My devastatingly honest verdict on watching this last night for the first time in a few years was that as a film, Scrooge is overrated. You only need to watch what David Lean did with Great Expectations and Oliver Twist to see what a truly great cinematic storyteller can do with Dickens, and director Brian Desmond Hurst (who?) is no match for Lean. It's flatly filmed, with only a few interesting flourishes.
However, there is a big but. A huge but. Alastair Sim cannot be overrated in the role of Scrooge. He is fantastic. He invests the character with all kinds of nuances and quirky mannerisms. He utterly makes Scrooge his own. His transformation at the end of the film had me smiling and laughing as I have at no other Scrooge.
And he is supported by the screen's finest Jacob Marley in the clanking and shrieking Sir Michael Hordern. I also enjoyed Kathleen Harrison's housekeeper, Mrs Dilber, and Mervyn Johns's Bob Cratchit. The entire ensemble is what really makes this film.
I must confess, however, to having done something that will horrify the purists: I watched the colourized version of the film from 1990. What can I say? It came free with a newspaper last week. The colouring was awful and distracting, but I simply had to watch the film, and it was the only copy at hand. It's definitely time I invested in the DVD of the original black-and-white -- perhaps then I would be more convinced of the film's artistic merits. In the meantime, however, it is well worth watching for the sheer joy elicited by Alastair Sim and the rest of a sterling cast.
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