by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I’d stumbled across an intriguing holiday-themed DVD in the
collection that my late roommate had bought: a 1954 TV adaptation of Charles
Dickens’ A Christmas Carol featuring
Fredric March as Scrooge and Basil Rathbone as the ghost of his late partner,
Jacob Marley. (Ironically, March later did an actual TV series called Fredric
March Tells Tales from Charles Dickens in
which a 1959 episode re-did A Christmas Carol, only this time Rathbone played Scrooge and March
played Marley.) The 1954 A Christmas Carol was offered as part of a CBS-TV series called Shower of
Stars, and CBS preserved the show and
re-ran it the next two years, hoping to establish it as an annual holiday
attraction. According to imdb.com, it was also originally filmed in CBS’s
noncompatible color system (which returned to the scanning-disc technology of
the early TV experimenters in order to split a black-and-white TV image into
three colored parts that could then be combined into a color picture), but
since you had to have a CBS color set to see the program in color (otherwise
you couldn’t receive it at all), most people only saw it in the simultaneous
black-and-white telecast made using normal 1954 TV technology, and apparently
this black-and-white kinescope is all that survives. Also, some editions of the
program left in the original commercials for the Chrysler Corporation, but this
one didn’t.
The actual creation of this version is a story as interesting as
the technology behind it; Ralph Levy, who both produced and directed, hired
some high-powered writing talent: the script was by Maxwell Anderson and
Bernard Herrmann was credited with both the background musical score and the
melodies of the songs, for which Anderson wrote the music (and though Kurt
Weill had been dead for four years when this show was made the influence runs
deep, especially since Anderson had been the lyricist and book writer for
Weill’s last two Broadway shows, Lost in the Stars and the unfinished Huckleberry Finn). The songs are not particularly memorable but quite
charming, and both Charles and I gave Herrmann and Anderson credit for writing
two songs for the street carolers at the beginning to sing that sound like traditional British carols even though they
aren’t. There’s also a quite nice solo for Scrooge’s girlfriend Belle (played
onscreen by Sally Fraser but dubbed offscreen by the young Marilyn Horne) and,
alas, two, count ’em, two sappy
numbers for Tiny Tim (played by Christopher Cook but undoubtedly also
voice-doubled — since this was a live telecast, the voice doubles had to stand
offstage and sing along with their live on-screen counterparts, who lip-synched
as best they could, much the way Joan Barry had doubled for the heavily
German-accented Anny Ondra in the role of a British shopkeeper’s daughter in
the 1929 film Blackmail). This
version of A Christmas Carol has
its moments — March is a pretty good Scrooge (though hardly in the league of
Alistair Sim in the famous film from three years earlier) and Rathbone is a
typically authoritative Marley even though one can’t help but think he’s really
Sherlock Holmes in disguise, sent by Britain’s Bureau of Inland Revenue to
infiltrate Scrooge’s operation undercover and bust him for income-tax evasion.
One trick Anderson borrowed from the classic 1939 film of The Wizard
of Oz was to make the Spirits of Christmas
Past and Present people Scrooge had known in his real life — Christmas Past was
Belle, the girlfriend he had who left him because she saw he was becoming so
obsessed with money he no longer loved her; and Christmas Present was Scrooge’s
nephew Fred (Ray Middleton), though Charles complained that Anderson’s script
omitted Scrooge’s sister and therefore contained no explanation of how he came
to have a nephew. (Middleton was
the actor hired to perform Earl Robinson’s “Ballad for Americans” at the 1940
Republican National Convention after Paul Robeson, who had recorded the piece
and was the first person they invited, not surprisingly turned them down.)
Indeed, mainly to squeeze in all the songs, the script deleted a lot of scenes from the original that do make it into
most of the adaptations, including Scrooge as a schoolchild (the only one who
can’t go home for the holidays since he has no living parents or older
relatives); Belle jilts him at Fezziwig’s party instead of on a later occasion;
there is no montage of other people celebrating Christmas during the Spirit of
Christmas Present sequence (just Bob Cratchit’s wife slow-roasting a goose over
an open fire); no scene of Scrooge post-reclamation bidding the boy outside to
buy the Cratchits the biggest turkey in the local butcher’s shop; and a pat
resolution telling us that the whole business with the spirits was all just
Scrooge’s dream. (Feh.) The appearance and disappearance of Marley’s ghost is
handled through simple double-exposure (Rathbone was presumably being filmed
against a blank backdrop in another part of the studio and was beamed in electronically)
and there isn’t the marvelous scene Charles and I saw in another early TV
version of A Christmas Carol (a
1949 show in which Taylor Holmes played Scrooge and Vincent Price narrated and
hosted) in which the door to Scrooge’s living room was made of paper so the
actor playing Marley’s ghost could literally walk through it, tearing it open
as he entered. Also, there wasn’t much of a Gothic effect in the graveyard
during the Christmas Yet to Come scene (nor was there a visible third spirit);
Scrooge simply stumbles around on set, sees first his own tombstone and then
one marked “Tiny Tim” (surely he would have been buried as “Timothy Cratchit”
instead!), and then wakes up from the dream in his bed, refreshed and
reclaimed. Still, despite all the flaws, this is an estimable adaptation and
it’s nice to see a bunch of old-pro actors — March, Rathbone, Middleton and Bob
Sweeney (as Bob Cratchit) — doing their thing, and may we still hope that one
day a color version will surface and we’ll get to see what 1954 TV audiences
(the handful of them with CBS color sets, anyway) originally got to see and
hear?
