Category Archives: miscellaneous; general interest

re the 1938 “A Christmas Carol”

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Regarding the 1938 film A Christmas Carol starring Reginald Owen (as Ebenezer Scrooge) and Gene Lockhart (as Bob Cratchit). This is a seriously flawed film.

The 1951 version with Alastair Sim as Scrooge and Mervyn Johns as Bob Cratchit is not only a much better film – it is the best Christmas Carol ever.

Some flagrant flaws of the 1938 film, which I watched with my son on Christmas Eve this week:

In the opening scene, after Scrooge dismisses Cratchit and the latter shuts down the office and leaves (on Christmas Eve), Cratchit, walking home, encounters some boys having a snowball fight. One of them knocks down Cratchit, who is momentarily flustered, then takes in all in good humor and merrily and joins in the fight.

If that isn’t enough, along comes Scrooge, walking home. One of Cratchit’s snowballs plunks Scrooge, who falls on his back. Scrooge’s hat is damaged when he falls on it. Scrooge is enraged. He fires Cratchit on the spot and makes him pay for the hat.

None of this happens (including any snowball fight), whatsoever, in Dickens’s novella.

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“And yet,” said Scrooge, “you don’t think me ill-used, when I pay a day’s wages for no work.”

The clerk observed that it was only once a year.

“A poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket every twenty-fifth of December!” said Scrooge, buttoning his great-coat to the chin. “But I suppose you must have the whole day. Be here all the earlier next morning.”

The clerk promised that he would; and Scrooge walked out with a growl. The office was closed in a twinkling, and the clerk, with the long ends of his white comforter dangling below his waist (for he boasted no great-coat), went down a slide on Cornhill, at the end of a lane of boys, twenty times, in honour of its being Christmas Eve, and then ran home to Camden Town as hard as he could pelt, to play at blindman’s-buff.

Scrooge took his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern; and having read all the newspapers, and beguiled the rest of the evening with his banker’s-book, went home to bed.

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What outages me about this (yes, outrages, since I cherish the novella and know it by heart) is that the filmmakers thought the story as it is wasn’t good enough or dramatic enough (how could it be any more compelling and heart-wrenching than it actually is?), and so they thought they had to make it more dramatic with Scrooge getting hit by Cratchit’s snowball. And, by the way, Scrooge does not fire Cratchit in the Dickens story. Cratchit reports to work the day after Christmas, in what is one the most compelling of many unforgettable scenes in the novella.

But, in this God awful, stupid movie, Cratchit tearfully tells one of his daughters on Christmas day that he has been sacked.

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After Marley’s ghost visits Scrooge (briefly), Scrooge — in the novella — goes to bed:

“I—I think I’d rather not,” said Scrooge.

“Without their visits,” said the Ghost [Marley’s], “you cannot hope to shun the path I tread. Expect the first to-morrow, when the bell tolls One.”

“Couldn’t I take ’em all at once, and have it over, Jacob?” hinted Scrooge.

“Expect the second on the next night at the same hour. The third upon the next night when the last stroke of Twelve has ceased to vibrate. Look to see me no more; and look that, for your own sake, you remember what has passed between us!”

When it had said these words, the spectre took its wrapper from the table, and bound it round its head, as before. Scrooge knew this, by the smart sound its teeth made, when the jaws were brought together by the bandage. He ventured to raise his eyes again, and found his supernatural visitor confronting him in an erect attitude, with its chain wound over and about its arm.

The apparition walked backward from him; and at every step it took, the window raised itself a little, so that when the spectre reached it, it was wide open.

It beckoned Scrooge to approach, which he did. When they were within two paces of each other, Marley’s Ghost held up its hand, warning him to come no nearer. Scrooge stopped.

Not so much in obedience, as in surprise and fear: for on the raising of the hand, he became sensible of confused noises in the air; incoherent sounds of lamentation and regret; wailings inexpressibly sorrowful and self-accusatory. The spectre, after listening for a moment, joined in the mournful dirge; and floated out upon the bleak, dark night.

Scrooge followed to the window: desperate in his curiosity. He looked out.

