This version of ‘A Christmas Carol’ rings its bells for me

Other than the first Christmas story — the one set in Bethlehem — the holiday tale that resonates most for me is “A Christmas Carol,” which first appeared as a Charles Dickens novella in 1843.

“A Christmas Carol” has had many incarnations since: in multiple films, as theatrical productions, even as a 1962 cartoon, “Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol.” When I was a kid, I loved that Mister Magoo version, with Jim Backus voicing Ebenezer Scrooge.

A couple of weeks ago, I listened to Dickens’ novella as a recorded book. In years past I’ve also read the novella itself several times in print.

But of all the versions I’ve watched, seen on stage, read or listened to — including Dickens’ own — the best is a 1951 British film adaptation, directed by Brian Desmond-Hurst, written for the screen by Noel Langley and starring the marvelous Alastair Sim as Ebenezer Scrooge.

I watched it again this past weekend for the umpteenth time. It still gets me squarely in the heart. Yes, it’s about “Bah, humbug!” and Christmas ghosts and all the rest, just like the other versions. But it’s really about more than that. It portrays the most convincing episode of spiritual awakening I’ve ever witnessed in a work of art.

It’s a film about a man being granted grace. It’s about a blind man who learns to see the same bleak old world through reborn eyes and in doing so finds heaven here on Earth.

True, the plot and a good deal of the dialogue are similar to that in other screen versions of “A Christmas Carol,” and much of the film comes word-for-word from Dickens himself. Yet somehow Sim, the actor, manages to inhabit Scrooge in a way no other actor does, better than even Dickens the author did.

The movie, and Sim, hit their spiritual zenith when the old miser awakens in his bedroom after the departure of the final ghost sent to haunt him—the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, who is Death incarnate.

It’s daylight. Scrooge slowly realizes he’s survived the night. Before our eyes, the white-haired skinflint suddenly becomes born-again, or filled with the Spirit—or something on the order of the manifestations I’ve witnessed at Pentecostal revival meetings. He enters some spiritual dimension heretofore unknown to him.

Barefoot, in his nightshirt, he dances around his apartment, clapping his hands and giggling.

“I don’t know what to do!” Scrooge exclaims. “I’m as light as a feather! I’m as happy as an angel! I’m as merry as a schoolboy! I’m as giddy as a drunken man!”

As he carries on like this, Mrs. Dilber (Kathleen Harrison), his Cockney housekeeper, is thrown into a tizzy of her own by Scrooge’s behavior.

Scrooge tries to explain what’s happened to him, then confesses he doesn’t quite know.

He sings his words like a child: “I don’t know anything. I never did know anything. But now I know that I don’t know anything!”

This fresh insight delights him so much he announces: “I must stand on my head. I must stand on my head!”

He leans headfirst into a chair and, still clad only in a nightshirt, kicks his feet into the air. Mrs. Dilber throws her apron over her face and runs off screaming.

It’s slapstick. But Sim makes the slapstick convincing. I never doubt I’m seeing a man who’s been — overnight — transformed from who he used to be into someone utterly new, someone even he can’t recognize.

Scrooge chases the fleeing Mrs. Dilber down a flight of stairs, catches her. He gives her an expensive gold coin as a Christmas present and quintuples her salary from two shillings a week to 10.

After that, he dresses and sets out to apologize to those he’s mistreated.

To the wife of the nephew he’s long rejected, he asks: “Can you forgive a pig-headed old fool for having no eyes to see with, no ears to hear with, all these years?”

The next day at his office, he raises the salary of his much-abused clerk, Bob Cratchit (Mervyn Johns), who appears as confused as Mrs. Dilber was.

“Oh, I haven’t taken leave of my senses, Bob,” Scrooge reassures him. “I’ve come to them.”

As an aside to himself, giggling again, Scrooge adds: “I don’t deserve to be so happy. But I can’t help it. I just can’t help it.”

Maybe it’s Sim’s acting. Maybe it’s a unique combination of his skills with Desmond-Hurst’s direction and Langley’s screenplay and Dickens’ own genius.

But this movie plays as nothing if not an allegory for the Christian story of redemption.

It always moves me, partly because it reminds me of a revelation that so many years ago changed my life, although my hour of visitation arrived and went without ghosts (except for the Holy Ghost, but that’s a different column).

The late C. S. Lewis described his own conversion as his having been “surprised by joy.” That’s Scrooge, too: surprised by incomprehensible joy.

Sim, in this “A Christmas Carol,” serves as an artistic reminder that redemption and transformation are possible for everybody, no matter how far gone he or she might be.

So may it be this Christmas season, for you and me alike. As Tiny Tim might put it, God bless us, everyone.

Paul Prather is pastor of Bethesda Church near Mount Sterling. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.