A Brilliant Conflict

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Spending your time spotting actors you've seen in other stuff may hold the key to making it through this rather lifeless adaptation of A Christmas Carol.Michael Horden makes a reasonable Scrooge but the surrounding production lets him down as it's clear that this suffers from a thin budget. Using drawings rather than actual sets may have a quaint charm in children's television, but here it just draws attention to how Scrooge-like the BBC must have been when they commissioned it.There are plenty of Christmas Carols on IMDb. This one isn't horrendous, but it's certainly forgettable.

This classic is probably the most ever adapted story by anyone to the silver screen or the TV screen. It has become like a universal reference, and not only because of Mickey Mouse. It is the reference to expose misers and their miserable little and at times enormous narrow-minded selfish sins. This particular adaptation is trying to make the story not too frightening, just weird enough to seem marvelous and fantastic. The ghosts are nearly friendly in a way, both in their voices and their appearances. The stories they tell are just simple stories of simple people who just try to survive in a harsh world with hard work and a lot of determination to live on and bring more life to the world. Scrooge is in many ways odious and yet he is repentant so fast that we could even believe he was touched by some kind of grace and he became nice for the sake of being nice, though he does it because he is afraid, and nothing but afraid of what may happen to him after his death. That's the very contradiction of this man becoming converted to doing good after a life of doing evil. He is moved by fear. Approaching death is a great teacher of manners and kindness. The film yet remains magic and the sudden conversion is quite pleasant. I could yet have preferred Scrooge to be a lot more inhumane, a lot more vicious, because misers are basically not human. They only exploit the others and never share.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

In comparison to longer, more showy versions of Dickens' classic novella, this version from 1977 with Michael Hordern as Scrooge can look a bit underfunded - however, I think that its short length and the quality of its cast outweigh these concerns.The key of adapting a familiar story is to meet expectations in many ways, and this version does succeed. The visitations of the four spirits (including Jacob Marley), are well done, Bernard Lee as Christmas Present, John Le Mesurier as Marley amongst them. Hordern himself makes a good Scrooge, grey, morose and menacing at the start, and gentle and reformed at the end.Alongside versions with Alistair Sim, George C Scott, Patrick Stewart, and others, this version more than holds its own.

I highly recommend this terrific U.K. television version of A CHRISTMAS CAROL and I wish it was better known than it is. Some PBS stations used to show it in the late 1970's and early 1980's but since then this version of the Dickens Christmas classic has shown up rarely even on cable. Let me make it clear right off the bat that I'm one of those people who could watch an "All CHRISTMAS CAROL, All The Time" channel every December. That doesn't mean that I love each and every version of the story that comes along, it just means I love watching them all every single year. This adaptation of the story stands out from every other film and television version I've seen and only it's low budget and short running time put it behind the George C Scott classic.The lighting may be 70's sitcom level and for some scenes this T.V. movie may use painted backgrounds but it wins the viewer over by demonstrating over and over again that it "gets" the point of the story. There's no attempt to psycho-analyze any of the characters, no silly attempt to contemporize the ghosts, no omission of Ignorance and Want and for once Belle doesn't overstay her welcome.The secret of this version's appeal is that it uses nothing but Dickens' own story and best of all, nothing but Dickens' own dialogue. This may put the conversational exchanges over the heads of very young viewers but those who love the novelette will be ecstatic about this. Dickens' wordplay in the original story is wonderfully close to prose poetry and it's delightful to hear it presented in it's original form. Similarly, there are no fabrications of scenes not in the "real" story and no extraneous characters added. I enjoy seeing what some adaptors do with the story as much as anyone but it's refreshing to see a visual depiction of nothing but the content in the original classic.Non-devotees of A CHRISTMAS CAROL would likely rate this lower than I do since I think the emotional bang of this telefilm makes up for it's budget limits. Even CAROL purists may be put off by the omission of some scenes from the original story but with the short running time that can't be remedied. Unless someone eventually does a film version of this story that's as slavish to it's source material as Erich Von Stroheim's GREED was to the novel McTEAGUE I don't think we'll see an adaptation that comes closer than this to realizing Dickens' original work.As long as you don't expect outstanding production values I think the heartfelt performances and respect for the viewers' intelligence will put this version of A CHRISTMAS CAROL near the top of your list.