In previous columns derived from postcards in my “Vacation” file, we have considered the early days of the camper and the way cartoonists saw American automobiles moving from squarish to rounded to squarish again. I have a few postcards left in this stack and noticed a separate phenomenon which the cartoonists can help us meander through. I refer to the prevalence on postcards of the roadster.
“Roadster” is a type of automobile which the dictionaries and car lovers have been very definite about, though it is a word few people use nowadays. (The party was over when they updated the Nancy Drew books so she no longer drove one.) It is an open-top conveyance of “sporting appearance or character” which is designed to hold, at most, three people (two is more comfortable.) Roadsters (sometimes known as runabouts, spiders, or city cars) differs from other sportscars in its complete lack of a roof, which may explain why you don’t see a whole lot of them offered to the general public today.
It also differed from modern sportscars in that some models were available at a low price to people who wanted to drive only when the weather was good or just for errands around town (this was a long time ago, when wheels were not essential to adulthood.) A small car with a reputation for joyrides and party excursions, it could be made even smaller for the purposes of the cartoonist.
The roadster was a godsend to cartoonists anyhow: it was compact, and didn’t take up space the postcard could use for other things.
For many, the roadster was the vehicle for singles, people who were carefree and without a lot of emotional baggage to be loaded in the vehicle along with groceries or family members.
It was the perfect vehicle for someone who just hankered after a nice, long road trip, or someone who was pulling up stakes and headed for whatever life offered somewhere down the road.
The roadster was also perfect for those quick trips by the young and the reckless.
The freedom to climb into a car with one other person and set off with the breeze in your face made a driver feel affluent and care-free.
There are plenty of postcards featuring traffic jams, but you hardly ever see roadsters on these: THOSE drivers have roofs over their heads and troubles on their mind. Traveling light and free was a part of the American dream.
Motels were clean and frequent along the dream road, and postcards were available all along the way so that the roadster lovers could make progress reports along the way.
Some cartoonists were willing to hint that even in a road trip, that dream could be hard to realize.
And even in a roadster, certain necessities could make your road rougher.
Reality and the roadster, however, were not an ideal match, As the occasional cartoonist pointed out.
When I was poking through my inventory of vacation-related postcards in quest of a subject for this column (and deciding I will not write about vacations as long as I am still wearing my winter coat when I venture outside) I noticed that every cartoonist has a personal way of drawing cars. Cars have been essential to vacation cartoons at least since the late nineteen-teens, which is about when the observation on tourists at the top of this blog was published.
It was obvious at the outset that some cartoonists really love drawing cars, and put a lot of thought and detail into their vehicle work, while others, while okay at car-drawing, would just as soon concentrate on something else. This can also be reflected in the kind of car that appears in the picture. Some artists wanted to stay as up-to-date in car design as possible, as this would appeal to the modern eye, while others went for their favorite jalopy as long as it was plausible.
This vacationer, for example, is having his hot time somewhere in the late 1930s or thereabouts, but this model of car was on its last legs, at least as far as new cars were concerned. In the world of used cars, this square-nosed model with running boards and fold-down top would stick around for a generation, As Jack Benny fearlessly drove his Maxwell into the Sputnik age, and Archie drove his pals around in one at least until the Reagan administration.
Other cartoonists, however, quickly adapted the more streamlined look. Note that the bumpers, fenders, and grille are far less square and tend toward the Art Deco or Airflow ideal. (The joke dates to horseless buggy days, of course.)
This is a more intermediate design. It’s a visual cue similar to that used by Archie or, say, The Beverly Hillbillies. The square, open auto helped emphasize how much you were piling in: the squarer design just implied weight and bulk.
Round, though, was the wave of the future. Something smooth and efficient could be just as much fun to draw, and could look just as anthropomorphic as that jalopy we saw smoking earlier.
Even the larger models could be drawn to imply speed and elegance.
Especially speed.
Artists who wanted to imply something else could slip in a few features of bygone models to suggest obsolescence.
Those smooth, elegant lines could be made more angular to suggest long, hard wear.
World War II interrupted to some degree. Some people drove their rattling Model Ts for a few more years while those who had the sleek automobiles enjoyed their speed and elegance where possible. (Note that this couple rides on the rims, the actual tires being stacked on top so as not to wear them out on the long vacation trip.)
After the war, of course, that old streamlined look seemed too decade-specific. Car designers started to look at the straight line again, breaking up the curves, prompted, according to some critics, by the resemblance of 1930s automobiles to helmets, which were an unpleasant reminder. At the same time, the postcard was moving into its last days as a major tool of cartoon humor
It wasn’t that people stopped piling things into and on top of the car for a vacation; they were just more likely to buy a card that showed where they’d been instead of how they got there. Pity, really, as they were driving into the era of the Volkswagen Beetle, surely the most cartooned vehicle since the Model T. I’m not sure that’s what this cartoonist had in mind but it sure isn’t a Corvette.
Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.
External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm him, nor wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn’t know where to have him, the heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect. They often “came down” handsomely, and Scrooge never did.
Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, “My dear Scrooge, how are you? When will you come to see me?” No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o’clock, no man or woman once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge. Even the blindmen’s dogs seemed to know him; and when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and then would wag their tails as though they said, “no eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!”
But what did Scrooge care? It was the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded walks of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance, was what the knowing call “nuts” to Scrooge.
So what does this fellow look like? Old features, frosty hair, wiry chin, pointed nose, red eyes, shriveled cheek: that’s about the extent of what Dickens gives us. When he performed the Carol himself,, he lopped most of the description away, concentrating on the clutching, covetous old sinner, cold and solitary. John Leech’s illustrations to that first edition give us a thin, pointy-nosed Scrooge but little more, as Ebenezer spends most of the story in his cap and nightclothes.
