Scrooge; or Marley's Ghost

Scrooge; or Marley's Ghost (1901)

*** (out of 4)

Most people, myself included, haven't heard of Paul's Animatograph Works, the production company here but they were the first to produce a film version of Dickens' A Christmas Carol. In the film we see Scrooge visited by three ghosts and his redemption. This is a pretty unique film for 1901 in many regards. For starters, title cards weren't being used during this era but this film here has pretty long ones and I'm pretty sure that this is the earliest film I've seen them used in. The film also tells a "story" which again wasn't the norm for this era. One would be shocked that a three-minute film could stay pretty faithful to the original story but this film does a pretty good job at that. I was really surprised to see the film pay close attention to the original material, although, needless to say, this film does have to speed things up quite a bit. The special effects, from the Melies style of film-making, are pretty good and hold up well today. Apparently this film originally ran a bit longer but hopefully the other few minutes will be found at some point. What remains is an interesting bit of history.

The oldest surviving cinematic adaptation of "A Christmas Carol" is a very truncated version to the point that the Ghosts of Christmases Past, Present and Future don't even appear. Jacob Marley shows Ebenezer Scrooge what the latter needs to know. There's apparently no available info about who the cast is. Only about half the movie exists today, and I watched it on Wikipedia. I understand that a lot of movies during cinema's infancy were adaptations of classic novels so that viewers would already know the story and there would be limited need for intertitles.

Aside from being the oldest surviving adaptation of Dickens's classic novel, there's nothing particularly special about "Scrooge; or Marley's Ghost". It's actually based more on J.C. Buckstone's stage adaptation "Scrooge". I'll forgive it for looking like it does - the background looks painted - since movies were just getting off the ground. My favorite adaptation of Dickens's novel remains "Scrooged", starring Bill Murray as a greedy TV exec (one of the lines describes a TV ad as "the Manson family Christmas").

Anyway, it's an OK movie.

CarolQuest Part I

The earliest ever adaptation of probably the most-adapted novel of all time is mostly built around some great theatrical tricks and not much else. Wikipedia insists it's also the first use of intertitles in a film which feels quite an intense mantle to place on it. Bracingly abridged down to about five minutes, and now only surviving as three-and-a-half it's worth a gander (beyond historical fascination) for the door-knocker effect at the very least and the genuinely fascinating choice of projecting Scrooge's youth onto a curtain behind him. Not essential, but fairly atmospheric.

Early adaptation of the famous Dickens tale. I believe it's the earliest film version (that survived, at least). IMDb lists the runtime as 11 minutes but the only versions I could find were 3 minutes and change. They cram a lot into that 3 minutes. Points for that but I can't imagine any viewer who wasn't familiar with the story knowing what was going on. There are a few title cards but, again, unless you know the story already they don't explain much. So you have this guy being tormented by Christmas spirits with little explanation. There's clearly a lot missing. Still, the effort is good for its time and limitations and some of the technical stuff is impressive.

Although the IMDb listing would have you believe this movie is 11 minutes in length, the DVD version of it as issued by the British Film Institute in 2006 times in at about three minutes --- and there isn't time enough to tell the story in any meaningful way unless you know it -- stick with the 1951 version starring Alastair Sim is my advice.

Nonetheless, this movie is interesting, because it may be the earliest use of titles I have ever seen in the movies. Although in coming decades movie titles would expand into dialogue, and the writing of concise and witty titles into a fine art, at this stage, the titles are actually just that: brief chapter titles, describing the scene you are about to see. There are four of them.