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| Carol for Another Christmas | 1964 The poster highlights the stelar cast and the writer, Rod Serling, the same man behind The Twilight Zone |
A Carol for Another Chirstmas A Carol for another Christmas is not an adaptation of a Christmas carol. It’s a remake, in the sense that it takes the core aspects of the classic by Dickens and uses them for a different story.
Daniel Grudge is a bitter man. A rich American industrialist, former navy men, he sits alone in a dark room in his mansion, playing an old record as he looks at a framed display of war medals on the wall. The medals belong to his son, Marley, killed in action during the second World War. His death, along with an already inflexible disposition have turned grudge into an isolationist, who believes the United States should stay out of International affairs, cocerning itself with its own development and progress only.
That goes against the beliefs of his nephew, Fred, and in fact, on Christmas Eve Fred drips by his house to talk about a cultural exchange program at the university that proposes to bring a researcher from Poland to the United States , something his uncle will go out of his way to stop from happening. He explains his position in the most ironic of tones:
“… he wants to spend a year in Poland at the University of… Krakow, was it not? And in exchange for our professor Harris the University of Krakow in Poland would send to our University one of their boys, whose name even if I knew what it was is probably unpronounceable. That’s what it’s known these days as a ‘cultural exchange’.”
Fed soon gives up on changing his uncle’s mind. But he reminds the old man of his son, Marley. He points out that all of the things Grudge has been doing – keeping Marley’s room like a shrine, for instance – are for himself, that have nothing ot do with Marley, with what the young man would have wanted… And not surprisingly, later that night Grudges sees the ghost of his son, only briefly and that serves as an announcement of what is to follow.
It’s Christmas eve, and Grudge is to be visited by three Ghosts… Much like Scrooge was. Only this time the focus is not so much on showing Grudge scenes of his own life, but reather showing him Christmasses in several parts of the world, at several different moments, in order to make him face the opinions he’s been defending so boisterously these past few years.
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| Grudge with his nephew, and his butler on the right |
The Ghost of Christmas past has arguably the best scenes/lines in the movie… He’s a war veteran, who’s very much amused with Grudge’s discomfort. They talk about the past over the coffins of army men killed in action, specifically about the I World War and the II World War… Grudge defends that the United States shouldn’t have gotten involved in either of them to begin with… And the ghost points out that non involvement didn’t work out well the last time.
“Was that how you kept the world from a second world war? Uninvolvement? Stay isolated? (…) After 1918 we got sick of war, fed up. All those American kids getting blown to pieces, alone, out of sight in foreign places with strange sounding names… So for the next 20 years we closed our eyes. Decided what we couldn’t see couldn’t hurt us. France didn’t wanna get involved. Italy took out their shades when Hitler took Austria. England wasn’t about to involve herself when Czechoslovakia went under. And Russia kept the phone off the hook while Poland was destroyed. And before you knew it everybody was singing ‘don’t rock the boat!’ while it sunk slowly to the bottom.”
Further more, he mockes the very idea of non-invasion when Grudge refers to the United States volunteering a “sucker brigade” to every major international conflict.
“Is that what they are, suckers? Is that what your son’s gonna be? (…) 60 000 people die in Flanders, 100 000 in Verdum, the Germans march through Belgium, Austria declares war on Japan, but who cares? It’s a nice summer, Boston is gonna win the world series...”
When Grudge insists that the US should stay on their side of the fence the ghost reminds him that the Atlantic Ocean is nothing but a shallow pond anymore.
“ A couple of supersonic bombers can spit over it! You don’t wanna get involved, sport, you got a job at you, you really got a job. You gotta disinvent the airplane, and the missile, and the submarine and a little old thing called the bomb.(…) Isolation went out with gas light in 57 states. And closing your eyes, that’s for sleeping.”
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| Grudge with the Ghost of Christmas past and on the right, the ghost of Christmas present |
The Grudge even takes Grudge to one of his own memories, in 1945 when he was a navy officer walking across the wreck that had been Hiroshima before the bomb. He along with a young lieutenant visit a field hospital full of burnt victims. School kids who’d been in class when the bomb fell.
“A yellow child is a black child is a white child. Is a chid. Can we agree to that much?”
