A Christmas Carol (1938) on Netflix
Ebenezer Scrooge refuses his nephew Fred's dinner invitation and turns away two charity collectors. He fires his clerk Bob Cratchit, and Jacob Marley's ghost warns him three spirits will come.
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- Rotten Tomatoes100%
Trailer
Plot summary
Ebenezer Scrooge runs a counting-house in nineteenth-century London and wants nothing to do with Christmas. On Christmas Eve his nephew Fred invites him to dinner, and two gentlemen ask him for money for charity; he refuses both. He lets his clerk Bob Cratchit have Christmas Day off but orders him to come in early the day after. When a snowball knocks off Scrooge's hat, Scrooge fires him and keeps back a week's wages, and Bob spends what he has left on his family's Christmas dinner. At home that night the ghost of his late partner Jacob Marley warns him to mend his ways, saying three spirits will visit him.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about A Christmas Carol (1938)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Gene Lockhart was picked to play Bob Cratchit not for his looks but because he hosted annual Hollywood Christmas parties where he and his family staged readings of the Dickens story. His wife Kathleen and daughter June, making her screen debut, were cast as well.
- After Lionel Barrymore dropped out, MGM abandoned plans for a major motion picture and made A Christmas Carol as an economical "B" picture with a second-tier cast and a running time of only 69 minutes.
- MGM made 375 prints of A Christmas Carol to guarantee first-run playdates over the Christmas season, an early example of the saturation booking later familiar from children's matinées.
- MGM began syndicating the film to TV stations in 1956, and it became a Christmas perennial for decades, a staple of Chicago's Family Classics on WGN-TV, airing on Turner Classic Movies since the late 1990s.
