Looking back now on the six surviving silent movie versions of A Christmas Carol (there are at least three lost versions), while remembering that two of the six are fragments AND that we are seeing them on a small screen, what did we see? SETTINGS: The 1913 version does the most with exterior scenes.Continue reading “SCREEN SCROOGES: Silent Supplement 7”
Tag Archives: Scrooge
SCREEN SCROOGES: Silent Supplement 6
There is occasional confusion online between the 1922 “Scrooge” and the 1923 “A Christmas Carol”. Each was made in England, and each was part of a longer series of films based on literature. The Gems of Literature series ranged farther afield in its sources, including Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe. If you go huntingContinue reading “SCREEN SCROOGES: Silent Supplement 6”
SCREEN SCROOGES: Silent Supplement 5
The 1922 version of A Christmas Carol, starring H.V. Esmond, is incomplete as we know it. Part of a series which presented excerpts from great literature (the four known films are all from Dickens) it ran seventeen minutes or thereabouts, but when it was brought to America in 1929, the distributors cut it downContinue reading “SCREEN SCROOGES: Silent Supplement 5”
SCREEN SCROOGES: Silent Supplement 4
Much as the previous silent Scrooges interested me, I am fascinated by the 1914 version. It runs to 22 minutes (some cuts are abrupt enough to suggest something is missing) and although Charles Rock makes a lively Scrooge, this is decidedly a Cratchit movie. We open with Bob Cratchit putting up holiday greeneryContinue reading “SCREEN SCROOGES: Silent Supplement 4”
SCREEN SCROOGES: Silent Supplement 3
“Scrooge”, rereleased later as “Old Scrooge” for no apparent reason, appeared in 1913 and was the longest (known) version of the story up to that time, clocking in at some forty minutes. It opens with a little pseudo-documentary beginning with shots of Charles Dickens’s birthplace (with people pointing at it in part so weContinue reading “SCREEN SCROOGES: Silent Supplement 3”
SCREEN SCROOGES: Silent Supplement 2
This is a supplement to the comparison of film versions of A Christmas Carol, taking a look at the surviving silent versions. We considered the earliest surviving version, from 1901, last week. After a lost version of A Christmas Carol made in Chicago in 1908, the next, and first American, Christmas Carol was releasedContinue reading “SCREEN SCROOGES: Silent Supplement 2”
SCREEN SCROOGES: Silent Supplement I
A sorry spot in serializing some of my non-fiction works in this space is a nagging refrain of “Remember how hard this was to research? Sure woulda been easier with the Interwebs”. Take, for example, my comparison of screen versions of “A Christmas Carol”, serialized herein not so long ago. It would easily haveContinue reading “SCREEN SCROOGES: Silent Supplement I”
SCREEN SCROOGES It’s Cold
Once upon a time—of all good days in the year, on Christmas Eve—old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house. It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy withal: and he could hear people in the court outside, go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement-stonesContinue reading “SCREEN SCROOGES It’s Cold”
SCREEN SCROOGES: Rules of the Game
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 hasContinue reading “SCREEN SCROOGES: Rules of the Game”
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