Insofar AS THERE IS A Standard Screen Scrooge, he is a tall, thin, cheaply-dressed man, balding, with a fringe of white around a high dome, and a beaky nose. There are exceptions. Magoo, McDuck, and Sim II, for example, are fairly short Scrooges, while Hicks, march, Magoo, Matthau, and especially Scott are fairly well-fed.
A beaky nose is more consistent, though how this translated into march’s eerie paste-on is hard to figure. Matthau has a round, rosy nose Rankin-Bass characters all lean toward round and rosy) while Magoo’s nose is bulbous and Hicks’s is snub. The fringe of white or grey hair is similarly customary, though a few Scrooges are totally bald (McDuck LOOKS bald, though technically I suppose that’s a dome of white feathers.) One or two have full heads of hair, particularly Finney with his fright wig.
As to clothing, some seem not to have bought anything new in the reign of the current monarch. But Sim I, Magoo, Matthau, Curry, and Scott are well turned out. (Hicks’s 1916 silent version does not come into this discourse, but take a look at it some time: he doesn’t even seem to have bathed for a generation.) Stewart and Caine should be described as soberly clad: most Scrooges tend toward basic black, but these two overdo it, rather.
Hicks has flying, wispy white hair, and a roundish face less Scroogelike than that of Donald Calthrop, his Cratchit. We open this version looking at his back; even this is cold and unyielding.
Owen is one of the oldest-looking Scrooges. He has bushy eyebrows and a tuft of hair at the crown of his domed head, and is pretty obviously a man trying to look thirty years older than he actually is. MGM did not make its reputation underplaying things.
Sim I has sunken eyes (not really red, even in the colorized versions), a deep scowl, a pointed nose, and the requisite fringe of white hair. On his way to his counting house from the London Exchange, he demonstrates his personality by declaring to a couple of his colleagues that he does not celebrate Christmas. To one man’s pleasantry about the Ant and the Grasshopper, he declares that an ant is what it is and a grasshopper is what it is, and Christmas, sir, is a humbug. If we have missed the point, once outside he rebuffs a man’s entreaty for an extension on a loan by declaring that neither Christmas nor the man’s wife’s health have anything to do with the matter. He continues by not only threatening the carolers at his door but actually pushing a small girl out of the way. Merry old chap.
As with Hicks, we see march’s back first; he does not turn until he is telling the Charity Solicitors “Nothing”. When we do see him, he is the very picture of the self-made Yankee businessman, with no attempt at a British accent. (He was apparently meant as a screen representation of Lionel Barrymore’s radio Scrooge.) Nearly as well-fed as George C. Scott, he displays a bald dome with a wild fringe, and a weird paste-on proboscis. Growling, grumbling, snapping, he has a surly reaction to just about everything, showing himself to be a strong man of violent moods.
Rathbone works away as the narrator tells us that Jacob Marley was a tight-fisted man in his day, but Scrooge is worse: a grasping, clutching, covetous, and so forth. Scrooge looks like the aged Franz Liszt, with a cascade of silky white hair, and garments of solid black. His face is a cold-chiseled scowl.
Mr. Magoo squints and gloats over his money, commenting that the only thing to be said for the holiday season is that people feel obliged to pay their debts. (Most Scrooges complain of precisely the opposite.) He seems to enjoy life as a miser, and is drawn in warm colors.
Haddrick has a fringe of grey hair round his dome, and the required pointed nose. He is tall, and goes in for retro fashion: he wears knee breeches with a stripe down the side. On his way from Marley’s gravesite to the office, he scowls at people, scattering bahs and humbugs freely on every side, and jostling women as he passes. Reaching his door he chases the carolers away, and we know just what sort of man we’re hanging around with.
In Sim II, the narrator prepares us by explaining Scrooge is an exception to the rule of good will to all men, and we move to a scene of a man hunched over a counting table. (This is another Carol icon; you MUST show Scrooge, or Cratchit, or both, huddled over a counting table.) he is an old man, bent of shoulder and thin of limb, with pointed nose and chin, high cheekbones, pinched face, and imposing dark eyebrows. His head is high and bare, with a fringe of hair at ear level. His face is stern, and he squints at his account books.
Finney begins by being affronted by the presence of carolers at his door. His Scrooge is a man of hot temperament for someone so cold, and also one of our younger Scrooges. His red hair is stringy and comes to his shoulders, but he is getting thin on top. His jaw is thuglike, his cheekbones hard and high, and he is the most hunched of Scrooges. Someone was thinking of Mr. Hyde and/or Richard III when he was constructed. He doggedly counts money when first we see him, and he is wonderfully Scroogy when, deciding to shake a fire iron at the nuisances singing at his door, he pauses to cover the money with a drawer before leaving the desk.
Matthau is a well set up, well-dressed rich man with a large head and bald pate. We find him playing with money at his desk and frowning upon children building a snowman outside his window.
McDuck rebuffs a beggar and reminisces fondly about his late partner as “a good ‘;un; he robbed from the widows and swindled the poor.” Since Scrooge McDuck began life as a comic book character based on Ebenezer Scrooge, he looks like what anybody would think Ebenezer Scrooge looked like…if Ebenezer happened to be a duck. (More than one commentator has admired his habit of wearing spats on shoeless webbed feet.)
George C. Scott is the biggest and most muscular of all Scrooges. His face is not exactly pinched; amazing whiskers bristle at the sides of it. He moves with confidence and purpose, almost too alive to be the cold, solitary miser Dickens describes.
Caine appears first in shadow, his face concealed until the crowd has finished singing “Mr. Humbug”, a musical elaboration of Dickens’s description, with interjections from passersby or our narrator, the purple Charles Dickens. When he finally turns, we find a young and stone-faced Ebenezer, with hair that seems to be working its way to grey from red. He is not only a moneylender but a slumlord; we have a quick scene with Mr. Applegate, who is behind on his mortgage payments and ends by being hurled bodily from the office by Scrooge. We’re pretty sure where we stand at this point.