The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains like Marley’s Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments) were linked together; none were free. Many had been personally known to Scrooge in their lives. He had been quite familiar with one old ghost, in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below, upon a door-step. The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever.

Whether these creatures faded into mist, or mist enshrouded them, he could not tell. But they and their spirit voices faded together; and the night became as it had been when he walked home.

Scrooge closed the window, and examined the door by which the Ghost had entered. It was double-locked, as he had locked it with his own hands, and the bolts were undisturbed. He tried to say “Humbug!” but stopped at the first syllable. And being, from the emotion he had undergone, or the fatigues of the day, or his glimpse of the Invisible World, or the dull conversation of the Ghost, or the lateness of the hour, much in need of repose; went straight to bed, without undressing, and fell asleep upon the instant.

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Not so in the 1938 film. Scrooge (Reginald Owen), after Marley leaves, opens a window and calls for a night watchman to report an intruder. Three watchmen respond and visit him briefly. They decide he is maybe a little batty.

What reason was this stupid scene interpolated for?

Enough said. On, no, not quite. Many scenes are way too brief for the point to get across, for us to enjoy them. Christmas Eve at Fezziwig’s establishment. Christmas day at Scrooge’s nephew’s. The scenes with each of the three spirits, particularly the Ghosts of Christmas Present and Christmas Yet To Come. They are skipped through without many of the best parts.

And, of course, the concluding scene when Cratchit reports to work the next day is entirely omitted. After all, Cratchit has been fired! In the film, that is.

 

— posted by Roger W. Smith

  December 2022

“You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”

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It is often claimed that either Lenin or Stalin said this. The phrase — as S. J. Taylor. the author of Stalin’s Apologist: Walter Duranty; The New York Times’s Man in Moscow, has noted — “would become the standard rationalization of Stalin’s actions during the First Five-Year Plan, years that would cover the brutal process of collectivization, the ‘liquidation of the kulaks as a class’—and the devastating famine that followed.”

It was Duranty who popularized the phrase, in his poem “Red Square,” published in the New York Times Magazine on September 18, 1932.

Russians may be hungry and short of clothes and comfort
But you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.

Walter Duranty, ‘Red Square, Russia’s Pulsiing Heart’\

 

 

And also in the following article:

“Russians Hungry, But Not Starving”

By Walter Duranty

The New York Times

March 31,1933

Walter Duranty – NY Times 3-31-1933

 

— posted by Roger W. Smith

   November 2022

what sort of man was Dr. Colp?

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I shared this whole letter from my mother to my father — a very long and loving letter, written when my parents were in middle age, seven years before my mother’s untimely death — with my therapist, Dr. Ralph Colp Jr.

The salutation is so tender and touching, I said to him.

It brings tears to my eyes, he replied.

 

my parents, 1944

— posted in loving memory by Roger W. Smith

   November 2022

my mental influences

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I got a great education, almost entirely for free. Realizing this now, I consider myself very fortunate.

But I want to talk mostly about my parents — Alan W. and Elinor Handy Smith (how I miss them!) — and their influence on me. Again, I was very fortunate. How much so I have grown to appreciate over the years. Posthumously, as it were.

Intuition and critical thinking skills. The ability to do mental work requiring great effort. To pursue an area of study: languages or mathematics, for instance; the principles and rules of composition and rhetoric.

To persist in research. The laborious undertaking (only a practitioner can appreciate this) of translation.

Sculpting a piece of writing. Perfecting it and trying to ensure comprehensiveness and accuracy.

Intellectual colloquy. Listening ability. The ability to assimilate and weigh contrary opinions. (How much I have enjoyed this with cherished friends. Incalculable.)

So called emotional intelligence. And what my former therapist, Dr. Colp, called “rapid insight.” He complimented me, saying I had it.

These are gifts which I was bequeathed. This being the case, I made the best of them. I am proud of this and, like Walt Whitman, feel entitled to be “no more modest than immodest.”

My mother. She had a “preternatural” intuitive faculty. Great insight. Emotional sensitivity like that of Dr. Colp, the practitioner of medicine and man of science who was a deep thinker (and a writer as well as physician) with keen analytical abilities; and, at the same time, like my parents, the opposite of emotionally clueless. He never lost or left at the door his humanity.

