What I watched: The 1949 NBC adaptation of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. This version, broadcast on Christmas Eve, was narrated by Vincent Price and starred Taylor Holmes as Scrooge with Pat White as Bob Cratchit. It was adapted and directed by Arthur Pierson. Video is available on the Internet Archive.
What happened: We open with a slightly haunting version of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman.” We open with Vincent Price, looking positively homely in a warm living room and a fuzzy suit. Price reads the beginning of the text to us, and we cut to the story itself. This is followed by, well, A Christmas Carol. You know the story, right? If not, go read the book, or better yet, watch the Muppet version.
What I thought: “A Christmas Carol” is one of the most adapted stories of all time, right up there with the Bible. There’s a good reason for that: it has a natural three-act structure baked in (well, really more of a five-act one if you count the two parts around the ghosts), and presents a character arc in a way that is easy to understand for even the most literal-minded viewer. Its short length makes it perfect for a screen or stage adaptation, and also keeps out the more baroque elements of Dickens’s plotting.
This is the first surviving television adaptation of the novella, and it would certainly not the last. Wikipedia lists ten film adaptations which had already been made, and the most acclaimed version of the story (with Alistair Sims as Scrooge) was two years in the future. At a certain point, there becomes a runaway familiarity effect: the story is so well-known that every series can do its own Christmas Carol and trust the audience to understand and anticipate every beat of the narrative. And on top of that, Christmas is the time where audiences least desire novelty, instead aiming to recreate their childhood holidays as much as possible.
That kind of cultural familiarity is necessary to get any enjoyment out of this 1949 version, which gives no idea of why anyone would care about this story. The production rushes through its signature dialogue and plot points, trying to squeeze everything into a 24-minute time frame. As a result, the moral drama of the novella is more or less eliminated. The TV version doesn’t really establish Scrooge as a bad guy, just kind of a curmudgeon who certainly doesn’t deserve to be tormented from beyond the grave. The short length isn’t entirely to blame — future cartoons and sitcoms would do a better job of fitting this material into a similar frame — but it’s clear that Pierson didn’t quite know how to deal with it.
The performances also don’t do much heavy lifting. Holmes has a rather nasal voice, and lacks the screen presence necessary to elevate Scrooge into someone we want to see redeemed. Perhaps this is inadvertently a more honest portrayal of the character, not as a Shakespearean lost soul but just a shitty boss. The other actors are fairly forgettable. Even Vincent Price, the most familiar name involved, seems off his game. (It would have been interesting to see him as Scrooge, but it’s clear they could only pay him for one scene.)
This adaptation also pays short shrift to the supernatural element of the story. The Ghost of Christmas Past is basically just a guy in a towel, and his segment is over in the blink of an eye. Christmas Present is very serious and essentially exists only to set up the bathos-ridden Tiny Tim scene. The future segment is the least abridged, making the whole production essentially seems like a scared-straight narrative.
There are a lot of angles one can take when adapting A Christmas Carol. The original text is deeply rooted in a Victorian morality in which the most important task is to ensure that society’s elites are committed to a Christian purpose. A director could choose to emphasize how different, or how similar, this perspective is from that of midcentury America. But alas, this is an adaptation without a perspective, done simply because someone wanted something Christmas-y.
Coming up next: It’s the last Life of Riley of the year, thank goodness.
The Eternal Couch Potato 