Curry’s Scrooge is well-dressed, for a Scrooge, with striped trousers and gold watch chain. He also owns a dog, which at first seems unScroogelike. This dog, Debit, is unpleasant, threatening, and as suspicious as his master; he’d be a very Scrooge of a canine were he not such a roly-poly bulldog. Scrooge himself demonstrates his coldness by scowling at merrymakers outside his window through the opening music, and eventually hurls a handful of coal at a small boy, following this, as mentioned, by sending Cratchit out to fetch the coal back. Lovely fellow.
Stewart bears a resemblance to the animated Sim II, without the fringe. This is a cold limestone face, perhaps carved by Egyptian sculptors in a hieroglyphic Christmas Carol. He is as warm and cuddly as a recently unwrapped mummy, at that.
Scrooges must be designed with some care, as they will be on view through the majority of the picture. A Scrooge who is too unpleasant will grate on the nerves early in the production; a softie won’t support the story at all. (And go easy on the make-up, huh?)
FUSS FUSS FUSS #2: How Old is Ebenezer Scrooge?
Dickens is not a lot of help here. Scrooge’s hair is frosted, but whether he is grizzled or has gone completely white is left up to us. His younger sister does have a son old enough to be married. And he must be at least as old as Jacob Marley; Marley’s ghost will note that Scrooge’s chain was as long and heavy as his, seven years ago, making them contemporaries. (For what it’s worth, the name of the firm is Scrooge and Marley, suggesting the possibility that Scrooge is older than his partner.) Anyway, as we have no real idea how old Jacob Marley was, this isn’t much help.
Here are some vague estimates of how old the Scrooge in each production is supposed to look.
45-50: Caine
50-55: Finney, McDuck, Stewart
55-60: Sim I, Haddrick
60-65: Hicks, march, Magoo, Matthau, Scott, Curry
65 plus: Owen, Rathbone, Sim II
Just for the sake of comparison, here are the (more or less) actual ages of the actors playing Scrooge at the time their version was released.
40-45: Haddrick (40), Finney (43)
45-50: Magoo (Jim Backus)
50-55: Owen, Sim I, Curry (all 51)
55-60: March (57), Scott (57), Matthau (58), Caine (59), Stewart (59)
I went riffling through my postcards in search of inspiration for today’s column. The first thing that occurred to me was that riffling counts as wear and tear, and probably lowers the value of the postcards involved. Like a lot of people, I understand the risks of my bad habits; it’s just that I really enjoy riffling. Unlike a lot of people, however, I decline to become the inventor of a 39-step Stop Riffling Program, or a website which explores the psychological causes of riffling in an effort to make you understand why you riffle, and suggesting therapeutic methods of breaking your riffle addiction. Riffling may be one of the few vices which does not already have an as-seen-on-tv product to make you quit, like a menthol-infused postcard mitten which slides on easily and is available for only…where were we?
Anyhow, as I riffled through my Vacation postcards, wondering if it’s too early to consider a blog on that subject (Sixty degrees yesterday, snow possible on Monday) I noticed a goodly number dealing with the craze for hitching a camper onto the back of your car and going out to enjoy the wider world, like the people at the top there, who are ecstatic about their freedom. What struck me was that itty-bitty bedroom hitched to their roadster. Looks like they’d have almost as much room to sleep in their car.
The history of heading out on the road for a vacation goes back at least to the nineteenth century. People had been doing a lot of camping before this, but the idea of doing it on purpose, for fun, had to wait for people in the big cities to figure they could afford a change. Even then, the craze could not become general until the automobile was a common item. There WERE horse-drawn campers, and you COULD pack a tent and other supplies and just take the train, but the ideal of a road trip with a portable bedroom and/or kitchen came to us attached to the horseless carriage.
There are other places where you can check on the history of the car-turned-vacation home, from the tinkerers who built new backs on their ever-modifiable Model T through campers nicknamed the Teardrop, the Silver Bullet, or the Canned Ham. What we are going to look over is what the cartoonist at mid-century THOUGHT about camping and campers. These chaps liked their pictures to be reality-adjacent, but the joke took precedence.
One thing you’ll see right away is that the average camper was teeny. I’m not sure the twin bed sized model on the right here actually existed, but the cartoonist pointed out that living in a space which your car could haul necessitated living in close quarters, not to mention remembering not to stand up straight.
It also required you to do some things the old-fashioned way. They did not come equipped with washers or driers, for example.
Speaking of old-fashioned ways, almost none included toilets, either.
There WERE larger models. The bus had been invented, after all, and some people just closed off the windows and lived larger. For the cartoonist, the larger trailer was a necessity simply to allow for broader humor.
Some people went in for a double hitch, allowing even more comforts of home. (Note that our cartoonist seems to have been afraid you wouldn’t know what the wooden shed out back was there for.)
With Dr. Seuss and Rube Goldberg as examples, cartoonists could propose ever more luxurious arrangements. It’s all about comfort. (Do not try this at home. I’m sure the authorities will require you to provide seatbelts for your cattle.)
But the whole principle of camping being reverting to the simple life, other cartoonists suggested you limit yourself to the necessities.
I regard the coming of spring or fall as similar to getting over a bad cold. There’s no great trumpet-blared moment marking the border between the extreme and the moderate seasons; you just realize one day that you don’t notice those old symptoms any more, and haven’t for a while and, by golly, you must have finished and moved on.
