In recent weeks ghosts, dozens - maybe even thousands - of them, have been appearing in my front room. I have, you see, been watching the many film versions there have been of the Charles Dickens classic in an endeavour to find the best movie adaptation of A Christmas Carol. Every year, around early December, I prepare myself for my Dickens Christmas Walk by both reading the book and watching the film. The film version I have always watched is the adaptation starring Alastair Sim, largely because a I consider it the finest version ever made and b because it brings back happy childhood memories, of when it was always on TV.
As it happened, they didn't want me to speak about the Alastair Sim version but rather The Muppet Christmas Carol and Bill Murray's Scrooged , neither of which, I am ashamed to say, I had actually seen. But, a quick visit or should that be click to Amazon and, a day later, the DVD's of both appeared before me and I spent the next two days watching them.
I have to say I loved them both, in particular The Muppets version, which, more or less, stuck closer to Dickens original story than practically any other film version - apart from giving Charles Dickens a big blue nose and introducing us to the Marley twins in order to make use of both Statler and Waldorf!
I thought Michael Caine gave one of the best performances of Scrooge I've ever seen, imbuing him with a pathos that suggests he Scrooge not Michael is very much a product of a miserable past. It set me wondering about all the different film adaptations there must have been over the years, and so I decided to begin researching the various celluloid incarnations of Ebenezer Scrooge by compiling a list of the many adaptations of A Christmas Carol and, having done so, I set about watching as many of them as I could.
Below, you will find a selection of the different adaptations together with my thoughts on each one. But they, at least, present us with a wonderful chronology of the various renditions of the second greatest Christmas story ever told, together with a terrific insight into the many and varied ways in which actors have portrayed Scrooge over the more than years since Dickens created him. I hope you enjoy these various renditions and, should you happen to know of, or you happen to encounter, any online versions I've not included, please let me know in order that I can add them to the page.
