This is the ninth in a multi-part article series running from November 1 to December 27. It discusses the themes and meaning of Christmas movies, digs into specific tropes, and unpacks the true nature of Christmas. The first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth essays can be found here.
Few stories have been so regularly reinterpreted and adapted into film as frequently as Charles Dickens’ Victorian-era novella A Christmas Carol (a.k.a. “Carol”).
Wikipedia’s list of adaptations for A Christmas Carol contains no less than 35 cinematic adaptations of the popular Charles Dickens novella between 1901 and 2022. That is almost certainly undercounting, particularly given that it’s been used as the framework for non-Christmas movies like An American Carol and Ghosts of Girlfriend’s Past. Few books in the Western canon are so beloved and regularly revisited and adapted. It’s been adapted to every medium dozens of times and the demand never shrinks. It is reinterpreted over time with changing trends, being seen as children’s literature in one decade or anti-capitalist polemics in another, but it endures. To quote Bart Simpson, following The Simpsons’ parody of the book in the episode “Tis the Fifteenth Season”, “TV writers have been milking that goat for years.”
Of course, it isn’t hard to see why it is popular. Since its publication in 1843, it has been regarded as a gentle and humanistic work of love and human kindness. It sold out its first printing of 6,000 copies almost immediately. Within months, plagiarized copies flooded the streets and eight separate unauthorized stage adaptations were playing in London. It’s never been out of print in the past 18 decades.
It’s also a remarkably ideal center for storytelling in the holiday season. As discussed in the second article, it isn’t focused directly on Christ or the incarnation, but instead on a more general ghost story appealing to secular audiences. It’s deeply illuminating in its exploration of a well-lived life and the importance of charity and kindness. Its values are the modern values of Christmas, with its emphasis on gift-giving and commerce. However, it’s also a story of the numinous, about the quality of life that we feel in the presence of the supernatural. It posits a strong moralist vision with the ferocity of a fire-and-brimstone sermon and yet is still a cozy and welcoming story about the best parts of life.
It has few critics. As scholar Paul Davis writes:
“Most literary critics have neglected the Carol. It is too simple, too popular a work to elicit rigorous explication. Commentators have preferred commendation to close analysis … Although we now see the Carol as a secular book, Victorians in the 1870s read his Christmas story as a retelling of the biblical Christmas story. Scrooge became a 19th-century pilgrim, a modern-day magus seeking the Christ child, while the Cratchits reenact the Holy Family. For later Victorians, the Carol was secular scripture.”
The Process of Adaptation
This leaves the original novella in high demand, constantly receiving new printings and adaptations. These adaptations are rarely similar, adding to or condensing the original story to suit the needs of new mediums. It’s since been cut down to 10 minutes in some cases. On film, most adaptations generally find a sweet spot of around 90 minutes. Given that most audiobooks of Carol run more than three hours, every adaptation of the film is an abridgment, but that’s natural for any adaptation.
The basic structure of every adaptation is readily identifiable. Ebenezer Scrooge is a miserly old man in Victorian England, and on Christmas Eve he’s greeted by his nephew and a local charity who call upon him to embrace the Christmas spirit. He refuses it as “humbug”. That night, he’s visited by three ghosts who show him: his past as an apprentice who loses his fiancée as money becomes his cynical idol, his nephew lamenting his absence and his employee Cratchit’s financial troubles, and a vision of a future where he’s dead and forgotten. Scrooge then awakens on Christmas with a renewed spirit, buys Cratchet a giant turkey, donates to the poor, and Tiny Tim yells “God Bless us, everyone!”
This structure is so popular that it has been burnt into the public consciousness, but what is less recognized is the way details shift around. That structure leaves a lot of room for details. Some adaptations are brisk and abridged, others making radical changes. Some craft entirely original scenes, characters, and dialogue. Others trim the book down to its roots. It leaves plenty of space for visually creative executions, cool special effects for the ghosts, and great leading-man performances. As Davis notes, many adaptations invent scenes of motivations from whole cloth, such as Scrooge visiting the Cratchit family on Christmas Day or renaming Scrooge’s nephew or fiancee. “Although Scrooge appears in every retelling, he is not always the hero.”