They’re telling me it’s spring, but I am withholding judgement for now. There have been numerous springlike days over the past four or five weeks, followed by falls of snow or “better get my hat on” winds. This is no reason not to observe the date, however, and therefore, I have decided to move into spring by studying umbrellas on postcards. Rain and umbrellas seem a natural part of spring in my region of the world, even though in this particular region, the easiest way to understand spring has come is to observe how many blow-n-part umbrellas have been jammed into trash cans along the street.
On postcards, as in popular music, rain is generally seen as a bad thing. For every “Kiss Me in the Rain” or “You and Me and Rain on the roof”, there are a dozen “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head” and “Don’t Let the Rain Come Down.” Childhood strains of “Rain, Rain, Go Away” echo through music and postcard reflections. Hence, of course, the umbrellas.
And yet, our postcard artists also like to point out that rain gives an excuse for umbrellas, and umbrellas give excuses for two unmarried people to huddle under an umbrella, as seen above. I suppose I should not have included a sun umbrella in this discussion, as we all know It Never Rains in Southern California. (Though we DO know about the rain down in Africa, and that the rain in Spain stays mainly…okay, I’ll stop now.)
Even leaving out sun umbrellas and parasols, though, there is considerable evidence that our ancestors regarded the umbrella as a convenient excuse…even without bad weather.
If you get an umbrella that’s big enough, in fact, you may not notice the weather at all.
I don’t see a whole lot of rain here, either. They may be from my part of the world, and know that just because it’s not raining now is no guide to what the weather may be in five minutes.
I suppose love is the real culprit. This couple are beyond even seeing whether it’s raining or snowing or ooblecking.
Rain and an umbrella are generally a reliable indicator of the status of a relationship.
Though the result of April showers ain’t always May flowers.
I wonder why no one’s written a song yet about “I’ve got the umbrella and I’ve got the rain; now all I need is you.” Dibs.
Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it; and Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile, and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did. How could it be otherwise? Scrooge and he were partners for I don’t know how many years. Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend and sole mourner. And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnised it with an undoubted bargain.
The mention of Marley’s funeral brings me back to the point I started from. There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet’s father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot—say St. Paul’s churchyard for instance—literally to astonish his son’s weak mind.
Scrooge never painted out old Marley’s name. There it stood, years afterwards, above the warehouse door; Scrooge and Marley. The firm was known as Scrooge and Marley. Sometimes people new to the business called Scrooge Scrooge and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names; it was all the same to him.
So how would you start a ghost story? Dickens certainly works to let us know what we’re in for. The subtitle of the book calls it a ghost story, the title of the first chapter is “Marley’s Ghost”, and the first sentence lets us know Marley is dead. To fix this all in our heads, he works in that quibble about door-nails. (This is how you can tell at a glance whether you are reading an abridged “Christmas Carol”; if the extended bit about door-nails is missing, put the book right back where you picked it up and slowly back away.)
This is all very well for prose, but cinema can do only so much with it. Then too, a movie has to have some place to plunk in the opening credits, the establishing opening shots, the hit theme song for the soundtrack album, and so forth. At the very least, we need to see pictures which explain that this is winter, in London, long years ago, and that Marley is dead, to begin with. We may or may not feel a need to mention door-nails.
Virtually all Carols agree on a proper opening: song or not, narrator or not, we simply must open with an overhead shot in which we gracefully float over the rooftops to a smattering of music and a scattering of snow. Smoking chimneys serve to give us a hint about the era as we descend to ground level and discover the passersby are clad in solidly Victorian costume. Gaslights are often a great help.
Narrators explain things to us in Sim I, even mentioning door-nails, while Scott’s narrator speaks over Marley’s funeral procession, giving us a two-sentence version of Dickens’s opening, reinforced some time later by Bob Cratchit’s remark about Mr. Marley dying “seven years ago today.” Rathbone has Frederic March read to us, explaining about the door-nail, and allowing the camera to move from a portrait of Jacob Marley to Scrooge at his desk. Matthau’s insect narrator-cum-Greek-chorus (B.A.H. Humbug is his name) shows us the briefest glimpse of Marley’s Ghost and tells us about the reformed Scrooge before starting the story he has just spiled for us with “Marley was dead; to begin with.” Caine presents as narrator no less than Charles Dickens himself (Gonzo the Great), who establishes the scene for us with the help of Rizzo the Rat. In a scene somewhat later, Dickens will explain that we must understand Marley is dead “or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am about to relate.”
Sometimes the filmmaker prefers to do without a narrator, instead touching on the above details briefly in passing. These folks probably assumed we saw the title and already know pretty much when and where we are. All we need now is a brief consideration of Jacob Marley. The first time we see Quincy Magoo as Scrooge, he is in an office where hangs a portrait of his partner; at one point, he pauses in counting his money to cackle “Wouldn’t old Jacob Marley have been proud!” McDuck, whom we watch trudge through snow to work, looks up at his shop sign (on which Marley’s name has been crossed out) to note that old Jacob is “dead seven years today.” We learn that this particular Scrooge made the undoubted bargain Dickens speaks of by saving the money Jacob left for a tombstone by having him buried at seas.
Some versions bother with none of this. After all, when the Charity Solicitors arrive later, Scrooge will state categorically that Marley is dead. Hicks, for example, opens with the text of Dickens’s preface (look it up) and then takes us through London to the counting house. Owen has a simple title announcing that the scene is “more than a century ago.” March, Finney, and Curry show us London in winter, and hurry on to Scrooge’s first collision with the holiday. Sim II, after showing us the lettering of the title page of the first edition of the book, has Michael Redgrave tell us the time and place, whisking us to Scrooge’s without so much as a mention of anyone named Marley.
