Is the pudding still singing in the copper, Peter?

Scrooge

(1951)

First Dickens I ever read, in my high school library, was a dramatization of this, done, I believe, by the man himself. Between then (1969 at the latest) and this year, the only other Dickens I read was Bleak House. This year, though, I declared Dickens year and read a shitload of Dickens, including, in the pat 48 hours, the short story/novella that was adapted for this film. So now I know . . .

Well, first, I've never seen an earlier film adaptation of this, so I don't know whether the makers of this film deserve all the credit, but there are lots and lots of changes in the Ghost of Christmas Past segment, and all of them for the better:

• in the novella, Fan is explicitly younger than Ebeneezer; in the film, he is the younger, and his mother died giving him life, which makes a neat parallel with Fan and her son Fred--and her deathbed scene, the most sentimental scene in the film, is also missing in the text;
• Ebenezer's betrothed, Alice, marries and has a daughter in the novella, but no moviegoer wants to know that the protagonist has no chance at love, so here she becomes an unmarried do-gooder; we also have a scene with her before Scrooge becomes a dick, which makes his initial love more credible;
• all of the business stuff is new: Fezziwig's business failure; Scrooge's meeting Marley; Scrooge and Marley's power play to seize the business; Marley's deathbed scene--none of it is in the source text, all of it is critical to the film's depiction of who, exactly, Scrooge is.

Except for Scrooge declaring himself "too old" for redemption, the interaction with the ghosts of Christmas Present and Future are essentially as in Dickens's text--the film's main contribution being the addition of the tearjerking "Barbara Allen" to the soundtrack--but the filmmakers recognized better than the master that the key to redemption is the past.

God, what a grand film!