It's now been 72 years since this film's release in December of 1935 but I had never seen it until the other evening on late night PBS television. I really enjoy Christmas-themed films so I'm surprised that I had never seen it before. It does have a good old Dickensonian flavor to it but it's not nearly as good as the MGM A Christmas Carol film that came out three years later with Reginald Owen or the Scrooge from 1951 with Alistair Sim which was the best of filmed adaptations of the Charles Dickens story. Noted British stage actor Sir Seymour Hicks is Ebenezer Scrooge in this offering adapted by screenwriter H. Fowler Mear and directed by Henry Edwards. It of course is the tale of an old miserly businessman in 1840's London who makes life as tough as it is even more miserable for those around him out of the misery and emptiness he carries with him all his adult life. A late night Christmas Eve visit by the ghost of his long-dead business partner will tell him that he will have additional ghostly apparitions that night and there still may be time to make atonement. Donald Calthrop is Scrooge's employee Bob Cratchit, Mary Glynne is Scrooge's past love Belle and Robert Cochran is the nephew. Hicks made a stage career out playing Scrooge and appeared years before in a silent film adaptation so he's quite familiar with the role but it's not a particularly great performance in this film. The other principal roles are delivered forced or wooden and only some of the minor roles are acted convincingly. This was a 61 minute version of the original 78 minute film so in some fairness it was not the complete intended film but even with that said it is still not that very good. Julius Hagen who was known as the Tsar of Twickenham was the film's producer and head of the small Twickenham film studios in London. He was known for churning out quickie films that were shot on low budget with run times between 60 and 80 minutes. He put out 19 films alone in the year Scrooge came out in 1935. Two years later he was bankrupt and by 1940 was dead. Twickenham lived on though despite being almost bombed out of existence during World War II. The Beatles filmed most of A Hard Days Night, scenes for Help and the rehearsals in Let it Be at Twickenham. An American Werewolf in London and A Fish Called Wanda along with many other notable movies have also been filmed there. I'd recommend checking out the 1935 Scrooge but it's nowhere near the 1951 or 1938 filmed versions. I would give this a 6.0 out of 10.
