God Bless us All, Everyone (forgive the redundancy)

I have just finished watching a version of A Christmas Carol which I have studiously avoided over the years. It was made in 1938 and starred Reginald Owen as Scrooge.
It was the first time I have seen the film, having long,long ago decided that the 1951 version with Alistair Sim as Ebenezer(MARVELOUS!),and completely faithful to the novel, is simply the finest rendering, before or since.
I must have seen it way more than a dozen times over the last 50-plus years and have bawled like a baby every time.

I noticed over the past few years that it had stopped appearing along with the other yuletide TV perennials.
Then a visit to Wal-Mart the other day I believe explained that puzzling fact---there it was on sale---at Wal-Mart mind you, for $14.95---at WAL-MART---a nearly 60-year old movie ---$14.95.
(Maybe we can take 'cautious optimism' in the fact, apparently, that someone at Wal-Mart is sufficiently un-Philistine to recognize something of value that wasn't made in the last 10 years).


Now to the 1938 version---which brought to mind the observation of some anonymous wit that in Hollywood a Classic Novel is called a first draft!
I wouldn't say this version took liberties with Dickens'classic, but I half-expected to see in the credits "...by Charles Dickens and Ross Hunter".

It takes all the original's nuances, subtleties and genuine emotion, flattens it all out with a bulldozer and replaces it with the cinematic equivalent of a King Family Christmas Special.

All the children laugh too loud and the amount of gaiety on the screen would have Ed Wynn pleading with the actors to 'bring it down a notch'!

When Alistair Sim laughed after his transformation, he laughed with genuine bubbling joy and abandon---Reginald Owen, on the other hand, when laughing, looks like a man who's being conveyed to an asylum for the criminally insane.

What a lump of coal we got this morning---an early instance of the movie industry's uncanny instinct for changing 'silk purses into sows' ears.'

A Merry Chriskwanzaramadanukkah to ALL!!