Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol (1962)
Starring Jim Backus as Mr. Magoo
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We are sorry that this post did not go out today, nor did yesterday’s scheduled Christmas poem. Some maintenance at Substack seems to have cause us a publication delay. Please excuse any duplication on our part as we try to get our posts to all of our subscribers. A very MERRY CHRISTMAS to you, and may “God bless us, every one!”
Sometimes, when people ask us which was the best film adaptation of Charles Dickens’ immortal novel of greed and redemption, we answer, “You’re not going to believe what we say!” We know very well the Alistair Sim version, and lately we’ve come to admire Sim’s work as an actor generally, though I don’t believe we’ve yet featured him here at Word and Song. And I’m aware that the Muppets have their partisans, and I guess even Albert Finney can claim a few hearts in the musical Scrooge (1970), and good gracious, how far can you go wrong when your cast includes Alec Guinness, Kenneth More, and Edith Evans? But in our opinion, if you want the work that does these two things simultaneously, namely, it preserves much of the rich language and the haunting and deeply religious mood of the original, and it catches a young audience with that lightness of heart that Dickens ever kept before him even in darkness, then Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol is it, and that’s why it’s our Film of the Week — something you can share with everybody in the family.
You will say, “You’ve been tippling a few too many holiday cups!” Actually, I haven’t tippled any at all — but that might not be so bad an idea, now that you mention it. Let me say two things straight out, one as a matter of opinion, and the other as something that Debra and I were accustomed to when we were children, but seems almost unimaginable now. The first is that Jim Backus’ voice as Mr. Magoo, in all the many cartoons wherein he played that crotchety, irascible, endearing, and near-blind little man of immense imagination, is — in my opinion — the greatest single cartoon voice in American film. I love Mel Blanc, and if you say, “Who was the greatest voice-maker in cartoons?”, Mel wins going away. Nobody comes close. Mel could do, off the top of his head, Bugs imitating Daffy or Daffy imitating Bugs; and who can forget the Tasmanian Devil saying to Bugs, in a brief moment of calm, “Why-for you bury me in the cold cold ground?” Or Bugs-Bwoonhilda, singing to Elmer Fudd-Siegfried — but if I go on with Mel Blanc, I’ll not come to an end. And still, if I had to name one voice alone, it would be Backus as Mr. Magoo. He could rail, chuckle, snarl, laugh out loud, sing, ponder, do anything in that inimitable comic old-man gurgle of a voice. The second thing is that Mr. Maggo’s Christmas Carol was the first in a pretty long series of novels or plays that the cartoonists put on for Mr. Magoo to star in, a couple of years later. Those would include Mr. Magoo as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Mr. Magoo as — what else would a nearly blind man be? — Don Quixote, Mr. Magoo as Friar Tuck, and many more.
I’ve always told my students that the heart of Dickens’ novel comes when the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come brings Scrooge into the Cratchit home, and the old miser sees the brace and the crutch that Tiny Tim used to bear, set lovingly aside in a corner, and he hears young Peter Cratchit reading to his younger brother and sister: “And he took a small child, and set him in their midst.” Dickens didn’t have to spell that whole scene out for his readers. They knew the words of the gospel, and what Jesus did, gently and firmly to reprove his disciples for bickering about who in the Lord’s kingdom was going to be more prominent than whom. Keep that in mind as the touchstone of the novel, and you will appreciate that glorious moment when Scrooge wakes up the next morning, crushed in his heart and changed utterly and raised up again, and he says he doesn’t know what day it is. “I don’t know anything at all!” cries Scrooge. “I am quite a baby!” Yes, precisely. It took you long enough, old man, but we believe it when Dickens closes the novel by saying that no one ever kept Christmas better in his heart than did Scrooge, from that day on.
The cartoon is faithful to the book in the most obvious sense: almost all of the dialogue is from Dickens. The writers couldn’t fit in the nephew, Fred, so that part of the plot, Scrooge’s reentry into family life, is not here, but we are well compensated by the wonderful treatment of the Cratchit family, a glance at Scrooge’s loneliness as a boy, and the terrific songs. You have to have fun with Dickens, or you may as well toss his books in the fire; but if you can’t have fun with Dickens, what fun can you have? So the writers have fun. It is hard to choose which of their songs is the finest: Scrooge and Bob Cratchit (Jack Cassidy) singing a duet from separate rooms, Scrooge singing about money and Bob singing about how cold he is; or the Cratchits singing at Christmas, such as they can celebrate it in their poverty, without a Christmas tree, and without razzleberry dressing. But we give the prize to the ghastly and jaunty song of the thieves, who have robbed a dead man’s own bedchamber while he lay there in state — full of such wonderful rhymes as, “We’re rep-re-hensible! We’ll steal your pen — and pencible!”
But through it all, without anyone’s needing to be glaringly obvious, the gospel shines. A human soul hangs in the balance, and is saved, not at all by his merit, but by a grace that shows him what he has been, what he is, and what he might have been, and what he might still might become. So we can say with Tim, from hearts filled with Christmas hope, “God bless us, every one!”
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Team Muppets here to say I’ll give Mr Magoo a try! Merry Christmas!
I remember this version as a kid-it was probably my first introduction to the Christmas Carol (that being said I really didn’t read the whole thing till it recently became a yearly family read aloud — at the insistence of my kids who are Dickens fans!). We can’t wait to add it to our list of Christmas movies! Thank you again for enriching our family culture!