The easy temptation for any adaptation of Carol is to lean into its character’s villainy, portraying him not just as miserly but decrepit, hunched, and barely human. It’s easy to craft a simplistic version of this character and jam him through the wringer until he cries, but better versions of the story recognize the novella’s flow, often accomplishing a surprising amount of character growth early on in the ghost visits. Many versions have him all but fully reformed before the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come appears, merely clearing up that his free will changes what happens next rather than scaring him straight. It’s a sign of craft that we empathize with Scrooge early in the story.
It is a testimony to the quality and consistency of Carol adaptations that cinematic giants like Guy Pierce, Jim Carrey, Tim Curry, and Patrick Stewart have all played Scrooge and their performances are comparatively lesser renditions. From Daniel Smith, who starred in the first silent short adaptation in 1901 to Netflix’s 2022 animated rendition starring Luke Evans, actors take Carol seriously and take the time to develop it.
Unfortunately, this has the side effect of no definitive version of the story on film. There are simply too many good versions for a definitive one to stand apart. For the sake of brevity, I’ve chosen ten of the story’s more notable and popular cinematic renditions to compare what sets them apart. They all work from similar bones, but watching them all back to back is remarkable in the sense that you’re never watching the same movie twice. Some are also quite radical and wild. The details jump out at you more when you see each actor grasping such perfect material and making it their own.
1. Scrooge (1935) – Starring Seymour Hicks
The silent era brought half a dozen adaptations of Carol over just a few decades, with most of them being visually impressive short films of various lengths and tones. The first of these came in 1901, with the 1916 silent release being its first feature-length adaptation. Unfortunately, many of these early films have been lost. With the proliferation of sound film, two additional shorts would be filmed in 1923 and 1928, with the first feature-length sound version of Carol released in 1935 from Paramount Pictures.
In the film’s opening images, the first time we see Scrooge in this version is with his back to the camera, standoffishly turning around slowly as he’s confronted by the charity takers. He’s a bitter, short-tempered, joyless curmudgeon. That might sound self-evident, but as we’ll see going forward each actor has a slightly different flavor and temperament for the character. Seymour Hicks plays the role stoically, adapting his prior performance from the 1913 silent version into something less energetic but more grounded.
Visually speaking, the movie makes several interesting cinematic decisions. Scrooge eats dinner alone in a tavern on Christmas Eve while this is cut against his nephew celebrating with an energetic party, showing a clear contrast in the quality of their lives. Marley is depicted without an actor, with Hicks acting against an empty chair. There’s a highly cinematic moment of sailors on a rolling naval vessel celebrating the churning seas on Christmas morning by singing “Hark the Harold” during the Christmas Present segment, and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is indirectly depicted only in expressionistic shadows. Additionally, the movie makes a change to the ending by showing Scrooge joining Cratchit for a Christmas Day church service, visually indicating his growth from the lonely man we see in the early scenes.
2. A Christmas Carol (1938) – Starring Reginald Owen
Just as Hicks played Scrooge stoically, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s adaptation with Owen finds its lead character similarly cold. Owen’s Scrooge is reserved with a cold exterior exuding the excesses of cruelty and villainy. He’s clearly infamous and miserly to those around him, but he’s more stern than bitter. It’s a surface easily cracked when Marley appears, causing him to visibly shake. Seeing him warm up throughout the story is like seeing a stone melt.
Despite being initially released as a B-movie, MGM’s version has endured a long life as one of the more enduring and popular adaptations thanks to frequent revival screenings and television screenings throughout the 1960s to the 1990s.