On the other hand, two versions have us make our way to Marley’s interment. After a preview of Marley’s Ghost and a few scenes of London at Christmas, Haddrick shows us Scrooge walking to work past the graveyard. From the road, he spots Jacob’s tombstone, and thinks back to memory of Marley’s exceedingly cheap last rites. Marley being dead, the Scrooge of seven years past explains, there is no need to spend much on him. He ends by offering the gravedigger such an insultingly small amount that the man dashes it to the ground. Scrooge picks it up, of course. (The day is rather warm for Christmas; the gravedigger’s coat is off and his sleeves are rolled up.) A voiceover explains that such hard bargains “is” Scrooge’s stock in trade, and that he has become colder and harder as time has passed.
Stewart has the most elaborate version, taking us through the burial and aftermath. We see the plaque on the coffin lid, which reads “Jacob Marley, 1784-1836.” Snow falls. Scrooge seems to be in the grip of strong emotion, but keeps a tight rein on himself. He discusses door-nails with another mourner, but here the quibble changes. The other mourner wonders why a door-nail should be any deader than a doorbell or a door-knocker. Scrooge, impatient, snaps “Nail, nob, or knocker, Jacob’s dead, and there’s an end to it.” (Nice touch, involving the doorknocker. Comes into the story later.) The clergyman in attendance remarks that the scanty turnout for the death of an important businessman can probably be attributed to what day it is; Scrooge seems to be unaware that today is Christmas. When he is alone, Scrooge waxes nostalgic, recalling the partners’ struggle to establish the business, eventually prospering on the “idleness of others”. He walks back to work through the snow, ignoring revelers and being greated at the counting house by Bob Cratchit. Seven years pass, shown by the rusting of the shop sign; later, Bob Cratchit inquires whether Mr. Scrooge will be painting out Mr. Marley’s name from the sign, after seven years. Scrooge notes that “Time will erase it at no cost to us.”
However we get there, we have arrived at the counting house, and can consider its CEO.
FUSS FUSS FUSS #1: When is This?
Our story takes place in 1843, sorta. Dickes states this nowhere—why date a story so definitely when you want it to sell every year?—and if you want to get technical about it, Christmas fell on a Monday in 1843, making it very unlikely that Bob Cratchit would have been in the office on Christmas Eve.
Anyhow, Hicks, Sim II, and Stewart, among others, come right out and tell us this is 1843. Other versions yearn to set it later, among the Late Victorians, people we are more familiar with, whom we can see it photo albums handed down by our great-great-grandparents. Finney, for example, sets the story in 1860, while Caine and Curry take us to some Christmas in the 1890s. (One can try to date a Carol by the costumes; the quickest way, however, is to wait until the Ghost of Christmas Present mentions how many of his older brother have preceded him.)
Owen, however, takes us in the other direction, with a title telling us the story takes place “over a century ago”, though the movie appeared in 1938. Haddrick doesn’t make it easy to date his version, but it probably runs the same direction as Owen. A grocer/poulterer we pass on the way to the counting house tells his customers that the turkey he’s holding would “feed Good King George and his whole court.” This places the story either before the death of George IV in 1830 or after the accession of George V in 1910. (One usually associates slips like this to American writers, but Haddrick’s version is Australian.)
It has been suggested to me that, for a column about postcards which show dogs doing other things than urinating, there were way too many references to dogs peeing. I am sensitive to the comments of my readers, so I feel I need to show you a few of the postcards in my inventory which deal with dogs not peeing.
Folk studies have considered the dog very seriously, for our species has coexisted with the dog for millennia without ever quite making up its mind. Our loyal companion bears a name which for years was a nasty thing to call somebody. To this day societies for the adoration of dogs coexist with those who feel we need to improve by planet by eliminating all those mangy canines. With so many contradictions, it should not be surprising that the number of postcards dealing with dogs peeing should exist alongside those which deal with not peeing.
Mind you, we have no real details about what they think of our own methods of dealing with the problem, as seen at the top of this column.
:Let us deal first with the three hundred pound doodle on the couch. Any cartoonist who could draw a hydrant and a dog (and some who couldn’t) dealt with this notion.
In a fine old joke which didn’t make it into our joke quizzes, an eager cub reporter runs into the editor’s office yelling “Boss, boss! Big news!” The editor, tired of enthusiastic kids, grunts, “What? Man bites dog?” “No!” says the rookie, “But a fire hydrant sprayed one!”
Sometimes unfeeling humans set up barricades to a dog’s natural instincts.
What on earth is a dog to do in the face of such overt gentrification?
In truth, of course, most dogs will not have much of a problem with this little human folly.
When a dog has its eyes on a target, human ingenuity can only go so far in thwarting the process. (By the way, no one who has not walked a dog has any notion of how many muscles the smallest dog can develop when the right tree or signpost is involved. That yellow triangle that says “YIELD” is just advising the dog walker on the quickest solution.)
I mentioned the relationship of dogs and trees in postcards. Look closely here and you’ll notice the trees seem happy to see the visitor. (The hydrant is reserving comment.)
The theme is so prevalent in postcards that a dog being squirted by a hydrant just barely beats out the spectacle of a tree astonished to see a dog walk right past.
Although sometimes the dog has a reasonable explanation.
I hope this little essay about dogs not peeing has satisfied my readers. I find my supply of postcards on the subject has, for the moment, run dry.
Some time ago, we examined postcards featuring dogs and found that the number one thing our canine friends do in comic postcards is, well, number one. The number of postcards involving peeing pekes and poodles was so vast that there was an equal and opposite number of postcards featuring dogs who weren’t urinating just when you expected them to. (The whole series of dialogues between trees and passing pooches is worthy of a blog on its own.)
In all fairness, then, it should be noted that postcard dogs had pother themes. For example, as seen in the exceedingly weird card above, dogs could fetch. (Personally, I think she should throw that catch back: too small.)
But for sheer number of postcards, probably the second largest theme is the relationship between the dog and the flea. Dogs and fleas just went together in the cartoon world.
Although we get to see a lot of different dogs dealing with the problem, though, we do not get quite the same variety of gags.
