A Christmas Carol (MGM, 1938)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Later last night (Tuesday, December 24) I turned on Turner Classic Movies for two Christmas-themed films, including the 1938 version of A Christmas Carol produced by MGM, directed by Edwin L. Marin and adapted by screenwriter Hugo Butler from the famous novella by Charles Dickens. This was originally planned as a vehicle for Lionel Barrymore, who had played Ebenezer Scrooge on radio several times – in fact, his annual portrayals of Scrooge on radio had become a much-awaited event around Christmastime – but just before the film was supposed to start shooting, Barrymore’s long-time arthritis became so bad he literally lost the ability to walk and had to play all his future parts in a wheelchair. (One film in which he put his disability to magnificent use to portray a bitter and crabbed character is Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, in which he played the principal villain, Mr. Potter.) So, though the studio still used Lionel Barrymore to sell the film by having him narrate and appear as himself in the trailer, MGM looked around for a replacement Scrooge and found him in Reginald Owen, who had played in another British classic, A Study in Scarlet, for the short-lived World Wide Pictures in 1933. In that one Owen played Sherlock Holmes and Edwin L. Marin directed that film, too. I’ve long thought A Study in Scarlet was underrated (William K. Everson called Owen the worst actor to play Holmes, which wasn’t true in the early 1970’s when he wrote that book and is even less true today) and so is the 1938 A Christmas Carol.

I remember being told when I was growing up that Owen’s version wasn’t worth watching and Alastair Sim’s portrayal of Scrooge in a 1951 British adaptation was far better – but it’s not taking anything away from Sim to say that Owen’s Scrooge has its points, too. The trailer for the film referenced MGM’s previous productions of Dickens stories, David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities, and though A Christmas Carol is hardly at the level of those classic films, it’s a worthy movie in its own right even though screenwriter Butler came in for criticism for leaving out some of Dickens’s best-loved dialogue lines. One thing I like about this version of A Christmas Carol is that the actors playing Mr. and Mrs. Cratchit, Gene and Kathleen Lockhart, were married in real life (and actress June Lockhart was their daughter). Another good thing about this film is the general excellence of the supporting cast: Leo G. Carroll as Marley’s Ghost, Ronald Sinclair (who starred in the quite interesting 1937 MGM musical Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry after Freddie Bartholomew’s parents had a diva hissy-fit with MGM and pulled him out of the film) as the young Scrooge, Barry MacKay as Scrooge’s nephew Fred, Lynne Carver as Fred’s girlfriend Bess, and Ann Rutherford (getting a welcome reprieve from the thankless role of the girlfriend Mickey Rooney was always temporarily abandoning in the Hardy Family movies), Lionel Braham, and D’Arcy Corrigan as the Spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come, respectively. The 1938 A Christmas Carol is a perfectly respectable adaptation of Dickens’s classic, and though it doesn’t achieve greatness it’s still an estimable movie in its own right even though it would have been even better if Lionel Barrymore had been able to play Scrooge.