CinemaSerf
Feb 14, 2023
6/10
This is a bit like reading the book, only with animated rather than static photo plates interspersed between the pages. Seymour Hicks is Dickens' eponymous miser who works and lives, frugally in the extreme, in his one one room counting house. It is Christmas eve and he reluctantly allows his clerk ("Cratchit") the day off tomorrow and settles down beside his meagre fire to count his gold and go to sleep before.... This is an extremely abridged version of the story. It spends rather a disproportionate amount of time on the preamble, but the more vindicating elements - the ghosts - make only brief appearances. Given this was made in 1913, the visual effects that create these apparitions are astonishingly effective. They float in and around Hicks with a chilly eeriness which, coupled with the ambient cold that the photography engenders, actually makes this quite an interesting adaptation. Maybe too much reading - but the slides are authentic to the novel, and the whole thing is a chilling and watchable example of very early British cinema.