Of course, if you can draw a cute enough puppy, the presence of the joke does not distract from the postcard.
For every person who bought a postcard because they liked the caption, there were ten who would write “Doesn’t this look JUST like old Truver after a long walk?”
You did see other jokes involving dogs at their second most popular pastime, but, oddly, most of the “scratching” jokes tended to be given to chickens. (Mind you, sometimes it was chickens AND puppies.)
Of course, part of the fun was that scratching in public, for humans, was considered vulgar. There was nothing like a joke where you could substitute a dog doing something you wouldn’t dare do in public. Which brings us to another much celebrated habit of corgis and collies.
This does, of course, bring us back into the ever-popular category of butt jokes. This variety, of course, was totally acceptable since, after all, dogs do these things.
Dachshunds were perfectly natural for this barely evolved species of humor.
Do you think that’s why so many people spend their time trying to teach dogs to shake hands? Would that be more socially acceptable?
Let’s change subjects, and ends of the dog. We will move completely away from the habit of butt sniffing if we note that dogs on postcards were frequently cited for having that cold nose.
Everyone knew about cold noses. That cool, damp nose meant your dog was healthy, no matter where he’d been poking it.
Cartoonists who focused on the nose of the doodle were, of course, far from making any jokes about other parts of the dog. And there’s an end for our blog investigation.
The original text of “A Christmas Carol has been chopped into 47 sequences, which form the chapters of this book. For each of these, we start with Dickens’s original. (Why 47? Well, I wanted to do an even 50, but the book won’t break down that way. It insists on 47.)
It has been a struggle, but I have resisted the temptation to change punctuation and spelling. English has changed more than a bit since 1843; we’re not nearly so comma-mad. My teachers would have slung a dictionary at me if I had been so free with colons and semi-colons. But this is the original text, and, as somebody or other once wrote, “my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it or the country’s done for.”
Following each chunk of text comes a brief summary of how the filmmakers regarded that particular sequence, and a discussion of how it was handled in each movie under discussion. The versions chosen for study in this book were selected for balance and variety. (Um, I actually just bought every version I could find available on videocassette in December. Just TRY to buy a carol in April. I ordered one in January and threw an entire warehouse into a tizzy. I finally got that video in August.)
Because titles vary from version to version, and can change between countries (England prefers “Scrooge” while Americans want “A Christmas carol”) each fi is referred to in the discussion by the name of the actor playing Ebenezer Scrooge. The films considered here are:
I.HICKS (“Scrooge”, 1935)
THE MOVIE: The 1930s gave us The Wizard of Oz as well as The Three Stooges. You can see bits of each here, along with an injection of Twenties Expressionist film. The version most easily available on videocassette is the one edited for television in 1946, and lacks about 18 minutes of the original film. There was a videocassette of the full version which, befitting cinema purists, is brighter, cleaner, and funnier, showing how the editors in 1946 did a masterful job tightening the movie but left out some of the fun. (2023 postscript: The one hour version is now much harder to find than the 78 minute version. The world turns around.)
HIGH POINTS: Seymour Hicks is a spectacularly idiosyncratic Scrooge, and one of the least aristocratic. He had played the role first on stage in 1901 and was the star of a silent version some twenty years before this first known talkie Scrooge. He took a hand in the script and direction of this version as well. Then there is that splendid Cratchit, Donald Calthrop, possibly the closest anyone ever dared come to the Cratchit Dickens produced in his live readings of the story. And for talking purposes, there is that amazing sociocultural section as the Lord Mayor’s household prepares for the official Christas diner.
LOW POINTS: These are the cheapest special effects this side of a middle school media class, and the sorriest set of ghosts ever. By gum, no Jacob Marley was going to upstage Sir Seymour Hicks.
II.OWEN (“A Christmas Carol”, 1938)
THE MOVIE: An MGM B-movie, this was designed to knock Hicks off screens at Christmastime in the U.S., and it did. Sterling British character actor Reginald Owen appears as the most querulous of Scrooges, who winds up partying with the Cratchits on Christmas Day like a man moving joyfully into a second childhood.
HIGH POINTS: There never was such a rollicking batch of Cratchits. Tiny Tim looks as if he might crumble before our eyes, and Bob is pitiable if portly, but the rest of the family (including June Lockhart in her film debut opposite her parents as Mr. and Mrs. Cratchit) are suitably but bearably lively. And then there is Jacob Marley, one of the most creepily corpselike ever to menace an Ebenezer.
LOW POINTS: If the picture benefits from MGM production standards, it suffers some of the scripting flaws of Golden Age Hollywood as well. The film runs barely an hour, but finds time not just to underline plot points but ring them with neon and blare them with trumpets. These Cratchits are also some of the most well-off, with a home worthy of Judge Hardy ad Andy. Fred has been made a bachelor to beef up his subplot in case Dickens’s story wasn’t enough to fill the hour. And the attempt to make Owen look at least a generation older than he actually was doesn’t quite come off.
III. SIM I (“Scrooge”, 1951)
THE MOVIE: For many people, this is THE Carol. Screenwriter Noel Langley (“The Wizard of Oz”) went farther than most in including material Dickens neglected to provide.
HIGH POINTS: Alastair Sim himself, of course. His Scrooge is utterly unrestrained; even when he is subtle, he is WILDLY subtle. He carries you by force of will through all Scrooge’s ups and downs.
LOW POINTS: Except when he is whining about being too old to change his ways: what was the point of all THAT business? And Marley’s deathbed repentance fails to move me (despite being another great scene for Sim.) These are minor quibbles; this production, even if you have to watch a colorized version, is top of the line.
