Scrooge
G, 113 m., 1970
Albert Finney (Ebenezer Scrooge), Laurence Naismith (Mr. Fezziwig), Alec Guinness (Jacob Marley’s Ghost), Edith Evans (Ghost of Christmas Past), Kenneth More (Ghost of Christmas Present), Paddy Stone (Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come), David Collings (Bob Cratchit), Richard Beaumont (Tiny Tim). Directed by Ronald Neame. Produced by Robert Solo. Screenplay by Leslie Bricusse. Based on the novel A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.
The notion of Albert Finney playing Ebenezer Scrooge is admittedly mind-boggling, and so is the idea of A Christmas Carol being turned into a musical. But Scrooge works very nicely on its intended level and the kids sitting near me seemed to be having a good time.
Still, I’m not sure the movie should have been in color (Scrooge having, of course, the definitive black-and-white personality). And I’m not convinced it should have been a musical. With so few musicals being made today, it’s our loss that so many of them are written by Leslie Bricusse. Here he is, after Doctor Dolittle, back again with still more forgettable tunes and inane lyrics with titles like “I Like Life” and “Thank You Very Much.”
Bricusse’s songs fall so far below the level of good musical comedy that you wish Albert Finney would stop singing them, until you realize he isn’t really singing. He’s just noodling along, helped by lush orchestration. To get the lead in a big-studio musical during the long dying days of the genre, you apparently had to be unable to sing or dance. How else to account for Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood in Paint Your Wagon? Or Finney in this one? Finney adopts Marvin’s singing style, which is a sort of low-register growl. Meanwhile, countless dancers and a children’s choir keep up the pretense that music is happening.
So if all of these things are wrong, why does Scrooge work? Because it’s a universal story, I guess, and we like to see it told again. Ronald Neame’s direction tells it well this time, and the film has lots of special effects that were lacking in the 1935 and 1951 versions. I was less than convinced by Scrooge’s visit to a papier-mâché hell, but the appearance of Christmas Present (Kenneth More) surmounting a mountain of cakes and candies was appropriately marvelous.
The whole problem of the Ghosts of Christmas have been handled well, in fact. Reviewing the 1951 British version of A Christmas Carol for the Chicago Sun-Times, Eleanor Keen noted appropriately that the three ghosts are “a trio that resembles fugitives from an eighth-grade play in costumes whipped up by loving hands at home.” My memory of that version is that she was right and the ghosts looked ridiculous.
In this version, the ghosts are handled more believably (if that’s possible). The Ghost of Christmas Past is a particularly good inspiration: They’ve made the role female and given it to Dame Edith Evans. She plays it regally and sympathetically by turns, and seems genuinely sorry that Scrooge’s childhood was so unhappy. Christmas Present, played by More, is a Falstaffian sort of guy with a big belly and a hearty laugh, who doesn’t look like a ghost at all. And Christmas Future is simply a dark, faceless shroud, not unlike Lorado Taft’s figure of Time in his Fountain of Life sculpture on the Midway at the University of Chicago. All three figures are miles better than conventional eighth-grade ghosts.
Alec Guinness contributes a Marley wrapped in chains; the Christmas turkey weighs at least forty pounds; Tiny Tim is appropriately tiny, and Scrooge reforms himself with style. What more could you want? No songs, I’d say.
The Thin Man
NO MPAA RATING, 93 m., 1934
William Powell (Nick Charles), Myrna Loy (Nora Charles), Maureen O’Sullivan (Dorothy Wynant), Cesar Romero (Chris Jorgenson). Directed by W. S. Van Dyke. Produced by Hunt Stromberg. Screenplay by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich. Based on a novel by Dashiell Hammett.
William Powell is to dialogue as Fred Astaire is to dance. His delivery is so droll and insinuating, so knowing and innocent at the same time, that it hardly matters what he’s saying. That’s certainly the case in The Thin Man, a murder mystery in which the murder and the mystery are insignificant compared to the personal styles of the actors. Powell and Myrna Loy co-star as Nick and Nora Charles, a retired detective and his rich wife, playfully in love and both always a little drunk.
Nick Charles drinks steadily throughout the movie, with the kind of capacity and wit that real drunks fondly hope to master. When we first see him, he’s teaching a bartender how to mix drinks (“Have rhythm in your shaking . . . a dry martini, you always shake to waltz time”). Nora enters and he hands her a drink. She asks how much he’s had. “This will make six martinis,” he says. She orders five more, to keep up.
Powell plays the character with a lyrical alcoholic slur that waxes and wanes but never topples either way into inebriation or sobriety. The drinks are the lubricant for dialogue of elegant wit and wicked timing, used by a character who is decadent on the surface but fundamentally brave and brilliant. After Nick and Nora face down an armed intruder in their apartment one night, they read about it in the morning papers. “I was shot twice in the Tribune,” Nick observes. “I read you were shot five times in the tabloids,” says Nora. “It’s not true,” says Nick. “He didn’t come anywhere near my tabloids.”
After a prologue set three months earlier, most of the movie takes place over the holiday season, including cocktail parties on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and the exposure of the killer at a dinner party sometime around New Years’ Eve. The movie is based on a novel by Dashiell Hammett, one of the fathers of noir, and it does technically provide clues, suspects, and a solution to a series of murders, but in tone and intent it’s more like an all-dialogue version of an Astaire and Rogers musical, with elegant people in luxury hotel penthouses and no hint of the Depression anywhere in sight.
The Thin Man was one of the most popular films of 1934, inspired five sequels, and was nominated for four Oscars (best picture, actor, direction, and screenplay). Yet it was made as an inexpensive B-picture. Powell and Loy had been successful together earlier the same year in Manhattan Melodrama (the last film John Dillinger ever saw), and were quickly cast by MGM in this crime comedy that was filmed, incredibly, in only two weeks. The quick shooting schedule was possible because there are very few sets and negligible exteriors, because there is much dialogue and little action, and because the director, W. S. Van Dyke, was known for sticking to a schedule. That The Thin Man cost so little and looks so good is possibly because the interiors are simple and elegant, and the black-and-white photography flatters the loungewear and formalwear worn by a great-looking cast (which in addition to Powell and Loy, included Maureen O’Sullivan and a young Cesar Romero). And there is a kind of grace in the way the six-foot Powell hovers protectively over the fix-foot-six Loy (or sometimes simply leans as if blown in her direction).
Although Dashiell Hammett was known for hard-boiled fiction, and John Huston’s 1941 film of Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon was one of the first examples of film noir, The Thin Man is essentially a drawing-room comedy with dead bodies. The plot is so preposterous that no reasonable viewer can follow it, and the movie makes little effort to require that it be followed. Nick Charles typically stands in the midst of inexplicable events with a drink in his hand, nodding wisely as if he understands everything and is not about to share. When a reporter asks him, “Can’t you tell us anything about the case?” Nick replies: “Yes. It’s putting me way behind in my drinking.”