I must have gotten my memory from my mother. She recalled emotionally significant situations, people, incidents in novelistic detail–minute detail. Something amusing or significant from her youth or young adulthood. Elementary school teachers. Relatives (aunts). Funny things they said or did. Wisdom from her father. Books she read and loved (from both childhood and later, e.g., Little Women, All the King’s Men), words and incidents. She would quote lines and passages from memory, as can I.

Humorous things she remembered and recounted. The oddities and peculiarities of a person. Related as might a Melville with his Bildad and Peleg and Peter Coffin of the Spouter-Inn.

My father. Blessed with native intelligence. A lover of learning, meaning, as was the case with me, intellectual immersion and challenge. For its own sake. (He would recount the sheer pleasure he took in certain school subjects and areas of study.) He was the first in his nuclear family to attend a four year college. Like me, valuing it mostly for intellectual enrichment, rather than regarding a degree as a steppingstone. (The same very true of my mother.)

Insight combined with intellect (rationality). (Thinking mostly of my father.)

My parents’ keen aesthetic sense. They both had it and transmitted this to me and my siblings, who all have it, in spades. This was perhaps the most important thing of all. My mother majored in Fine Arts in college, my father in Music.

Like Dr. Colp, who had every right to be presumptuous, my parents did not seem to care that much about degrees or credentials. Other than being proud, implicitly, of having graduated from prestigious schools. It was the same with me (insofar as regards how I valued having a degree).

The following is a final point or points which I believe are critical.

The abilities I acquired should not be taken for granted. As I have said, they were inherited. But they had to be developed.

Most people, I would guess, think college is everything. The school one attends, what one majors in. This is not quite true. For me, at least. I think also for my Dad (a Harvard graduate). It was quite interesting to see his high school transcript and to find about the languages he studied and how he excelled in math (as did I). He studied Latin and French! (And German in college.) I never knew it.

College (for me) was greatly enriching and intellectually broadening and stimulating, an intellectual finishing school. But high school–early adolescence– in contrast, was foundational, critical. Made all the difference. (A nod to Robert Frost.)

French. Latin. Le subjonctif. Declensions and conjugations.

Magna cum celeritate. Castra ponere. Caesar’s Gallic Wars. Corneille and Racine.

Algebra I and II. Theorems and proofs. Quadratic and simultaneous equations. Cartesian coordinates. Logarithms.

English class. Writing essays in first period. Like pulling teeth, as they say. Coming up with something to say. Trying not to make a fool of oneself.

Lucubration. Intellectual effort.

Workshops and discussion groups in my church youth group.

I have often thought of Samuel Johnson in this regard. Like me, he got an excellent primary school education. But you know what the most important period was? His adolescence. Not his year at Oxford. The influence of his cousin Cornelius Ford, whom he boarded with for a year or two beginning at age sixteen. See W. Jackson Bate’s magnificent biography of Johnson. With Ford’s example and from conversation with him came the brilliant Johnson– scholar, writer. and conversationalist — whom we meet in Boswell’s Life.

 

– posted by Roger W. Smith

  November 2022

“He would do good to another”

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To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit — General Knowledges are those Knowledges that Idiots possess.

— William Blake, Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses

 

AND many conversèd on these things as they labour’d at the furrow, Saying: ‘It is better to prevent misery than to release from misery; It is better to prevent error than to forgive the criminal. Labour well the Minute Particulars: attend to the Little Ones; And those who are in misery cannot remain so long, If we do but our duty: labour well the teeming Earth.… He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars. General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer; For Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars, And not in generalizing Demonstrations of the Rational Power: The Infinite alone resides in Definite and Determinate Identity. Establishment of Truth depends on destruction of Falsehood continually, On Circumcision, not on Virginity, O Reasoners of Albion!

— William Blake, “Jerusalem”

 

— posted by Roger W. Smith

   November 2022

the museum … the library

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The late William S. (Bill) Dalzell was a very important and valued friend to me, beginning in my twenties when I first came to New York.

We worked at the same place, 218 East 18th Street — technically not for the same employer, since Bill was a self-employed printer.