Owen certainly deserves gratitude for that success, but its most interesting adaptation choice is to change Scrooge’s relationship with his employee Bob Cratchit by having him get fired on Christmas Eve. This immediately makes Cratchit’s performance feel weightier. Gene Lockhart gives what is easily the best Cratchit performance in any film adaptation thanks to the weight he carries scene to scene, having to bury the reality of losing his job from his family over Christmas while still trying to enjoy it and deal with Tiny Tim’s troubles. Given its brisk 69-minute runtime, this results in the Cratchit relationship being the film’s focal point. Fred’s party in the Present Stave is excised and it focuses more heavily on Scrooge’s impact on this one family.
3. Scrooge/A Christmas Carol (1951) – Starring Alastair Sim
If there’s any version of Carol that has earned a status as the best version of the film, there is a case to be made for the Alastair Sim version of the film. It’s easily one of the most expansive and ambitious adaptations of the film, but its success is rooted in its execution. New York Times critic A.O. Scott, who argues this adaptation is the “best of them all,” says the film works through a combination of realism and horror. It’s rooted firmly in reality while still managing to be scary as its character goes through his dark night of the soul.
The film’s greatest strength though is its lead performance by Alastair Sim, who delivers one of the most empathetic renditions of the character on film. He’s a man who believes his own words, and who truly wants “to be left alone.” As novelist Andrew Klavan similarly argues, the performance works because he “doesn’t play Scrooge as a mean man but a man with a philosophy. He plays him as a man who believes he is doing the right thing … He pays his taxes; he pays for systems that pay for the poor. Why should he be giving money to charity? It’s in Dickens to give him good arguments.”
Christmas is a true annoyance to Sim’s Scrooge, but it doesn’t take much for the repressed humanity to pour out of him. His quest for the “golden idol” of money has made him cold and transactional. This is true of the film too, which is far larger, more expansive, and confident than its predecessors. The Owen film wasn’t nearly as cinematic. This version is full of double-exposure shots, more complicated cinematography, and more ambitious special effects. It also breathes better, not afraid to let each scene play out with a more deliberate pace, and still it is only 20 minutes longer than the Owen version.
4. Scrooge (1970) – Starring Albert Finney
Despite being one of the longer adaptions and having more room to unpack the original story, 20th Century Fox’s adaptation feels like one of the most needlessly packed, bloated renditions of the story. This is not to say it is bad, as Roger Ebert’s three-star review of the film rightly said it “works very nicely on its intended level.” The problem is the means of this adaptation. Scrooge is one of many musical adaptations of the novella, and it is constantly cutting between renditions of the original scenes to ham-fisted musical numbers that express the exact emotion of the character at that particular moment without much subtlety.
Finney’s rendition is certainly a major departure from the past several performances, playing Scrooge as a disheveled and grumbling man with poor posture and an outward radiance of negativity. He looks more like Smeagle or the Hunchback of Notre Dame than the stoic and esteemed man of means in prior versions of the film. If that’s not enough, his original songs have lyrics like “I hate people, I loath people,” viewing others as despicable, detestable, diseases, while considering himself an “honest” and “hardworking” man. It’s a rendition that is neither well-spoken nor elegant.
As Marley’s ghost makes clear, it is pity toward Scrooge’s current state that earns him this final chance. He’s so hobbled by life and tragedy that death seems to look down on him. Aside from Scrooge, the film is certainly one of the more energetic and colorful adaptations. Whatever one thinks of the lyrical quality, its characters constantly have goofy ear-to-ear grins on their faces and flood the streets with dancing and spirit.
The movie’s most interesting original aside is Scrooge’s brief descent into hell, falling into Christmas Yet to Come’s grave, where he’s welcomed to a new position to serve as the devil’s assistant in a similar position to Bob Cratchit. By the end, he’s standing taller, speaking clearer, and even dons a Father Christmas costume, and starts dancing and giving away presents around London. It’s hard to disagree with Pauline Kael’s assessment that the film is “innocuous” given all this good feeling and visual creativity, but that just leaves it the definitive version for theater kids.
