Until the Muppets got their hands on it—and even then it took two decades for everyone to come around—the 1951 version of the story was virtually undefeated as being considered the definitive film version of A Christmas Carol. Which means that it was considered better than those adaptations which came before it as well as those which followed. The reason for the former is easy enough to explain: never in the history of cinema to that point had the novel been filmed so faithfully or without severe alterations in tone. This is a dark portrait of Scrooge’s story and doesn’t shy away from that—as far as 1951 censorship would allow. But in the decades since, the full darkness of the story has been explored in any number of ways by any number of filmmakers with a greater reputation than Brian Desmond Hurst. So what gives?
Dickens gave him a screenplay in the form of his novel. Hurst worked with screenwriter Noel Langley to do the one thing that every other filmmaker up to then had done: pare away the scenes they didn’t need. Writing a movie version of A Christmas Carol is tantamount to editing a film. You shoot lots of footage and lots of scenes and what works stays while what doesn’t is cut. After cutting out what they didn’t want, didn’t need or couldn’t use, all that really needed to be done to make the definitive version to date was film what Dickens wrote and get out of the way.
But Hurst and Langley went one step beyond. Looking at the cinematic prose Dickens had given them with all extraneous elements shorn away, the one significant flaw in the novel became much more obvious. While the entire story is dedicated to explaining the motivation behind how the most hated man in London redeemed himself and became the Christmas spirit personified, Dickens is surprisingly light on scenes explaining how Scrooge made it from a nice young man to mean old crone.
The 1951 version of A Christmas Carol is not, in fact, one of the most faithful adaptations of all time; just the most faithful to that point. The sequence set in the past is greatly expanded over what Dickens wrote and—most importantly—the key figure here is a character invented by the filmmakers who has no analogue in the source material. Mr. Jorkin slithers his way into the Christmas of the past to become the serpent who tempts Scrooge and Marley to the dark side of greed and capitalistic excess.
It was an audacious move and a calculated risk that was almost certain to shock purists. But it paid off handsomely by intensifying the psychology of the story. In the original story, the leap from nice guy to mean man is incomplete; perhaps it makes sense to a moral society steeped in the belief of good and evil, but to modern sensibilities it is just a big psychological black hole. That the move was successful is confirmed not just by the long-lasting esteem in which the film is held, but by all the adaptations which have followed that recognize the story’s flaw and attempt to fill it with their own scenes of psychological motivation.
