Henry Winkler stars in An American Christmas Carol, an American/Canadian co-production retelling the classic Charles Dickens novella A Christmas Carol, with the setting this time being Depression-era America. While the time and place may have changed, the end results still respect their source of origin.
#1 by Jason Farrell on November 9, 2011 - 11:14 am
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Really liked the essay from UNKNOWN MOVIES; despite my love for the novel, I would always wind up distracted and bored as I watched this. Now I think this movie need background music in the same way that DRACULA needs background music.
#2 by Read MacGuirtose on November 16, 2011 - 1:21 pm
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I don’t know about the Great Depression, but in Dickens’ time that was definitely not the case. Most businesses were open on Christmas Day, and very few workers got the day off. (Modern readers may see Scrooge’s insistence on Cratchit coming in to work on Christmas Day as one of the most extreme examples of his nastiness, but in fact that wasn’t at all unusual at the time.)
In the Victorian era when Dickens lived, the English were just beginning to take an interest again in Christmas, which at the time had been a long-ignored and mostly forgotten holiday. The royal family got their first Christmas tree only a couple of years before the publication of A Christmas Carol, for instance, and Christmas trees didn’t become common among the hoi polloi till years after. Christmas then just wasn’t the big deal it is now. As a matter of fact, A Christmas Carol was largely responsible for Christmas becoming the major holiday it eventually did; while the holiday’s revival had already begun before Dickens’ story was published (though not long before), the popularity of A Christmas Carol gave it steam and really encouraged its observance.
#3 by Greywizard on November 16, 2011 - 4:19 pm
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Thanks for the correction, Read. I’ll add your information to the review shortly.