Tea at Trianon: Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol (1962)

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, January 6, 2025

Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol (1962)

My first exposure to Dickens. From Anthony Esolen:

I’ve always told my students that the heart of Dickens’ novel comes when the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come brings Scrooge into the Cratchit home, and the old miser sees the brace and the crutch that Tiny Tim used to bear, set lovingly aside in a corner, and he hears young Peter Cratchit reading to his younger brother and sister: “And he took a small child, and set him in their midst.” Dickens didn’t have to spell that whole scene out for his readers. They knew the words of the gospel, and what Jesus did, gently and firmly to reprove his disciples for bickering about who in the Lord’s kingdom was going to be more prominent than whom. Keep that in mind as the touchstone of the novel, and you will appreciate that glorious moment when Scrooge wakes up the next morning, crushed in his heart and changed utterly and raised up again, and he says he doesn’t know what day it is. “I don’t know anything at all!” cries Scrooge. “I am quite a baby!” Yes, precisely. It took you long enough, old man, but we believe it when Dickens closes the novel by saying that no one ever kept Christmas better in his heart than did Scrooge, from that day on.

The cartoon is faithful to the book in the most obvious sense: almost all of the dialogue is from Dickens. The writers couldn’t fit in the nephew, Fred, so that part of the plot, Scrooge’s reentry into family life, is not here, but we are well compensated by the wonderful treatment of the Cratchit family, a glance at Scrooge’s loneliness as a boy, and the terrific songs. You have to have fun with Dickens, or you may as well toss his books in the fire; but if you can’t have fun with Dickens, what fun can you have? So the writers have fun. It is hard to choose which of their songs is the finest: Scrooge and Bob Cratchit (Jack Cassidy) singing a duet from separate rooms, Scrooge singing about money and Bob singing about how cold he is; or the Cratchits singing at Christmas, such as they can celebrate it in their poverty, without a Christmas tree, and without razzleberry dressing. But we give the prize to the ghastly and jaunty song of the thieves, who have robbed a dead man’s own bedchamber while he lay there in state — full of such wonderful rhymes as, “We’re rep-re-hensible! We’ll steal your pen — and pencible!” (Read more.)