“What the Dickens have they done to Scrooge?” the poster ads demanded. You might well ask… It’s not really much of a surprise that A Christmas Carol was given the musical treatment. The surprise is that it took so long to get around to it. Following the success of Robert Wise‘s The Sound of Music (1965), the big-budget, all-star musical became the “flavour of the month” in Hollywood and beyond (Camelot (1967), Doctor Dolittle (1966), Finian’s Rainbow (1968), Hello, Dolly! (1969), Song of Norway (1970), Man of La Mancha (1972), Lost Horizon (1973)), many of which crashed and burned at the box office. One of the few exceptions was Ronald Neame’s lavish adaptation of Charles Dickens’ 1843 novella which proved to be a big hit with a public seemingly still hungry for yet another go at the story.

The plot more or less follows the well-established pattern (Scrooge was the first A Christmas Carol adaptation in colour but was very far from the first overall) with a few new wrinkles along the way. The miserly Scrooge (Albert Finney) is visited by a variety of ghosts on Christmas Eve and is forced to see the error of his skinflint ways. You know the drill well enough by now. Scrooge‘s main selling points are a huge budget (every penny spent is there to be seen on the screen, though some corners were cut by reusing sets left over from an earlier Dickens’ musical, Carol Reed’s Oliver! (1968)), a starry cast of familiar British faces and the fact that the tale has been reimagined as a musical.

A Christmas Carol adaptations tend to work best when they’re smaller, more intimate affairs that highlight the darker as aspects of the story. Scrooge turns a very simple story into a full-blown musical epic and it loses something along the way. It looks fantastic, there’s no denying that, and the simple pleasure of watching some of the greats of British stage and screen at work can’t be easily dismissed but it has one fatal flaw – it’s a musical with barely a memorable tune to be heard. Only Thank You Very Much lodges itself in the ear and won’t go away, and unsurprisingly was the one nominated for the Oscar and Golden Globe – the rest are a bland collection of functional ditties written by Leslie Bricusse that are forgotten almost the second they finish.

When it steers clear of the unnecessary song and dance routines and lets the excellent cast get on with telling the story it’s a decent enough adaptation. Alistair Sim is still the benchmark by which we measure screen Scrooges and Finney sadly comes nowhere near. Buried under ageing make-up that took hours to apply and remove, he affects a London accent probably more appropriate to the characters than most but never quite convinces in the role, his affections and tics becoming increasingly annoying. Alec Guiness looks like he’s having a ball as a gravity-defying, rather fey Jacob Marley (though the flying mechanism gave him a double hernia that required surgical treatment after filming ended) and Dame Edith Evans makes for an unlikely but effective Ghost of Christmas Past though poor Kenneth More, obscured by an extravagant beard, makes little impact as the Ghost of Christmas Present, never the most interesting of the spectres anyway. Elsewhere, David Collings, Frances Cuka, Michael Medwin, Gordon Jackson, Anton Rogers, Laurence Naismith and Suzanne Neve are among the well-known faces on parade.

But the lack of memorable tunes and a certain self-indulgence – it’s overlong, a full half hour before Marley’s ghost turns up – undoes a lot of the good that the spirited cast do. The length isn’t helped by the addition of new or expanded sequences that exist mainly as an opportunity to cram in a few more songs. These newly minted additions – Scrooge’s flight through a London night sky filled with ghosts and a trip into Hell after the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come (Paddy Stone), who turns out to not be as terrifying as childhood memories suggest, casts him into his open grave – add nothing at all to the story.

The Hell sequence, in which Marley escorts Scrooge to an icebox of an office where he’s destined to spend eternity, seems particularly odd and unneeded as it was clear that Scrooge was willing and ready to repent even before the third ghost turns up. The sequence was frequently cut from US television prints and for once censorship worked in the film’s favour. Elsewhere, more is made of Scrooge’s relationship with Belle – here renamed Isabel (Neve) – is greatly expanded from the story, allowing another song (Happiness) and much cod-romantic meanderings through Hyde Park. Again it adds nothing substantial to the story.

And yet despite its flaws, the film was a big hit and remains a much-loved adaptation. It was adapted as a stage musical in 1992 with Anthony Newly in the title role, a production that was revived several times, in 2003 starring Tommy Steele and in 2007 with Shane Ritchie. The stage version reinstates a musical number for Marley, Make the Most of This Life, that seems to have been shot (the build-up to it remains in the film) but which was cut before release. Scrooge isn’t the best film adaptation of Dickens’ perennial seasonal favourite, nor the worst. Where it gets things right – the casting, the gorgeous set (by Terence Marsh) and costume (by Margaret Furse) designs and Oswald Morris’ marvellous photography – it’s an entertaining extravaganza. But it’s let down badly by those instantly forgettable songs and by the fact that it takes so long to tell a tale that was told so succinctly and with far more charm in the original story.