A couple more thoughts on this 1910 adaptation. It's a lot of analysis for a little 13-minute thing, but I really think it's fascinating.
I'm all about context, so it's cool to get a glimpse of what people in 1910 would have seen at the movies as part of the pop culture of the time. This might even have been the first movie some people had ever seen. In these days of TV and videos everywhere, it might be hard to imagine how exciting that was.
Being made in the early days of movie making, one thing that really shows is the heavy makeup. Bob Cratchit's seems particularly overdone, but I think Scrooge's is pretty good. He's got a great Scrooge look. When he bursts into the office at the beginning, you know he's Scrooge!
The actor who plays Scrooge, Marc McDermott, was only 29 at the time, which made it handy for him to also appear as young Scrooge in the Christmas Past sequence. Old Scrooge in on screen for almost the whole movie and he does a good job. Some of the acting is naturally very emphatic, since there's no talking, but I don't find it over the top.
The actor who plays Bob Cratchit, Charles Ogle, was 45 at the time. I'm not sure what they were going for with his makeup. Does it make him seem younger or older? I don't know. I'm never really sure how old Bob Cratchit is supposed to be anyway!
Charles Ogle has an absolutely awesome claim to fame: He was the first actor to play Frankenstein's monster on the screen! This was in another 1910 Edison production. He lived until 1940, so he probably saw Boris Karloff's much more famous interpretation. What did he think of it?
It's great that this adaptation of "A Christmas Carol" survives, as it's not only a window into the past, it also shows that the basic story could still be told with certain liberties, even in 1910!
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