1935 British Version of SCROOGE Screening Thursday and Friday Nights at Webster University

“My spirit never walked beyond the limits of our moneychanging hole. so I cannot rest; I cannot stay; I cannot linger – anywhere.”

The 1935 version of SCROOGE screens this Thursday and Friday (December 22nd and 23rd) evenings at Webster University’s Moore Auditorium (470 East Lockwood). The feature will be preceded by two animated shorts: Somewhere in Dreamland  (1936 – 9 min.) and Christmas Comes But once a Year (1936 – 9 min.). The program starts at 7:30 both evenings. This is a FREE event.

In this straightforward adaptation of Charles Dickens’ novella “A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost-Story of Christmas,” Ebenezer Scrooge (Sir Seymour Hicks) is the ultimate miser and cannot stomach Christmas or holiday cheer.  His impoverished clerk Bob Cratchit (Donald Calthrop) and nephew Fred (Robert Cochran) are full of holiday spirit. But in the night, visits by three spirits leave a lasting impression on Scrooge.

While not as well-known as other versions of the Dickens classic (Owen, Sim, Magoo, Scott), the 1935 British film of “A Christmas Carol” is almost in their league. Among other things, it preserves, in sound, the performance of one of the legendary Scrooges of the English stage, Sir Seymour Hicks, who definitely does not disappoint. In the beginning, his Scrooge is one of the nastiest ever seen on film, his appearance that of something that crawled out from under a rock. But it is precisely these qualities that make his gradual transformation all the more affecting. At the beginning, we loathe the man, at the end, we rejoice with him at his redemption.