5. A Christmas Carol (1984 film) – Starring George C. Scott
If there were ever an actor who felt like he ought to be in a Carol adaptation, the great George C. Scott feels like a natural choice. The Academy Award-winning star of Patton had certainly built an image for himself in the prior decade as a great actor with the ability to play gruff masculine characters with harsh exteriors. Naturally, his rendition of Scrooge is practical, stern, and quite happy in his station in life.
One of the film’s earliest scenes is Scrooge disciplining Cratchit for wasting too much coal to heat their office, instead suggesting he rely on warm clothes that don’t cost money to replenish. When the charity takers come, Scott’s Scrooge cackles at the idea of Christmas and sends them away with a smile on his face. He’s not just taking joy in evil, but showing that he’s quite comfortable in his calloused exterior. The film adds details to his backstory, suggesting that his mother died in childbirth and gave his father a grudge against his son, adding to his lack of sentiment towards family.
Amusingly, for an England-produced film so deeply indebted to English stiff upper-Lip-ism, Scott’s Virginian gruffness, which served him so well in Patton, makes him stand out as a rude American in a crowd of proper warm English accents. His fellow actors all have authentic accents, and Scott stands out from the crowd just by speaking. Thankfully, Scott acts a lot with his eyes, showing astonishment or contempt at almost everything. When he visits the Cratchits during the Present Stave, he’s heartwarming enough by the family’s prayer that he prays along too before denying to the ghost that it’s affecting him. “No, I said nothing.” Scott’s ability to speak through his performance gives it a layer of depth that stands out among Scrooges.
6. Scrooged (1988) – Starring Bill Murray
Many more recent films based on Carol take broad liberties or completely rewrite the story in a new context. Bill Murray’s inspired take on the material is one of the most famous examples, completely recasting the story in a modern setting. Murray plays Frank Cross, a self-absorbed, cruel television executive preparing to stage an ambitious live broadcast of A Christmas Carol that will be one of the network’s largest programming events of the year. Struggling with stress, he starts having a mental breakdown and begins seeing the four ghosts from the story haunting him and showing him his own life.
While it’s played as a more or less unironic adaptation of the original story, it’s easily one of the more mean-spirited adaptations of Carol, which feels right for a film by Murray at the height of his career. For good measure, Murray’s real life brothers play the ghosts. It is easily “the best commentary on the soullessness of the television industry since Network,” as film critic Sonny Bunch has written. “Scrooged takes sentimental source material and turns it into a movie that’s not just a comedy but a great one.”
Murray is also an inspired Scrooge, with his detached arrogant affectation being undermined by the film’s satire. As he tells the Ghost of Christmas Past, “I’ve made a few mistakes and I gotta live with them, but I know who I am, I know what I want, and I know what’s going on!” But after the first ghost visit, he tries to reconnect with his old flame only to get rebuked for selfishly trying to abscond her from a charity event. Appropriately, the Ghost of Christmas Present repeatedly punches him in the face and affirms “Sometimes the truth is painful.”
Its plot is executed with the heightened surrealism of a Looney Tunes cartoon, with Murray’s scene chewing performance elevating his greedy and selfish affection into an even larger breakdown on live television that turns into a rambling, incoherent yet sincere speech about the true meaning of Christmas. He’s an appropriately hatable protagonist, which adds weight to this speech where he finally admits that “I was a schmuck.”
7. The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) – Starring Michael Caine
It’s tempting to say that Carol adaptations get more novel and gimmicky over time, but this isn’t necessarily true. The last few decades have delivered sincere adaptations as readily as farcical ones. Patrick Stewart’s unironical Hallmark rendition would be released just a few years after this in 1999. But as the next few entries show, the novel ones certainly make for interesting premises in light of so many prior adaptations.
