I have to say that I’ve never seen that version so I can’t comment on its overall quality, but the scene I dropped onto was the one in which the butcher is delivering Scrooge’s anonymous Christmas morning gift to the Cratchits – a huge turkey to replace the (presumably) much smaller goose for their Christmas dinner. It didn’t sit well with me.
The exterior shot showed the street to be quaint and liberally spattered with pretty half-timbered houses à la some hugely expensive touristy village in the English Home Counties, when a reasonable presumption would dictate that it should have been a dark, gloomy terrace in a poor part of Victorian London.
Cut to the interior shot and the Cratchits arranged around the dining table. The dining room in such a house would have been small and have the air of a hovel about it, however much the dutiful Mrs Cratchit and the kids might have tried to keep it tidy. In the film the room is large, pristine, and expensively furnished. It could easily have doubled as the drawing room in Chatsworth House.
And let’s remember that the Cratchits are grindingly poor, since Bob earns only a derisory salary as a miser’s clerk. That being the case, they would have been dressed accordingly in well-worn clothes that would probably show some evidence of having been routinely patched. So what were they wearing in the film? Fine attire that would have looked perfectly at home on the rich family who owned bloody Downton Abbey! All the family looked well fed, healthy, and comfortably off. Mrs Cratchit even had a hairstyle which bore testimony to the skill of a Hollywood hairdressing salon.
The whole thing was an unconscionable travesty, so how long do you think I sat there, mouth agape and waiting for the next forkful, before I switched it off? Not very long.
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