IV. MARCH (“Shower of Stars: A Christmas Carol”, 1954)
THE PICTURE: This took over, in many US markets, the role of definitive television broadcast Scrooge from Hicks. It featured Frederick March and Basil Rathbone in a script by Maxwell Anderson, with score by Bernard Herrmann (before he started scoring for Alfred Hitchcock movies and episodes of the Twilight Zone.) The readily available videocassette of this reverses a trend, being a black-and-white version of a television program made in color.
HIGH POINTS: Nice touch, as well as economical, to have the same actress play Scrooge’s lost love AND the Ghost of Christmas past, while nephew Fred’s actor makes an excellent Ghost of Christas present.
LOW POINTS: But where is the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come? Bob Cratchit is little more than wallpaper here, and given a choice between story and more songs, the production goes for the songs every time. And what, um, was the purpose of giving Frederick March a fake nose roughly eleven feet long?
V. RATHBONE (“A Christmas Carol”, 1959)
THE PICTURE: This was part of a television series called “Tales From Dickens”, in which Frederick March hosted half hour adaptations of full novels.
HIGH POINTS: Er, it certainly is individual. More of the story makes it in that you’d expect from a half hour production. And it has Basil Rathbone, so how bad could it be?
LOW POINTS: Well, that depends on your definition of “bad”. This is staged like a cross between a silent melodrama of 1914 and a particularly unenthusiastic episode of The Twilight Zone. Whether those sets are meant to be surreal or just really really cheap is a matter of opinion, and as for the story, it’s a perfect example of what happens when you hand over a classic to someone who feels nothing matters but the plot. All the decorative plaster is removed from the structure, allowing you to admire the framework and scaffolding.
VI.MAGOO (“Mr. Magoo’s Christas Carol”, 1962)
THE PICTURE: a made-for-tv cartoon by UPA, with Jam Backus’s Quincy Magoo as a Broadway star appearing in a musical version of “A Christas Carol”. This play is divided into five acts, roughly corresponding to Dickens’s five staves.
HIGH POINTS: I recuse myself. This was my first Scrooge, and try as I may, when I think of the Carol, I see this Jacob Marley, this Christas Past, this Christas Yet to Come, and especially these Ragpickers. More books than mine, though, call this the best musical version of the story.
LOW POINTS: The cut-and-paste here is ruthless as whole scenes and characters are moved about willy-nilly. The most obvious example has to be putting the Ghost of Christmas PAST AFTER the Ghost of Christmas Present.
VII.HADDRICK (“A Christmas Carol”, 1969)
THE PICTURE: An Australian animated version aimed at the Saturday morning TV crowd, featuring the voice of Ron Haddrick in the first of his two animated Carols. Visually, the adaptation is free, but textually it clings to the original words, adding mere bits of business here and there.
HIGH POINTS: Some of the added material is not unamusing, and he get one of the flintiest, most heartless Ebenezers on screen ever.
LOW POINTS: What DID the artists have in mind? Most characters are buck-toothed buffoons, particularly Fred. Jacob Marley looks like nothing human, though Scrooge recognizes him at once. The colors are sickly, and a pointless preview at the beginning shows us Marley’s Ghost, killing the suspense later on.
VIII. FINNEY (“Scrooge!”, 1970)
THE MOVIE: A musical from the people who gave us “Oliver!”, this was intended as a similar lush Victorian romp. The critics were largely unkind.
HIGH POINTS: The music is lively, the Musical Fantasy Early Victorian London is colorful and jolly, and the material added to the original story is pert and fanciful. Christmas Past and Christmas Present are magnificently solid spectres, both of them mildly astonished to find themselves associating with someone as petty as Scrooge.
LOW POINTS: If you like your literary creations dead serious, Albert Finney and Alec Guinness as Scrooge and Marley will be a sore trial to you. Scrooge occasionally comes across as Mr. Hyde by way of Richard III and possibly Quasimodo. He is the wildest Scrooge outside of Alastair Sim, which is not to all tastes. (And one of the few who could play both the present day Scrooge and his younger self.)
IX. SIM II (“A Christmas Carol”, 1971)
THE PICTURE: Winner of an Oscar as Best Animated Short Subject for 1971, this cartoon was made in the grim, swirling fantasy style very popular at the time. Not only does it attempt to be true to the original text as far as time allows, it brings backs the performers of Scrooge and Marley from Sim I, and reuses some other key imagery as well.
HIGH POINTS: This animation style is well suited to the darkest, grimmest parts of the story. The dark house Scrooge inhabits was never darker, the Ragpickers never more verminous.
LOW POINTS: It’s a short subject, and moves far too quickly, lopping out a great deal just to bring the picture in under thirty minutes. (Still, it is the best half-hour version out there.)
X. MATTHAU (“The Stingiest Man In Town”, 1978)
THE PICTURE: This was an animated revival of the 1954 TV musical of the same name which starred Basil Rathbone. It abbreviates script and songs, and recasts everything with the twinkling touch of Rankin-Bass, makers of some of the most memorable of TV holiday specials.
HIGH POINTS: This is a jolly Carol. Matthau’s Scrooge gives us a pretty good hint of how W.C. Fields might have played the role. The Rankin-Bass touch was not meant for gloom; bright backgrounds and perky people populate this version.
LOW POINTS: In 49 minutes, not only is the original story much abbreviated, but so is the script of the 1954 musical Subtle plot points do not have much place in a quick-moving cartoon tale.
XI. MCDUCK (“Mickey’s Christmas Carol”, 1982)
THE PICTURE: Disney characters assume the roles here, with Mickey Mouse as Bob Cratchit in his first movie role in nearly thirty years. This was Scrooge McDuck’s second movie appearance after decades in the comic books, and the last picture for Clarence Nash, who had done the voice of Donald Duck since the advent of talkies.
HIGH POINTS: Liveliness, certainly. Perky music. And a great source of fun, particularly picking out Disney characters in the background.
