Review: "A Christmas Carol" with George C. Scott is the Definitive Adaptation

Movie of the Week #23 wishes you all a very merry Christmas

Merry Christmas, and welcome to Movie of the Week, a Wednesday column where we take a look back at a classic, obscure, or otherwise interesting movie each and every week for paid subscribers. Follow this link for more details on everything you get subscribing to Fade to Lack!

If you have never seen the 1984 version of A Christmas Carol directed by Clive Donner and starring George C. Scott, you have done yourself a disservice. This is easily the greatest screen version of one of the greatest stories ever told, and simply one of my favorite films ever made. I inherited my love for it from my Dad, who adored the film (and Scott in particular, given his affection for the film Patton), but the older I get, the more I develop my own love for what Donner and company achieved here.

The film is a fairly literal adaptation, using much of Dickens’ wonderful dialogue; while I sometimes find that screenwriters can craft more organic films by changing the novel to better suit the cinematic format – many Dickens films are unbearably talky – there’s something about the writing in A Christmas Carol that translates to film incredibly well, that demands to be spoken aloud; many of the best adaptations are the ones that allow the actors to bask in the glory of Dickens’ impeccable prose. This version also includes several darker scenes usually cut from adaptations, but which I think are really crucial. Chief among them is the Ghost of Christmas Present showing Scrooge the “children of humanity,” ‘Ignorance’ and ‘Want,’ depicted as starved, malnourished children, a metaphor for all the people mankind overlooks and ignores in our everyday sins of insensitivity. It is a moment that implicates not just Scrooge or those who hoard wealth, but most members of the audience. Donner’s film never shies away from the horrors inherent in this story, and seeing this material dramatized is arguably more impactful that reading it on the page.