Charles Laughton looms large over RCA Victor's 1951 recording of "A Christmas Carol," as befits his status as an Oscar winning movie star, but there is a supporting cast.
The record album contains a cast list, which is immensely helpful, as how else would we know who played those parts 70-ish years later?
The other actors are not featured much and they're not particularly famous, but they seem to be a bunch of Charles Laughton's associates.
The Scrooge here is not overly forceful and doesn't really sound old enough. He's played by William Cottrell (33 years old at the time), who had been a student of Laughton's and was later his assistant. He doesn't have roles in all that many movies, but he was in "The Man on the Eiffel Tower" (1949), which starred Charles Laughton. The most fascinating thing about him was that he was at one point married to Morganna, the infamous "Kissing Bandit" of the 1970s!
Also appearing in "The Man on the Eiffel Tower" was William Phipps, who was also a protégé of Laughton's. He plays Fred on the recording. He's in a ton of movies and TV shows from 1947 through 2000 with his credits ranging from providing the speaking voice of Prince Charming in Disney's "Cinderella" (1950) to a featured role in the so-bad-it's-almost-good "Cat-Women of the Moon" (1953)!
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| Harry Burnett made these puppets for Albert Einstein and Gary Cooper. That's just plain awesome! |
Then we have Harry Burnett as Bob Cratchit. I presume this is the puppeteer who was an associate of Elsa Lanchester (who was married to Charles Laughton for many years) in Hollywood's Turnabout Theatre.
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| Non-puppet Coop gives Laughton his due! |
The Ghost of Christmas Past is played by Peter Brocco, who also played a ton of mostly small roles over a along career. He also appeared with Laughton in the movies "Devil and the Deep" from 1932 and "Spartacus" from 1960!
Vic Perrin, a prolific radio and voice actor plays Marley's Ghost. I don't know if he has a specific connection to Charles Laughton, but he does the most "acting" here, but it's mostly going "ooooohhh" in the background - in case you didn't know he's a ghost!
Among his memorable later voice work was several "Scooby Doo" villains and, best of all, Nomad the space probe on the "Star Trek" episode "The Changeling" from 1967. I would not want to run into Nomad, as I'm sure he'd think I'm guilty of plenty of non-sequiturs!
So it would appear to me that Charles Laughton was pretty much given free reign to cast whomever he wanted for this "A Christmas Carol" project. Most of it consists of him reading from the original text, so it's all good.
Also worth mentioning is the producer of the recording, Steve Carlin. He later had an interesting career in TV, executive producing such shows as "The $64,000 Question," most famous of the rigged quiz shows of the 1950s, as well as Jackie Gleason's "You're in the Picture," infamous as the worst game show ever. The first episode was so bad that for the second (and last) episode, Gleason came on to apologize!
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| How sweet it is... not! |
So, a bunch of colorful characters coming together for kiddie record!
Next, what about the plot?
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