A Christmas Carol (1910)
Director: J. Searle Dawley
Scrooge: Marc McDermott
OK, now let's really get old school and go back to 1910, with a short, silent movie adaptation produced by Thomas Edison!
I think this is the oldest surviving complete adaptation. It's certainly one of the earliest anyway. There was one in 1901, and a few minutes of that still exist, but it's incomplete, and there was also a version from 1908, but that's completely lost as of this time.
So, how did filmmakers in 1910 approach the story and how did they do? If you have 13 minutes to spare, check it out:
Not bad for over a hundred years old, right?
A quick rundown of the major changes shows that Fred is not married because he doesn't have enough money, but Scrooge makes him his partner at the end so he can get married, then Scrooge brings Fred and his fiancee to Bob Cratchit's house with the giant turkey.
Hold the phone! Doesn't that sound an awful lot like the MGM version from 1938? Did they base that on this? Twenty-eight years isn't that long for someone to have remembered this version. Or did they both "borrow" that plot device from some other source? Maybe one of the myriad stage versions that had been produced since 1843? Hmmm...
In any event, this thing is a fascinating little time capsule. 1910 wasn't so far away from 1843 and Charles Dickens did public readings of "A Christmas Carol" up through 1869. That's only about 40 years before this movie adaptation came out. Did some people attend a Dickens reading and later see this movie? That's a pretty cool thought! This is sort of only second generation!
This little movie definitely requires basic knowledge of the original story in order to follow along, as there are only a few intertitles, and none of them contain dialogue. If you're reading this blog, you'll have no trouble telling what's going on.
In addition to the changes already mentioned, there are a couple of others and then, as always, a few oddities. We'll talk about those next...
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