Scrooge (1935)

(On Cable TV, August 2019) According to Wikipedia, there’s been almost 20 straight film adaptations of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (a number that swells well into the hundreds when you throw in the TV adaptations, parodies and derivative works à la Scrooged), and the 1935 version of Scrooge is certainly one of them. I kid, but the truth is that I overdosed in December 2018 on roughly five different versions of the story (including one whose production date I was never able to formally identify for sure) and even waiting eight months before clearing my DVR of Christmas leftovers wasn’t long enough to get me interested in any other straight take on the story. This being said, there is something intriguing about a mid-1930s version of the story. The images may be muddy, the sound may be fuzzy, the special effects underwhelming (some of the ghosts, intriguingly, are never quite shown) and the performances a bit overdone, but the nature of Dicken’s story makes it unusually timeless, even enhanced by those now-historical takes on the story. The language is theatrical, the black-and-white cinematography old-fashioned and production values deliciously old-school … far closer to the original intent than, say, the 2009 full-CGI version. At barely 78 minutes, it’s also admirably efficient in the way it rushes through the expected plot points and removes a few less-important ones. That the film feels like cinematic muzak, to be left on while doing other things around the house, does have its charm.