A Christmas Carol (1977)

Spending your time spotting actors you've seen in other stuff may hold the key to making it through this rather lifeless adaptation of A Christmas Carol.Michael Horden makes a reasonable Scrooge but the surrounding production lets him down as it's clear that this suffers from a thin budget. Using drawings rather than actual sets may have a quaint charm in children's television, but here it just draws attention to how Scrooge-like the BBC must have been when they commissioned it.There are plenty of Christmas Carols on IMDb. This one isn't horrendous, but it's certainly forgettable.

A Christmas Carol is such a timeless story, one that almost everybody knows and is Charles Dickens' most accessible works. This 1977 adaptation is a very good one and, while not as good as the Sim, Scott and Muppet versions, deserves to be better known. It is too short in length and did feel rushed as a result, it needed another thirty minutes at least. The production values are not quite of the highest quality but are at least acceptable and hardly ugly-looking, they also at least give some atmosphere, with Cratchit trying to warm his hands you can actually feel the cold in which he works. The adaptation is directed assuredly, and is well-performed too. Michael Hordern is a most credible Scrooge, Alastair Sim is still the definitive Scrooge but Hordern does a fine job as well. There's also John Le Meseurier's spooky Jacob Marley, Clive Merrison's humble Bob Cratchit, Paul Copley's jovial Fred(one of the better actors as the character alongside Barry MacKay in the 1938 film) and Timothy Chasin's heartfelt Tiny Tim. The Three Christmas Ghosts are very well-characterised as well, especially Bernard Lee as Ghost of Christmas Present, funny and imposing. What makes this adaptation as worthwhile as it is is how it tells the story. The dialogue, being amusing, dark and with pathos, is very Dickenesian and adapted intelligently. And the story, for one told in such a short running time, maintains the spirit of the story, and is every bit as magical, charming and enthralling as it should, the message is one to warm the heart and the darker aspects are genuinely foreboding. Overall, a very good adaptation and deserving of more credit. 8/10 Bethany Cox

This classic is probably the most ever adapted story by anyone to the silver screen or the TV screen. It has become like a universal reference, and not only because of Mickey Mouse. It is the reference to expose misers and their miserable little and at times enormous narrow-minded selfish sins. This particular adaptation is trying to make the story not too frightening, just weird enough to seem marvelous and fantastic. The ghosts are nearly friendly in a way, both in their voices and their appearances. The stories they tell are just simple stories of simple people who just try to survive in a harsh world with hard work and a lot of determination to live on and bring more life to the world. Scrooge is in many ways odious and yet he is repentant so fast that we could even believe he was touched by some kind of grace and he became nice for the sake of being nice, though he does it because he is afraid, and nothing but afraid of what may happen to him after his death. That's the very contradiction of this man becoming converted to doing good after a life of doing evil. He is moved by fear. Approaching death is a great teacher of manners and kindness. The film yet remains magic and the sudden conversion is quite pleasant. I could yet have preferred Scrooge to be a lot more inhumane, a lot more vicious, because misers are basically not human. They only exploit the others and never share.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

I highly recommend this terrific U.K. television version of A CHRISTMAS CAROL and I wish it was better known than it is. Some PBS stations used to show it in the late 1970's and early 1980's but since then this version of the Dickens Christmas classic has shown up rarely even on cable. Let me make it clear right off the bat that I'm one of those people who could watch an "All CHRISTMAS CAROL, All The Time" channel every December. That doesn't mean that I love each and every version of the story that comes along, it just means I love watching them all every single year. This adaptation of the story stands out from every other film and television version I've seen and only it's low budget and short running time put it behind the George C Scott classic.The lighting may be 70's sitcom level and for some scenes this T.V. movie may use painted backgrounds but it wins the viewer over by demonstrating over and over again that it "gets" the point of the story. There's no attempt to psycho-analyze any of the characters, no silly attempt to contemporize the ghosts, no omission of Ignorance and Want and for once Belle doesn't overstay her welcome.The secret of this version's appeal is that it uses nothing but Dickens' own story and best of all, nothing but Dickens' own dialogue. This may put the conversational exchanges over the heads of very young viewers but those who love the novelette will be ecstatic about this. Dickens' wordplay in the original story is wonderfully close to prose poetry and it's delightful to hear it presented in it's original form. Similarly, there are no fabrications of scenes not in the "real" story and no extraneous characters added. I enjoy seeing what some adaptors do with the story as much as anyone but it's refreshing to see a visual depiction of nothing but the content in the original classic.Non-devotees of A CHRISTMAS CAROL would likely rate this lower than I do since I think the emotional bang of this telefilm makes up for it's budget limits. Even CAROL purists may be put off by the omission of some scenes from the original story but with the short running time that can't be remedied. Unless someone eventually does a film version of this story that's as slavish to it's source material as Erich Von Stroheim's GREED was to the novel McTEAGUE I don't think we'll see an adaptation that comes closer than this to realizing Dickens' original work.As long as you don't expect outstanding production values I think the heartfelt performances and respect for the viewers' intelligence will put this version of A CHRISTMAS CAROL near the top of your list.