Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Scrooge
1951 · Brian Desmond Hurst · Scrooge on Sightlines
An old man in his nightshirt on Christmas morning laughs at his own face in the mirror. He can't stop, and his arms and legs won't do what he tells them. Alastair Sim plays the moment so far past dignity that it tips toward something frightening, and it is the image most people carry away from Brian Desmond Hurst's Scrooge. It's worth asking why a redemption should look so much like a breakdown. The answer lies in everything the film made him watch first.
Start with how the film is built. Dickens gives Scrooge's youth only brief, emblematic glimpses. Noel Langley's screenplay grows them into a second film inside the first. There is Fan, the beloved sister who dies giving birth to Fred, so every cold word Scrooge later says to his nephew carries buried grief and guilt. There is Alice, the fiancée he loses. And there is Mr. Jorkin, a businessman Langley invented outright, under whom the young Scrooge and Marley rise until they take over the firm. These ghosts do more than warn. They dig. They turn up causes.
Deleuze has a name for what the ghosts produce: the recollection-image. This is the flashback in its ordinary sense, a dated piece of the past (that office, that year, the night Fan died) brought back to explain the present. Deleuze was wary of it. To him the flashback is a closed loop. It leaves the present, fetches a memory, and returns with a reason, so memory ends up serving the story the way a witness serves a trial. With some films that is a criticism. With Scrooge it simply describes the design, and seeing the design is what makes the ending land.
Here is the strange part. While the past plays, Scrooge can't touch it. He watches George Cole, as his younger self, make the choices that will harden him. Deleuze calls this figure the seer: someone caught in a situation where he can only look and listen, with nothing he can do. The postwar European cinema Deleuze admired is full of seers who never get their agency back. They wander, they watch, the film ends. Scrooge belongs to an older bargain. He is made a seer for one night so that he can act again in the morning.
That older bargain is what Deleuze calls the movement-image: cinema in which a character takes in a situation and acts to change it. The variant that matters most here is what he calls the imprint, the bond by which a milieu stamps a character and the character stamps it back. Langley's Jorkin sequences are pure imprint. Boardrooms, industrial ambition, the takeover of the firm. We watch commerce press itself into a frightened young man until he becomes its instrument and then its master. The film gives Victorian capitalism a set of rooms and gives Scrooge's cruelty a history. That's why the lens is worth using. Read as a parable, the story says a bad man turns good. Read through the imprint, it says a man was made, and so he can be unmade.
Then there is the light. C.M. Pennington-Richards lights the counting-house and the Cratchit parlor in fairly naturalistic tones. When the spirits come, the film goes Gothic: hard pools of light, deep shadow, fog. Deleuze traces this style to German expressionism, where light and darkness struggle across a gradient and things take on a life that isn't organic, neither quite alive nor quite dead. Marley belongs to that world. Michael Hordern plays him as a tormented man, but what you remember is the chains, whose clanking comes from a soundtrack that is otherwise plain and built around dialogue. In this film, objects can haunt.
The light has a lineage. Pennington-Richards's photography directly echoes the fog and cavernous interiors that Guy Green and Robert Krasker lit for David Lean's Great Expectations (1946). Lean's Oliver Twist (1948), with its looming, enclosed London, supplied the grammar for the ghost sequences. The dissolves and superimpositions that conjure the spirits come from MGM's A Christmas Carol (1938), the studio template Langley's script was revising. Clive Donner's editing deepens them into structure. Dissolves knit present, past and a foreshortened future so cleanly that the film's time travel never confuses. Langley brought a debt of his own from The Wizard of Oz (1939), where he had already staged an inner change as a structured fantasy journey. Hurst's partnership with the composer Richard Addinsell went back to Dangerous Moonlight (1941) and its concerto-style themes. Here Addinsell weaves carols into the score, so communal warmth keeps sounding just outside Scrooge's door. And Sim was answering Seymour Hicks, whose ferocious miser in the first sound Scrooge (1935) had set the baseline. Sim kept the ferocity and found the wound underneath it.
Which brings us back to the mirror. The movement-image closes when action resolves the situation, and the reborn Scrooge does turn toward action. But Sim plays the hinge between night and morning as mania: a body overrun by a feeling it can't yet turn into deeds. In Deleuze's vocabulary, this is pure affect, felt but not yet spent. For a few minutes the old machinery of seeing-then-doing is starting up again and grinding its gears. That's why the joy looks almost unhinged. A man who spent a whole night unable to act suddenly can, and he doesn't know what to do with his arms.
What did this film change? After a slow start with audiences, it became arguably the version that shaped popular expectations of the story more than any other. Part of that is Sim. Part of it is Langley's quiet heresy: he turned a fable into a character study, with supernatural machinery that works like an excavation. The story kept pulling at the people who made it. Decades later, its editor, Donner, came back to direct it himself for television.
So watch it again with one question in mind. When Sim laughs into the glass, who is he laughing at? The old man is still there in the reflection. The young man George Cole played is somewhere behind him. The new one hasn't done anything yet. For a moment, a film that kept memory so neatly in its place lets three Scrooges share one image. Watch his face, and then watch what his hands do next.
Concepts in play
- recollection-image (mnemosign) — Langley's expanded backstory (Fan's death giving birth to Fred, the loss of Alice, the rise under Jorkin) brought back by the spirits as dated pasts that explain present cruelty; a psychoanalytic excavation in which the ghosts uncover causes
- the seer (voyant) — During the visions Scrooge can only watch his past (George Cole's younger Scrooge) and cannot act on it, until the morning restores his agency
- imprint (empreinte) — The invented Jorkin business-world sequences stage Scrooge's moral corrosion as a gradual giving-in to commerce, ending in his and Marley's takeover of the firm: the milieu stamps the man, and the man then masters the milieu
- the movement-image — The overall arc runs from situation to transformed action. The supernatural night is a detour that ends by restoring Scrooge's ability to act, staged in a classical, composed camera style
- expressionism — Pennington-Richards lights the visitations with hard pools of light, deep shadow, fog and chiaroscuro (Marley's arrival, the final spirit's graveyard), and the clanking chains give objects a haunted, non-organic life