Scrooge (Twickenham Film Studios, 1935)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Monday, December 19 at about 19 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched two films off a three-movie public-domain DVD which I had assumed was made from live TV broadcasts early in the days of the medium. In fact, the featured item was Scrooge, a 1935 theatrical feature film made by the Twickenham studio in Britain, based (of course) on Charles Dickens’ novel A Christmas Carol and featuring a rather overwrought actor named Seymout Hicks and Donlad Calthrop, a quite interesting British character actor who usually played villains (his best-known role is in Alfred Hitchcock’s first talkie, 1929’s Blackmail, in which he’s the blackmailer; he also played a bitter disabled man in a quiite good film from 1936, The Man Who Changed His Mind, retitled The Man Who Lived Again n the U.S., which featured Boris Karloff in the first of his mad-scientist roles) in a change-of-pace part for him as Bob Cratchit. Alas, the version we were watching was an hour-long cut-down from the 78-minute theatrical original, and the lacunae showed in at least one scene: the Ghost of Christmas Present tells Scrooge that Tiny Tim Cratchit will die of his crippling disease and, when Scrooge expresses sadness at this, the Ghost says, “If he be like to die, let him do it and decrease the surplus population.” As all A Christmas Carol buffs will know, the Ghost is throwing Scrooge’s own previous words back at him – Scrooge had earlier refused to donate to charity with that very sentiment (which Dickens no doubt was referencing the then-popular political philosophy of Edeard Hobbes, whose book Leviathan famously argued that the root cause of poverty was overpopulation) – but the scene in which Scrooge was solicited by a representative of this charity was left out of the version we saw, though it was presumably in the 78-minute version.

The film was directed by Henry Edwards, whom I didn’t have that good a regard for based on the one other film of his I’ve seen – the 1936 movie Juggernaut, which starred Boris Karloff (who made it during a trip home to his native England in 1936 right after he made The Man Who Changed His Mind) as an unscrupulous medical researcher determined ti murder as many people as he has to in order to get his hands on a fortune he needs to continue his research. Edwards’ path crossed Dickens’ again in 1948 when, as an actor, he played the minor part of a police official in Davld Lean’s film of Oliver Twist. Like the U.S.-made Mystery of Edwin Drood which Charles and I had seen December 11, Scrooge is filmed as all-out Gothic horror only occasionally lightened up until the final scene of Scrooge’s reformation. The story is so familiar it’s the sort of film in which you watch wondering how the filmmakers are going to handle every time-worn incident, dialogue exchange and plot point instead of wondering what’s going to happen next. As Charles pointed out early on, Seymour Hicks (billed as Sir Seymour Hicks in the credits, at a time when it was still a relative novelty for actors to receive knighthoods) mght not be the meanest Scrooge we’ve seen but he’s certainly the roughest. Not only does he chew out Bob Cratchit for trying to sneak a few lumps of coal back to his desk to keep himself warm, this Scrooge takes it as a personal affront when whatever he’s doing in his office is interrupted by the noise from a reception down the street in which Queen Victoria herself is the guest of honor. (We don’t actually see the Queen, but we hear the British national anthem in her honor, though there’s an odd glitch in that at the song’s beginning we hear “God Save the Queen,” properly for the time period, but at the end it’s “God Save the King,” which was correct in 1935.)

The critical consensus seems to be that Alistair Sim, in the 1951 British version, was the screen’s best-ever Scrooge, but Hicks is certainly right up there even though he gets to be even more overbearing than most movie Scrooges – and there are several felicitous touches, notably the decision of Edwards and his writer, H. Fowler Mear, to have Jacob Marley’s ghost invisible to the audience so the character becomes a scarier figure when we only hear his voice and don’t see a ghostly image on screen. (Maybe Twickenham simply didn’t have the special-effects capacity or budget to show the ghost more normally in the double-exposure effect typical of how the screen presents ghosts, but it’s still surprisingly effective.) And the one flashback we get from the Ghost of Christmas Past is of Scrooge’s girlfriend Belle (Mary Glynne) angrily giving him back his engagement ring after he’s demanded the eviction of a hapless young couple who’ve fallen behind in their rent. Another neat touch is we see Scrooge literally trying to wipe off the name from his tombstone – and the scene dissolves to him waking up from his dream and frantically wiping at the blankets on his bed.