OFFBEAT CHRISTMAS
Initially scorned, fans 30 years later herald Scrooged as a beloved classic
When the Christmas movie Scrooged first hit theatres in November 1988, it wasn’t welcomed with the gift of good reviews.
Most critics at the time were unimpressed with this modernday version of the 19th-century Charles Dickens novella A Christmas Carol starring Bill Murray. Complaints ran the gamut from too sentimental to too mean and too dark.
“Scrooged is one of the most disquieting, unsettling films to come along in quite some time. It was obviously intended as a comedy, but there is little comic about it, and indeed the movie’s overriding emotions seem to be pain and anger,” said the king of the critics Roger Ebert in his review of the movie. “You can’t bad-mouth A Christmas Carol all the way through and then expect us to believe the good cheer at the end. In his studies of Dickens in preparation for this role, Murray seems to have read only as far as ‘Bah! Humbug!’”
Ouch.
But time, it seems, was this film’s friend. As the years rolled by something interesting, almost Christmas Carol in nature happened — people began to see the good in Scrooged and made it a holiday classic. and now, 30 years after its debut, it is being celebrated with a special Blu-ray, DVD and digital releases.
Scrooged stars Murray as Frank Cross, an odious, ambitious TV network president (the youngest ever), whose only joy seems to come from drinking vodka and making those around him miserable.
He will do anything to get ratings and boost the bottom line including creating crazy, lowest-common-denominator programming. Highlights of his schedule include Robert Goulet’s Cajun Christmas and Lee Majors (a.k.a. The Six Million Dollar Man) in The Night the Reindeer Died. That latter gem comes complete with machine gun-packing Santa Claus.
Finally Frank’s cynicism catches up to him, and he gets visited by three all-knowing and not-so-nice ghosts. They, through classic Dickensian self-reflection and worstcase scenarios, show Frank the sobering error of his ways.
Back in the day, Scrooged cost $42 million to make and earned $80 million at the box office, putting it at No. 13 on the list for the year’s top receipts.
Considered a modest success at the time, the film is now on many of the lists of best Christmas movies that are floating around the internet.
“It’s irreverent. It’s an irreverent Christmas film,” said Karen Allen, who played Claire, the sweet, dogooding love interest in Scrooged. “I can’t think of another irreverent Christmas film off the top of my head.”
She has a point. You are never going to hear a character in a Hallmark holiday movie say something like: “The b---h hit me with a toaster!” as Frank does after being clocked with a shiny four-slicer by The Ghost of Christmas Present (the hilarious Carol Kane).
Allen — whose career includes starring turns in legendary movies including Starman, the Raiders of the Lost Ark and Animal House — says most of the time while working on a movie, it’s rare you get a sense of how the film will turn out or be received. And Scrooged was no different.
“With something like this, which was based on A Christmas Carol and Michael O’Donoghue and Mitch Glazer had written it and Bill was in it and Dick Donner (Richard Donner) was directing it, you know it is certainly going to get a lot of attention. Usually what that means is it’s either going to crash and burn or it’s going to do really well,” Allen said in a recent interview.
“I remember when it came out I honestly don’t remember if it was hands-down loved. In my memory it took about 10 years to build to the stature that it has in terms of people loving it as kind of a Christmas classic. It is on every Christmas and people talk about it as being one of the beloved Christmas films.”
Scrooged was shot during the winter of 1987, and Allen said it was nice to actually portray a season in the actual season.
More often than not, actors filming Christmas movies (it’s a huge industry that sees Hallmark produce 20 plus Christmas movies a year in Vancouver alone) find themselves having to pretend to shiver in the summer.
“I did one of those Hallmark films, though we shot it in Nova Scotia instead of Vancouver, but I did one of those with Sam Elliott where we were bundled up and playing Christmas in the summer,” said Allen about the decade-old film November Christmas.
“Yeah, it is kind of wacky. To tell you the truth, though, I would rather be doing that then playing that it is summer in the middle of winter, which I have done many times in films. There you are freezing and they say: ‘Action,’ and you have to act as though it’s breezy and sunny and wonderful. In between takes, they are throwing the jacket on you and then ripping it off. It’s a little harder than being hot, to me.”
With Christmas close by and traditions in full flight, Allen says she is happily planning her family ’s Christmas celebrations. She says it is easy to get into the holidays when you live in a small quaint New England town that is already getting snow.
And like a lot of people, she turns to holiday movie programming to help her get in the spirit of the season.
“I’m an It’s a Wonderful Life girl, I have to say. It really is truly my favourite film, and I watch it every year,” said Allen about the James Stewart and Frank Capra 1946 classic, before adding, “I love Christmas. Who doesn’t love Christmas?”