LOW POINTS: Thoroughly Disneyfied, this version retains perhaps a dozen lines from the original (And two of THOSE are “Bah, humbug!” and “God bless us, every one!”) It is also one of the few versions of the Carol in which The Ghost of Christmas yet to Come talks. I bet you didn’t know he was from Brooklyn.
XII. SCOTT (“A Christmas Carol”, 1984)
THE MOVIE: a lush and dramatic production, replete with authentic backgrounds and moody effects. George C. Scott is a hefty self-satisfied Scrooge, who takes a LOT of convincing before he realizes he is not just the model of a proper British businessman.
HIGH POINTS: It takes some getting used to, but once you’ve accepted George C. Scott’s face (certainly the least like Dickens’s description of Scrooge than anyone except maybe Mr. Magoo), it becomes the focus of the story. It twitches. It grimaces. Even before the reformation , it smiles a WHOLE lot. And it is as classically constructed as the Victorian buildings behind it.
LOW POINTS: It is a cold, hard Christmas, isn’t it? Every character in this production seems to exist solely for the purpose of lecturing Ebenezer Scrooge. The Ghosts treat him with contempt, his nephew is hard and angry, and Bob Cratchit labors with an air of seething resentment. No wonder he’s dour: even his customers treat him to lectures about his behavior. You start feeling sorry for him long before the Ghosts even appear.
XIII. CAINE (“The Muppet Christmas carol”, 1992)
THE MOVIE: A mix of Muppets and men: as with Mickey Mouse’s version, part of the fun is recognizing characters you already know from other roles, even if Dickens did not make room for a boomerang fish act. It is the only musical version to include singing lobsters.
HIGH POIINTS: exuberance. Enthusiasm. The music bounces along, the dialogue is well-spoken. The social conscience of the Muppets is a good fit for that of Charles Dickens. Caine is a nicely cold and stony Scrooge, and there has never been a warmer Ghost of Christmas present.
LOW POINTS: Touches here and there echo the Mickey Mouse version. The Marley brothers are having an awfully lot of fun for two damned souls, and the ragpickers have been shortchanged. The Muppets are not all that well suited for the grimmer parts of the tale.
XIV. CURRY (“A Christmas carol”, 1997)
THE PICTURE: This animated version includes a star-studded cast in a story set perhaps fifty years after the time period of the original. Scrooge owns a dog named Debit, with whom he shares a Dastardly-and-Muttley relationship. Debit handles the slapstick in the early parts of the story but sits out most of the middle.
HIGH POINTS: Tim Curry is another particularly hard-hearted Scrooge. He sics Debit on the charity solicitors, and hurls lumps of coal at the carolers, then sending Cratchit out into the cold to bring the coal back. He has some great throwaway lines. There is interesting background action.
LOW POINTS: Why on earth assemble a cast like this and do so little with it? Whoopi Goldberg is a very restrained Ghost of Christmas Present, and Tim Curry is not allowed to be all that much more than a good Saturday morning cartoon Scrooge. The music is well-meaning, I suppose.
XV. STEWART (“A Christmas Carol”, 1999)
THE PICTURE: A made-for-TV extravaganza, with much period detail and an attempt to include as much Dickens as possible.
HIGH POINTS: London and Scrooge are properly served chilled, as here. We find less of an attempt to be picturesquely Victorian: a drab office in a drab building of 1843 has much in common with a drab office of today. A lot of thought has gone into the dialogue: Joel Grey is a warm, glowing Ghost of Christmas past, and Stewart makes Ebenezer Scrooge very much his own.
LOW POINTS: The Ghost of Christmas present seems almost TOO sardonic, too grim. And with all the work in special effects, couldn’t the Ghost of Christmas yet to Come have been a little more impressive?
It has been suggested to me that my notes on postcards dealing with the military, particularly during World War II, have not been fully representative. The Army, including the Women’s Army Corps (ch), is well-represented, but what about the Navy?
In fact, the Navy was considered just as rich a service for postcard humor, and humor generally, during the war. Movies tended to be made in California, which had a goodly number of naval bases, and while a lot of radio comedy came out of New York and Chicago, neither of those places was short on ships and sailors. (You may be thinking that New York is a logical spot, but Chicago? Well, it was the home of a major naval training base, possibly, as Donald Kaul pointed out about Iowa, it is, after all, about as far from one ocean as the other.)
So a life on the sea was considered pretty fair game. Some day, when I can do it without getting queasy, I will cover the whole subject of seasickness in postcards.
This can be countered by a stereotype often associated with people on long sea cruises: lifting a knife and fork is the most exercise some people were believed to get.
And if army life was associated by comedians and cartoonists with peeling potatoes, the Navy automatically made them think of swabbing decks.
HOWEVER, there was one chore sailors were connected with in the popular view even more than scrubbing. The soldier on leave had a reputation with the ladies, but for a sailor this was considered a primary function. People felt they went to sea just for a rest between romances.
In an America where men were being taken away for training every day, the sailor who had only one girlfriend was simply not doing his part to keep up morale.
There was that saying about having a girl in every port, or…you got that one, eh?
The tradition goes back to before the Second World War, of course. Once upon a time, the sailor, however much work it was, had the quickest mode of transportation to cities around the world.
I have been told that, given a choice, a lady of the evening who specialized in military encounters preferred soldiers, who tended to be so tired from marching everywhere that they fell asleep quickly, to sailors, who were rested up and had had all that time on a ship to make plans.
Not that there weren’t opportunities at sea as well.
The postcards covered all of this and, as you may have noted from most of the above, also reinforced the belief that the boys taken from their homes and put in uniforms to fight were having a generally good time. Even if life afloat seemed unnatural to most landlubbers, Navy men often, according to this frequently reused verse, came to realize it was the life for them.
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