Summary
Christmas Eve drapes London in sooty gaslight; frost claws at the fog while Ebenezer Scrooge, a man whose soul has ossified into double-entry ledgers, locks his counting-house like a mausoleum. Across the threshold drifts Jacob Marley—dead seven years, jaw bound in coin-stamped bandage—dragging ponderous chains woven from ledgers, lock-boxes, and the rusted keys of foreclosed hopes. His warning is a knell: repent or be shackled to the ledger of eternity. Scrooge snorts, yet midnight splits and the translucent archive of his own past glides in: a candle-flame ghost who peels the years like onion-skins. Suddenly the child Scrooge trembles again in a schoolroom deserted but for atlas-ghosts; the adolescent clerk laughs beneath the mistletoe of Fezziwig’s riotous warehouse; the young lover watches Belle, his betrothed, slip a ring back into her purse and vanish into snowfall. Time dilates, the scene folds, and Present arrives—a cornucopia-robed giant spilling light, turkeys, and boisterous warmth across the city’s roofs. Inside the Cratchit hovel, a crippled Tiny Tim lifts a toast as fragile as spun sugar; outside, Scrooge’s own nephew mocks his uncle’s parsimony with genial pity. Finally, a hooded silhouette, silent as eclipse, extends a bony finger toward a future where Scrooge’s death prompts only curt sighs and auctioned bed-curtains. Terror perforates the miser’s granite heart; dawn finds him dancing barefoot in his nightshirt, ordering geese, toys, and forgiveness in a delirium of reclaimed humanity.
Synopsis
On Christmas Eve, an old miser named Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the spirit of his former partner, Jacob Marley. The deceased partner was in his lifetime as mean and miserly as Scrooge is now and he warns him to change his ways or face the consequences in the afterlife. Scrooge dismisses the apparition but the first of the three ghosts, the Ghost of Christmas Past, visits as promised. Scrooge sees those events in his past life, both happy and sad, that forged his character. The second spirit, the Ghost of Christmas Present, shows him how many currently celebrate Christmas. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows him how he will be remembered once he is gone. To his delight, the spirits complete their visits in one night giving him the opportunity to mend his ways.
Review Excerpt
"
London, 1843, yet the celluloid smells of 1923 nitrate: a whiff of smoke, silver nitrite, and the metallic sting of projector carbons. Ronald Neame would later splash Technicolor goose-fat across the screen; the 1951 Alastair Sim vehicle would inject noir brimstone; yet this monochrome British relic—only four reels, a breath under an hour—chooses chiaroscuro starvation, letting candlelight carve caverns into H.V. Esmond’s gaunt cheekbones. The result is a film that feels less like cosy Yuletide..."