We hit it off immediately. Bill (as I turned out to be) was a lover of his adopted city. He grew up in Williamsburg, a suburb of Pittsburgh.

He had many pregnant thoughts. We had such interesting conversations.

He was a confirmed bachelor and a creature of habit.

He never worked on weekends.

On Saturday mornings, he would go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He would begin in the cafeteria, nursing a cup of coffee and lost in thought.

He said that for him the museum was like a cathedral. It had that effect on him mentally. Either explicitly or implicitly, he was also thinking of Norte Dame Cathedral. He had been there several times and said it was “the holiest place” he had ever visited.

Which brings to mind the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue.

It has that effect on me. The beautiful building. The interior. The high ceilings and sunlight streaming through. The staff. The “serious,” “dedicated” sense of purpose and calm quietness. The calming and focusing effect it has on me mentally.

 

— posted by Roger W. Smith

   October 2022

addendum (his character)

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Elaborating further on my latest post

his character

his character

Was my praise of my father fulsome? A Falstaff and all that.

Enumerating such things (as James Joyce did in the case of his own father), I would say that I got from my father:

– intelligence

– good nature towards all and sundry

– conscientiousness

– a sense of humor

Regarding personal flaws, mine and everyone else’s:

I don’t choose friends or intimate acquaintances (to the extent one chooses one’s spouse, significant others, and closest friends) based on a checklist.

If I see good in someone, humanity, sincerity, etc., that is enough for me. There may be egregious failings as well.

I greatly value the friendships I have formed with intellectuals and deep thinkers. I do not, however, look down per se on people less well read or educated than me. This is not just out of kindness of indulgence on my part. There are all sorts of wisdom and intelligence that one can profit from. And, character means a lot to me. Plus – as an afterthought – I have observed wit and insight in persons who don’t necessarily read a lot. This is something my father, who was entitled to pride himself on his education, was very capable of.

I have tended for most of my life to be very self-critical. I am more able now to live with myself when I do something “wrong” out of heedlessness or resulting from willful misbehavior. But I don’t just forgive myself or give myself a pass. I have not changed in that respect.

Regarding friends and acquaintances of mine who have been guilty of transgressions or have character flaws — or what seem to be misguided beliefs — I err far on the side of tolerance. And the same with those who have problems causing them to be castigated as deviant or abnormal.

I was greatly influenced by the Bible when I was young, how Jesus treated sinners: Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

and

Now the tax collectors and sinners were all gathering around to hear Jesus. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them” (Luke 15:1-2).

And Walt Whitman:

This is the meal equally set, this the meat for natural hunger,
It is for the wicked just the same as the righteous, I make appointments with all,
I will not have a single person slighted or left away,
The kept-woman, sponger, thief, are hereby invited,
The heavy-lipp’d slave is invited, the venerealee is invited;
There shall be no difference between them and the rest

— Watt Whitman, Song of Myself

 

— posted by Roger W. Smith

   July 2022

James Joyce on his father

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James Joyce said of his father, John Stanislaus Joyce, “I got from him his portraits, a waistcoat, a good tenor voice, and an extravagant licentious disposition.” In Ulysses, Simon Dedalus is a version of the author’s father. While the fictional character is a bad provider for his family, leaving his daughters penniless, James Joyce also portrays Simon as witty and good company outside of his home, popular in bars and gifted with a wonderful tenor voice that soars in the novel’s “Sirens” episode. Of his father’s influence on the book, Joyce told a friend, “The humor of Ulysses is his; its people are his friends. The book is his spittin’ image.”’

— James Joyce exhibit, Morgan Library

I can relate to this portrayal.

 

— posted by Roger W. Smith

   July 2022

The path leading them wherever they choose.

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Around 4 p.m. on Father’s Day.

I am sitting, rather bored, in a bar on Seventh Avenue.

I have a good view of the street.

It’s a lovely Sunday afternoon. A stream of pedestrians keeps passing by.

Where are they going?

Who knows? They themselves probably don’t.

They are walking on air. The energy of the City propels them along.

Multiple attractions, things to do. Oh, to be a part of it.

The path leading them wherever they choose.

 

– posted by Roger W. Smith

  June 19, 2022

my Ukraine post updated

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See

my comments on Ukraine