Scrooge

Alastair Sim plays Ebenezer Scrooge, Charles Dickens’ miserly old businessman who hates Christmas. You really should know the story.

This is an under rated Christmas classic. It’s easy to drown in a pool of A Christmas Carol adaptations (there are some that go back to the 1910s), but Scrooge stands head and shoulders above the others.

Sim’s performance is remarkable. Scrooge is a difficult character to get right; over-do it and you end up with a laughable cliché, under-do it and you don’t get the point across. Sim has a way of making Scrooge genuinely cruel, whilst maintaining a slight comedic tone. He’s not laugh out loud funny, but also not scare-your-kids scary.

Hurst manages to capture some of the essence of Christmas in his style and set design. Everything is larger than life from the snow and the houses through to the costumes and special effects. It’s not a film grounded in reality, which makes it timeless.

Scrooge is Christmas done right.