Scrooge (1935)

Seymour Hicks isn’t a name that resonates particularly these days but in his long career as a producer, playwright, actor-manager and particularly actor, he was both prolific and hugely successful. Born in 1871, he made his stage debut at the age of just nine, and started acting professionally at sixteen, He wrote and starred in a string of popular musicals in the 1900s that earned him enough money to commission the building of the Aldwych Theatre in 1905 and the less well known Hicks Theatre to the following year. He continued to work on both stage and on the screen (his first film appearances were in 1913) until a year before his death in 1949 at the age of 1978.

Perhaps his greatest role was that of Charles Dickens’ legendary miser from A Christmas Carol, a role he played on stage over a thousand times. By the time he brought the character to the screen for director Henry Edwards in 1935, Hicks had already played the part on film once before, in 1913 for director Leedham Bantock (also titled Scrooge, it was released in the States as Old Scrooge). A short adaptation of the novel – now believed to be lost – had been made in 1928 which featured a synchronised soundtrack, but the Edwards/Hicks film was the first feature length version of the story made in sound.

Scrooge sticks close to the main thrust of Dickens’ novella but inevitably makes changes (what version doesn’t?), some more detrimental than others. Whole characters are jettisoned (there’s no room for either Mr Fezziwig or Scrooge’s sister Fan here) and plot nuances overlooked (Scrooge doesn’t meet the children Ignorance and Want, but again it’s a rare adaptation that features them) but all of the central ideas and themes and present and correct. This version is heavy on Scrooge’s life prior to his memorable Christmas Eve – not really surprising as the script was an adaptation of one of Hicks’ stage versions that were written specially to foreground the actor.

Edwards uses this as a chance to paint one of the grimmest of screen visions of Victorian London. London 1843 has rarely looked as unpleasant as it does here. The low key, expressionistic lighting of cinematographers Sydney Blythe and William Luff fills the impressive sets with great pools of darkness, complementing scriptwriter H. Fowler Mear’s decision to focus the early stages of the film on the squalor and misery the poor had to endure. It’s pretty forthright in its embracing of Dickens’ social concerns, nevermore so perhaps than in the early scene of the Queen, the Lord Mayor of London and the city’s wealthy enjoying an elaborate Christmas Eve banquet while starving children peer in through the kitchen window. Later the film is unusual for actually showing the tragic Tiny Tim (Philip Frost) on his death bed, his lifeless body watched over by his grieving parents.

The decision to concentrate on Hicks also throws into sharp relief Scrooge at his vilest, loneliest and most callous. Hicks is marvellous throughout, playing both the older Scrooge and his younger self seen losing his one true love Belle (Mary Glynne) due to his money-grubbing ways. With over a thousand stage performances under his belt it was unlikely that he was going to mess it up here but his performance is one of the few that comes close to rivalling that of Alastair Sim, still the definitive screen incarnation of Scrooge.

Some have been dissatisfied by the film’s sometimes eccentric portrayal of the ghosts, something that is both a major mistake and one if the film’s greatest strengths. It was a huge mis-step to not show Marley’s ghost, but simply to have it represented by a disembodied voice (often wrongly rumoured to be an uncredited Claude Rains) while Hicks reacts to what appears to be an empty room. But the other spirits all have their merits. Past (Marie Ney provides the physical outline though the identity of the male voice performer has never been established) is a wonderfully ethereal apparition, a glowing white vision, featureless and strangely creepy, and is nicely balanced by Yet to Come (referred to here as (“Ghost of the Future”), a never-speaking shadow of a pointing, accusing finger (C.V. France). Only Present is represented in human form, Oscar Asche playing the role as an odd cross between Father Christmas and Herne the Hunter.

A couple of times, Edwards deploys a rather impressive special effects shot that allows his camera to float over the snowy rooftops of the city, figures seen moving in the windows of a large, elaborate model. There are other directorial flourishes too – note the way the Stygian gloom of the bulk of the film is instantly banished when Scrooge throws backs the curtains after his epiphany on Christmas morning, the film suddenly becoming brighter as Scrooge’s future changes.

But there are faults. There sometimes seem to be bits missing from even the longer prints. At one point in the opening scene, Scrooge says “I don’t know that” in answer to a question that hasn’t been asked. This may be a fault caused by the editing of the film for the American market. Fifteen minutes were removed, deleting moments like the visit of the two philanthropists seeking donations for the poor; scenes set on a lighthouse and a sailing ship and the final shot of Scrooge meeting Bob Cratchit in church. For many years the film was hard to find as existing prints were either the compromised 63 minute version or were in shockingly poor shape but thankfully better 78 minute prints have since surfaced. Other problems are squarely down to Mead and Edwards – after his redemption, Scrooge visits his nephew Fred (Robert Cochran) and his friends for Christmas dinner, but the scene that follows has Bob Cratchit (Donald Calthrop) rushing off to the office at nine o’clock in the morning.

But these are minor niggles in a film that never really challenges the pre-eminence of Brian Desmond Hurst’s 1951 version as the definitive adaptation, does have plenty of its own dark charms. Hicks is the main draw but the photography, the occasional meanders into Gothic territory (as in the moment where “the Ghost of the Future” shows Scrooge his charwoman, laundress and undertaker stealing his possessions) and the eagerness to embrace some of Dickens’ social concerns marks it out from the plethora of other adaptations. It’s not a particularly well loved version but it’s now perhaps overdue a re-evaluation. It probably goes without saying that avoiding the hideous colourised version does little to aid that re-evaluation and is to be avoided at all costs.