Forget Saint Paul; forget Tim Leary: the West’s greatest embodiment of the conversion experience is Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The film/TV versions are all but endless, and due to the strength of the story, a lot of them are pretty good. Critical opinion agrees with what my father told me when I was a kid: the British Alastair Sim version is tops, but the tale is effective whether it’s Mr. Magoo’s musical version (now edited because the graveyard scene was too scary for kids) or Bill Murray’s Scrooged transposition. Tonight I’m watching one I haven’t seen since childhood, the 1938 Hollywood version with Reginald Owen, on TCM at 8 tonight.
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- alex 11-26-2005 3:55 am