There is a popular meme online, discussing this film and Muppet Treasure Island, that says “The reason Michael Caine and Tim Curry are so good in their respective Muppet movies is that Michael Caine treats the Muppets as fellow actors and Tim Curry treats himself as a fellow Muppet.” This is a bit reductionistic, but broadly I don’t disagree. Caine is an actor who has sold out plenty of times in his career, famously saying he took a role in Jaws: The Revenge because it paid for his mother’s house, but he is also a consummate professional who shows up to play. His role here is no different.
Little introduction is likely necessary for this entry, given that its gimmick is worn on its sleeve. It’s a full musical version of the original novella but reenacted with the cast of The Muppets. In that regard, it’s a wonderful display of the strength of such a concept. To paraphrase film critic Bob Chipman, the Muppets exist to put a clown nose on reality. They’re a joyful lot, but they’ve also got a deep heart and an ability to tell sincere stories. Their 1990s adaptations of this and Treasure Island are both excellent adaptations of the stories in their own right that are nonetheless goofy light-hearted self-parodies.
The heart of Dickens’ story remains fully intact, while the Muppets all play Greek Chorus with original musical numbers and metacommentary on the story—mostly in the form of Gonzo and Rizzo as narrators bickering and losing the plot. Naturally, Kermit the Frog plays Bob Cratchit to great effect as the film’s most tender and sincere character. The film’s foundation though remains rooted in Caine’s stern rendition of the character. The Toronto Star critic Norman Wilner put it well, saying, “Caine, who has always been able to fully become the characters he plays, delivers an unexpectedly strong performance as a human being who plays every scene with hand puppets.”
8. Disney’s A Christmas Carol (2009) – Starring Jim Carrey
Little can be said about Robert Zemeckis’ animated rendition of Carol, nor its performance by comedy legend Jim Carrey, without first addressing its execution. As the last of his three motion-captured blockbusters, this was the safest of the trilogy comprised of The Polar Express and Beowulf. Having seen prior financial success using his ambitious motion-capture technology on a Christmas movie, he sold his final such film to Disney as a big-budget animated version of one of the most popular Christmas stories of all time. Despite this, it grossed only $325.3 million on a $200 million budget, becoming regarded as a mild box office failure and a severe critical failure.
Even as the most visually textured and detailed of the three, its motion capture is still a challenge to get over. The motion capture artists are overly expressionistic, flailing their arms in every direction with unrealistic movements. Its animation mostly yields opportunities for visual creativity, sweeping cameras, and a unique approach to the three ghosts. Unfortunately, the dialogue-heavy script also means there’s less camera movement to hide the worst parts of the animation, with character’s faces looking stiff and dead-eyed. Jim Carrey, Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Bob Hoskins, and Robin Wright are all on hand, but their performances are unrecognizable under the animation.
Thankfully, its unique style does yield several visually exciting setpieces. The image of Christmas Present’s bottomless house flying across London, shuttering with impacts against the crowded buildings as the ghost laughs joyously, comes to mind as one of the most visually interesting ways that the Present stave has been presented in any adaptation. Unfortunately, the film also feels the need to add action to the story and uses the Yet to Come stave to add a pointless chase scene between a shrunken Scrooge and the ghost across the streets and rooftops of London. It’s all so tiresome, especially when the film’s most interesting scenes are its subtle ones—such as a prologue where Scrooge steals a coin off Marley’s corpse to pay for his burial.
9. The Man Who Invented Christmas (2017) – Starring Dan Stevens and Christopher Plummer
Recent adaptations have certainly been willing to play heavily with the tone and premise of Carol, such as Guy Pearce’s incredibly bleak dark fantasy miniseries adaptation or Scrooge & Marley, which adapts the story in modern times with LGBT characters. Scrooged certainly played with the story’s premise as well, but these final two entries completely deconstructed Carol to tell different stories.