Grudge meets the ghost of Christmas present over a dinning table with a Christmas feast. The ghost is hapily eating as much as he can while the poor and hungry of the world watch him and Grudge is shocked by how heartless is that ghost and the ghost mocks him… Says that he’s been doing the same for years. He snaps his fingers to make the people go away and asks Grudge whether he’s more comfortable now. Grudge is motionless…
“Mankind, mr. Grudge. In there. A hungry part of mankind. The anguished part. The dispossessed. If you shared a loath of bread with them how would you be relinquishing your freedom? If you joined other nations to administer vaccinations to their children, how would you have dessacrated their flag? If you offered them solace and hope, how would you have made yourself succeptible to tirany?”
Then they talk about the present. About the poor and hungry, about how many were suffering that very night. About the inequalities of the world. The ghost dumps a truck of statistics on Grudge, “the mathematics of now”, while the old man looks at them, and the ghost keeps him there, even when he begs for that to stop.
And then he listens to the children singing Christmas Carols…
“Foreign words, but not necessarily conspiracies to destroy you, mr. Grudge. Just christmas songs, and of those who do not celebrate christmas, songs of hope. They sung in their languages before you did in yours. Your Christmassess have just been a lot merrier, that’s all. And your hope, more of a reality.”
Finally, the ghost of Christmas Future arives and he takes Grudge to the world after the atomic holocaust (that people feared might come at any second during the cold war). He sees the chambers of his own town, ruled by the maddened cowboy that is the leader of the empire of individuality. This part borders on the absurd but it’s also incredibly similar to the trial we see in the very first episode of Star Trek The Next Generation: Encounter at Farpoint, the courts of the post-atomic horror. It is, of course, terrifying to envision a future like that. And when Grudge wakes up to find himself in his home again, he is faced with the same question dozens of Scrooges had before him – although not exactly with these words:
“Are these the shadows of things that will be? Or things that might be only?”
But Sterling Hayden doesn’t play Grudge as the overly excited Sscrooge we are used to see, delighted to discovered that he didn’t miss Christmas after all, and eager to start to do good. Grudge seems… Numb. After all his adventures during the night, and he seems aloof and confused when he talks to his nephew at the door and when he walks to the kitchen. He is definitely changed, but also quite shaken, and the ending is subtle, but in my opinion it could have been a little bit better… The soundtrack is beautiful, though.
A Carol for Another Christmas was comissioned by the United Nations for a series of TV specials about the mission and work of the UN in order to gain support. Rod Serling wrote the script, the same man who created The Twilight Zone. The actors waved their fees due to the importance of the work (Peter Sellers who at the time charged $750000 appeared for only $350 the Screen Actors Guild minimum).
Reviews were mixed when the film first aired in 1964, and most of the criticism had to do with it being long-winded and dull. I can see how that can be true,… Ordinary adaptations of A Christmas Carol focus on depicting scenes from Scrooge’s life whilst here, the encounters with the ghosts are mostly consisted of dialogue and long dialogue at that. But in my opinion, that is what made the message of the film so powerful. The violence of The ghost of Christmas back is frightening as he talks about the statistics of the hungry and dispossessed on the world. The easy manners of the Ghost of Christmas past, have everything to do with a man who has seen too much and doesn’t stress over little things anymore. His speech also has the wisdom of an older mentor who knows exactly how to get to his pupil…
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| The Imperial Me and the Ghost of Christmas future |
That said, the film can be guilty of beeing too strightforward and heavy-handed in relaying its message, which has to do with the educational purposes for which it was made. In addition to that, the script was depressing and not exactly optimistic, even at the end, which was unusual for Serlings scripts.
Following the initial exhibition the film was not broadcasted until 2012 when it aired on TCM. It’s very dark, and a product of the earliest years of the cold war, in a way that there will probably not be another film like this one again… It’s definitely worth watching, at least once…
Carol for Another Christmas | 1964 | Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz | Written by Rod Serling | Britt Ekland, Ben Gazzara, Sterling Hayden, Pat Hingle, Steve Lawrence, Percy Rodriguez, Eva Marie Saint, Peter Sellers, Robert Shaw, James Shigeta, Barbara Ann Teer
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