Last night, after much frustration and fiddling with the remote, I watched on Amazon Prime the Albert Finney Scrooge, a movie I've always disliked. I finally watched the whole kaboodle. Finney's Scrooge seems younger than George C. Scott and Alastair Sim, my two favorites, but I liked his performance. I thought most of the performances were good, but I loved Edith Evans and Alec Guinness. Laurence Naismith, who plays Fezziwig, was Kris Kringle on Meredith Willson's musical Here's Love and Pangloss in the 1958 London production of Candide, so it was fun to see him.
What I disliked about the movie: most of the musical staging and about 75% of Leslie Bricusse's score, and much of his screenplay's additions to Dickens: the milk of human kindness nonsense and the very funny scene in hell between Scrooge, Marley, and several extras carrying a huge chain. I continued to have the feeling the movie was trying too hard to be Oliver!
At least I have now seen it all.