The Man Who Invented Christmas can hardly be said to be a strict adaptation of the novella. It’s a biographical drama about the book’s creation, dramatizing a fictionalized version of history where we see Dan Stevens as Charles Dickens working through writer’s block and attempting to write and illustrate the story in less than a month to help him avoid debtor’s prison. While it’s accurate in broad strokes, the film’s strict historical accuracy is evidently lacking and takes a great deal of dramatic license.
The film is effectively an exploration of the way Dickens’ autobiographical details inspired the book, showing his past as a child laborer in London, his poor relationship with his father, his unstable mental state, and the supposed real-life figures who inspired characters in the book. The film also dramatically reenacts key scenes from the novella, with Christopher Plummer on hand to play Scrooge. Much of this just exists to give Dickens a creative muse to bounce off of, allowing him to explain his logic and creative process directly to the characters he’s putting through the wringer.
Unfortunately, this ends up being a rather saccharine and Freudian way to explore the process of writing a book, as though all details in any book have to have a one-to-one real-life counterpart. This is a trope with other recent literature biographies like Tolkien and Goodbye Christopher Robin and it’s not generally the most creative way to dig into a complicated author’s motivations. That said, it does offer the chance to consider a potential alternative ending to the book that goes full tragedy and lets Scrooge die at his author’s hands, which wouldn’t make for a much worse book.
10. Spirited (2022) – Starring Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell
Considering how many adaptations of Carol go for sincere retellings or change a few scenes and tone for the sake of being experimental, it’s unusual to see a film effectively try to be a deconstructionist sequel musical to its source material. AppleTV+’s Spirited is still relatively new and unknown, but it is a bizarrely ambitious attempt to explore the ideas in Dickens through a high-concept musical comedy starring two of the biggest stars in Hollywood. In any case, it proves to be the most bizarre riff on Carol I’ve thus far seen.
Spirited’s story is told from the perspective of the three ghosts, who we learn are actually part of a larger unnamed organization in the afterlife that works to redeem one soul every year and create enough ripples to improve the world. Their program effectively “Scrooges” a new person every year with the hope that it has a major impact. Unfortunately, recent years have picked small fries—bad neighbors and crappy managers—and haven’t made much of an impact on the modern world.
The Ghost of Christmas Present, feeling despondent and ready to retire, finds a new drive when he discovers an “unredeemable” soul named Clint Briggs, a cynical media consultant who dogmatically believes that people don’t change and that human nature is predictable. As Present says after attending one of his speeches, he’s “so persuasive, almost makes you want to throw an old lady down a flight of stairs!”
The organization is initially unwilling to take him on, but Present forces their hand. Unfortunately, Clint’s belief seems to prove true as his evil is resilient enough to make the ghosts ineffective. Marley can’t handle his sarcasm and gives up trying to warn him, while Christmas Past ends up sleeping with him and calling HR to make sure she doesn’t get in trouble. Present ends up having to reveal his true identity—that he was the actual Scrooge and a fellow unredeemable—to connect with Clint, hoping that he can prove him wrong and defend his own change of heart.
As a meta deconstruction of the novella, Spirited is heavily invested in unpacking the original story’s themes in light of modernity. The world of the internet, politics, and virality has given humanity more opportunities to do evil. Clint profits off of trolling and gossip. He’s also aware of the original story and constantly calls out cliches when he sees them. Thankfully, the movie ultimately comes around to the novella’s side to show that change is possible. But given that Reynolds is giving one of his infamous Deadpool-lite self-aware performances, the path to redemption proves to be a long one that he fails several times before finally getting right. Spirited is a bizarre movie, and its musical numbers will make it a hard watch for many audiences, but it is also weirdly impressive and thoughtful despite its contrivances and cliches.
It’s a thoroughly mixed bag from any sincere critical analysis, but it’s also wildly ambitious and works hard to entertain. And given that it manages to come around to a good Christmas lesson, it certainly affirms its place as a curiosity for Dickens fans.