It’s into the 1910s next day, with The Adventure of the Wrong Santa Claus, a diverting silent short from 1914 directed by the prolific Charles M. Seay. This one sees a cheeky burglar sneak into a wealthy family’s home and nick all the kids’ Christmas presents. The bounder! Not to worry, amateur detective Octavius (Barry O’Moore) is visiting for the holidays and will put his sleuthing skills to the test to save the season.
To be honest, this doesn’t involve much detective work, just a lot of chasing and a bit of argy-bargy, though there is a pretty exciting bit where Octavius catches onto a moving train. It suffers from the pacing issues I mentioned earlier, with some drawn-out scenes of our hero hanging about and flirting with a pretty young guest before the more thrilling stuff.
The good detective has agreed to play Santa for the party, but it all kicks off when he goes to get changed and rumbles the burglar. This leads to some hijinks with ‘good’ Santa chasing ‘bad’ Santa all over town, though I do feel this part outstays its welcome.
With justice served, we segue into an odd extended ending with Octavius and his crush trying to sneak away from the tykes for a celebratory snog. This part’s interesting as they end up breaking the fourth wall to stare at the audience, as if to say “bugger off and give us some privacy!”
This was apparently part of a long-running series featuring Octavius, who is a fancypants, more roguish Sherlock Holmes type. It’s all good fun, though not as jolly as I’d hoped. I’m also noticing that these old films seem fascinated with burglars and the rich/poor class divide. Interesting.
I follow this up with some old-timey Russian weirdness with 1913’s The Night Before Christmas, which you would have a hard time mistaking for the earlier American 1905 effort. This one’s a bit of a culture shock for me, having been directed in the Russian Empire by Ladislav Starevich and based on a macabre yarn by Nikolai Gogol. I’ll admit I give up trying to understand what the hell’s going on pretty early, but it’s still a fascinating watch.
There’s much strangeness going on in an old Ukrainian village involving a chubby witch and her demon accomplice stealing the moon and putting men in sacks and stuff. There are some gnarly, cool for the time effects to portray the creepy demon’s moon-pinching and later soaring around in the sky with a chunky Cossack on his back.
Later, the demon shrinks down to tiny size to jump about a bit before stowing away in a dude’s pocket in a set-piece that leaves me stunned. I think this was done using very early stop-motion techniques and it looks fabulous. From what I can find online, it seems Starevich was quite the pioneer of early animation techniques and he really shows off his skill here. Top job.
The film has some sort of plot about a cute woman demanding a suitor bring her a fancy pair of shoes from the Prince of Russia but I can’t really follow it, despite some occasional intertitles doing their best to keep us up to speed. It’s all very trippy, with another standout effects scene involving some sort of sorcerer with magic stuff flying in and out of his mouth. It's mesmerising and memorable, but I’ll be buggered if I can tell you what any of this has to do with Christmas.
1913’s Old Scrooge follows, from director Leedham Bantock and it’s yet another take on the Dickens story. This one leans a little more heavily on the intertitles, lifting a lot of text directly from the source novel but for me it relies on the words too much, rather than letting the visuals, performance and movie magic carry the tale.
This has an interesting framing device, featuring an actor portraying Dickens himself discussing his inspiration for the tale. It’s different, but for a short film it really starts to drag. Most of the film is set in Scrooge’s small office and it’s more than 20 minutes in (halfway!) before a ghost arrives to spice things up. Perhaps they didn’t have the budget or the means to show much spectral action, but I don’t go into a ‘Scrooge’ film to watch extended scenes of Ebeneezer and Cratchit just blethering.
Luckily the ghost scenes are fun and impressive, with lots of those spooky superimpositions used to create our festive phantoms. The film cheats a bit, cutting corners by having Jacob Marley represent all the ghosts, but I appreciate the economical storytelling. It’s a shame they couldn’t have been more time-efficient with a lot of the other scenes.
Seymour Hicks gives an engaging, if slightly hammy turn as Scrooge, though the constantly cutting intertitles don’t give his performance much room to breathe. Hicks looks a bit young to play the old miser, but I’m surprised to discover he played the role thousands of times on stage and many times on the big screen too. He’s a safe pair of hands.
It’s another thought-provoking watch but sadly doesn’t grab my attention in the same way the 1910 version did. It seems like early filmmakers couldn’t get enough of Ebeneezer, but I’m starting to feel a bit ‘Scrooged’ out. Time to leap into the era of sound, I think.
Comments