Alastair Sim as Scrooge: Better than Perfect

If I have a Christmas tradition, other than just feeling the holiday, the way you feel spring has arrived, it's watching Alastair Sim in the 1951 adaptation of A Christmas Carol titled Scrooge. Most films fail to do novels justice: there's much more in most novels than could ever be put on the screen, so you feel that a lot is missing. But the rare film does, in fact, not only do justice to the novel it is based on but actually takes it further, and this is one of those rare ones.

I've watched the film and read the book any number of times, and frankly, the film does a better, tighter, richer job of making Scrooge a person we can understand. For the most part, the book presents him as a nice young fellow who becomes avaricious, as if avarice were a sort of free-floating virus you could catch and be transformed by. I've read a lot of Dickens, and his people are mostly nice or naughty by nature. Scrooge has gone a long way down a bad road, but he's actually presented as sympathetic in any passage where his inner self is revealed.

With the Sim characterization, the story and the acting give us more. Scrooge becomes embittered for specific reasons—his father consigns him to a bleak boarding school because he blames him for his mother's death in childbirth. The father softens over the years, and Scooge's near-angelic sister Fan intercedes for him and gets him returned home. She herself dies in childbirth, and Scrooge is embittered and rejects his nephew because of it.

Scooge's fiancé eventually rejects him too—another angel, who loved him when they were both poor "and content to be so," but who realizes he now covets money and values it more than her love. Scrooge and his partner (in the legal, not the contemporary, sense) Marley increasingly turn to shady, underhanded, ruthless dealing with the world. For Scrooge, the motivation is clear: attachment is pain.

So far, so good. But the amazing thing that Alastair Sim does is to present us with a performance that's both a Dickensian caricature and a deeply insightful look into the psyche of a person in deep pain, afraid of connection and caring, who repels people because it's the path of least resistance. He's not simply mean and irascible—Sim could have stopped there, but no. Again and again, when confronted with something that might awaken his memories of how it felt to care about people, he reacts with a kind of squeamish distaste, the way neurotically inhibited people are conflicted about sex. There's a deeply submerged part of him that is drawn to other people, but he doesn't consciously remember, understand, or want that connection any more, and he reacts to the desire with an offputting, mistrustful scowl that reminds me of Richard Nixon.

In the end, of course, he's cured, he knows on which side the bread of his new life is buttered, he will rejoin the human race. But he's sadly aware that he has a long way to come back from. The manic glee of the Christmas morning scene is touching, even gleeful, but the awareness of how wrong he's been in most of his life is never far. His trepidation when he goes to his nephew's to see if the invitation to dinner still stands is the fulcrum of the entire film.

Let's give Dickens and the original version credit: he says at this juncture, "He passed the door a dozen times before he had the courage to go up and knock. But he made a dash and did it." Fair enough. But look at Scrooge when he approaches the door in this segment from the film. He's guilty, sad, and scared; he knows he may be courting a well-justified rejection from the only person in the world with a real connection to him. And it shows on his face, as a trace of the old scowl shows that he has not entirely lost the long-ingrained cowardly preference for sour solitude. And the snow of the London winter still sticks on his coat—coldness and warmth are metaphors in this story, and we see, literally, that Scrooge isn't yet free of his fears and pain. But a young maidservant welcomes him to the foyer, and encourages him with a smile as he hesitates by the door. The nephew greets him with hearty delight, and the nephew's wife rises, beaming with joy at how happy the uncle has made her husband. The piano player strikes up a polka, and guess what? The skinny-shanked old fellow can still caper about with the best of them.

The book is wonderful, and short enough to read in one quick sitting. But the film—sorry, Charles—the film from 1951 is better. Merry Christmas, gang, and whatever gods may be, I hope they will bless us, every one.