and most often a good deal of their greatness has been determined by how closely they stick to the original text. Think of the 1930s version of THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP (with an unforgettable performance by Hay Petrie as Quilp), the 1940s versions of OLIVER TWIST, GREAT EXPECTATIONS and NICHOLAS NICKELBY, and the 1950s version of THE PICKWICK PAPERS. Of course, these all came from England. The one Hollywood excursion into true film greatness by way of Charles Dickens is the incredibly moving 1935 version of A TALE OF TWO CITIES (although they produced a first rate David COPPERFIELD shortly before it). But for me none of these comes as close to a full realization of Dickens as the 1951 Christmas CAROL. Every time I see it I feel like I have truly been transported back to mid-19th century England. The visual filming is absolutely perfect, of course, but it is the performances of the entire cast that make the film the greatest film realization of any of Dickens' works, but most especially that of Alastair Sim as Scrooge. This has to be one of the very greatest acting performances in the entire history of cinema. I have seen any number of other actors in this role - Seymour Hicks, Fredric March (on TV), Albert Finney, George C. Scott, Patrick Stewart - and great actors that they all are, not one comes even close to Sim. As is commented on elsewhere here, he quite literally 'owns' the role, and his is my mind's eye image whenever I think of old Ebenezer Scrooge. (Interestingly, that great British character actor Francis L. Sullivan is my similar mind's eye image of Nero Wolfe whenever I read one of Rex Stout's hilarious mysteries, yet I'm pretty certain Sullivan never played that particular role.) Sim was a great and highly prized comedian, yet his greatest film performance is certainly in this very dramatic and thrilling version of the Dickens classic. And Michael Hordern is just as definitive as the ghost of Jacob Marley - has ever this condemned spirit been so hapless, shrill and self-condemnatory as Hordern makes him, or so concerned with saving his friend Scrooge from the torment now visited upon himself? You can only pray that his condemnation is not for all eternity, but, like Hamlet's ghost, only a temporary state until his sins have been expiated. And, amazingly enough, George Cole, playing Scrooge as a better-hearted young man, looks amazingly like a young Alastair Sim, or at least a young Scrooge who will grow into the old Scrooge we now see before us. For me, this is not just a perfect film realization of a great short novel, but quite simply one of the most perfect movies ever made (another one would be the 1940 THIEF OF BAGDAD, but it was not based on anything so concretely unchangeable as a Dickens novel), one so grandly flawless that the imagination cannot conceive of it ever being done as well again.