Scrooge

Miserly Ebenezer Scrooge (played by Seymour Hicks and looking particularly decrepit) is given a tour of his cold, grasping Christmases - past, present and future - by the restless shade of his deceased partner Jacob Marley. Similar to the 1901 Robert Paul version, the iconic three ghosts are replaced by Marley (a deviation from the original popularised in J. C. Buckstone's 1901 theatrical retelling). Typical of the era, special effects are simple double exposures but that doesn't detract from the 'dreaminess' of the story and Hicks, who frequently played the humbugging skin-flint is quite good (he also stared in a 'talkie version' in 1932). The film opens with a brief introduction to the provenance of the original story and (unlike the earlier silent versions) there are extensive intertitles featuring lines of dialogue that will be familiar to anyone who has read the book or seen the 'talkie' versions. The version I recently watched on You-tube would have benefitted from a musical score.

Seymour Hicks, in a long and distinguished career, had a specialty of playing Scrooge on stage for many a decade. He first essayed the role in 1901, when barely past thirty and got bad reviews because he couldn't play 'old' well -- he got better at it. In his time, he committed the role to film twice: in this silent film (re-edited in the mid-twenties) and in a sound version in 1935.

In this earlier version he gives a fine performance, but it is quite clearly gauged for the stage. He twitches, he shakes himself out of camera range and he is the angriest Scrooge I have ever seen: not in the sense of ready to lose his temper, but angry all the time. It's an interesting interpretation and must have been a corker on stage. But on the theater screen it is, alas, just too big.

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.

His Scrooge is the result of long term experience, on stage, later in film and this is the main detail for see this version, proposing a profound different character by other adaptations.

Scrooge reminds the look of a homeless, he is animated by fears, his angry is fruit of deep bitterness and the change seems, more obvious than you feel from other adaptations, by the terrible risk of death.

A good point - the ghosts. And the office becoming his home.

It is one of precise crafted versions , offering, in many senses, just more than you expect from a film made in 1913 and from a short version of A Christmas Carol. And significant contribution to that is the merit of Mr. Hicks, no doubts.

At around 40 minutes, Old Scrooge is much longer than its predecessors (Scrooge or Marley's Ghost (1901) & A Christmas Carol (1910)), but it's the same essential presentation. The standout here is Seymour Hicks, as the titular character, who seems very rough around the edges. Once again, Jacob Marley replaces the three Christmas spirits and, once again, they use superimposed images to create the ghostly visions. I would consider this to be the best of the three silent film adaptations I've seen, but the version I saw didn't have any musical accompaniment, so that made it more tedious to watch.