Bonus Bransby!

A little bonus Bransby Williams...

This recording is an earlier version of the third part of Mr. Williams's Scrooge monologue, the "Awakening of Scrooge" part. A little shorter, but pretty similar.

It's definitely from an Edison cylinder, which I think is from 1905. It has the spoken introduction common to cylinders of that time. So, pretty early in the scheme of things!

Give it a listen:

I'm not sure how many recordings he made of this material and it's not easy to find out which is which.

Here's a British LP from 1952 on Decca Records. Are they new recordings or reissues? The liner notes refer to Mr. Williams as an octogenarian, which would seem to indicate these are freshly recorded. Maybe someday I'll get my mitts on a copy, then I'll know!

The more I listen to Bransby Williams, the more I think he sounds a bit like Lionel Barrymore. Did Lionel possibly find inspiration for his take on Scrooge from those old records? I guess we'll never know, but intriguing nonetheless!

A Christmas Carol (1910) (Part 3)

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!

A Christmas Carol (1910) (Part 2)

Now let's take a little bit more of a look at the 1910 silent version...

For a 13-minute (or whatever it should be based on proper projection speed) silent one-reeler, it gets a lot of the story in there. As with most adaptations of "A Christmas Carol," the relative brevity of the source material helps a great deal in this matter.

1910 was pretty early in the development of movies, so some concessions needed to be made.

The biggest, by far, is to have just one "Spirit of Christmas," who shows Scrooge each of the past, present and future vignettes, which are sort of projected in Scrooge's bed chamber.

It shows that they were already pretty good with special effects back then, as we have Scrooge and his room with the spirit superimposed, then the various sequences superimposed over that. So, triple-exposure. It's not bad at all!

We also see Jacob Marley appear in the door knocker and reappear as a transparent ghost. The audiences back then must really have been wowed!

The opening scene in Scrooge's office gets a lot in there, but there are a couple of oddities.

There's a "Charity Relief Committee" that comes to ask Scrooge for a donation. There's three men rather than the usual two portly gentlemen. Not sure what's up with that.

Odder still, however, is that when Scrooge's nephew comes in (helpfully explained by an intertitle), he has another man and two women with him. I presume one of the women is his fiancee, but it's hard to tell. I have no idea who the other couple would be or why they're there at all. Is that some remnant of a well-known theatrical adaptation of the time?

There's also a brief bit where Scrooge angrily shakes his walking stick at the window. I think he must be chasing off the little caroler. That's mean of him to do, of course, but fun that they include it here.

I presume that intertitle above refers to Scrooge's youth and not the Spirit's!

In any event, we get glimpses of Fan visiting young Ebeneezer at school, Fezziwig having Scrooge and Dick Wilkins clean up for the Christmas party, the party itself and Belle breaking up with Scrooge. It's all shown with no other intertitles, but you know what's going on. On the side, Scrooge reacts to each scene.

The Spirit disappears after each sequence, giving Scrooge some time to think about what he's seen, then reappears for the next set of visions.

Now the spirit shows Scrooge what he could be doing with his money in the present. These two sequences do get an introductory intertitle.

First we have Bob Cratchit's dinner, including a toast to Scrooge. We can see Tiny Tim toddling around with his little crutch. The implication would be that Scrooge should pay Bob better wages, and Scrooge instinctively reaches into his pocket as if he could do so right then. Tiny Tim and his less-than-promising future is never focused upon, however.


The next scene shows Fred getting kicked out of his fiancee's family's Christmas party because he doesn't have enough money to get married. Wow, that's cold! The would-be father-in-law maybe needs a little ghostly intervention himself!

We also get a peek at Want and Misery, which I think is represented by just one child(?), as opposed to Ignorance and Want, but it gets the point across.

The Spirit of Christmas then reappears wearing an extra veil or something to show Scrooge his death. And we do see him die! And the second he's gone, not-Mrs. Dilber steals a ring off his not-even-cold finger! Yikes!

To top it off, we see Scrooge's tombstone, which reads, "He Lived and Died Without a Friend." Now, that would scare anybody straight!

Did 1910 audiences clap because that intertitle worked in the title of the movie? Maybe not.

Interestingly, when Scrooge wakes up on Christmas morning, he checks to see if his bed curtains are still there. A nod to the book, to be sure, but we did not see them get stolen, rings and all, in this version's future.

Scrooge meets the whole charity committee on his way to Fred's house and makes his donation. He then pulls a Reginald Owen by making Fred his partner (as shown in a really big note), then bringing Fred and his fiancee over to the Cratchits, prize turkey in tow.

And a happy ending for all!

Next up - a few more notes!

A Christmas Carol (1910) (Part 1)

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...