It's 1979, the ratings might have slipped a little bit this season, but last year Happy Days was the third-most-popular show on television - tied with Mork & Mindy, and just barely behind Laverne & Shirley and Three's Company. So, logically, now is the perfect time to cast Henry Winkler as a Great Depression-era New England equivalent of Ebenezer Scrooge for a TV movie, and keep him in atrocious age makeup for most of the runtime, yes?
- Look, I need to emphasize just how bad the makeup is; it looks like the Fonz had a supervillain origin story involving an accident in a rubber factory.
- Ever since I watched the grimdark 2019 miniseries version, I haven't been able to stop thinking about whether any particular iteration of Scrooge (or analogue) would be as grossly depraved as Guy Pearce plays him; Barry Zuckerkorn's Evil Twin here just might qualify. His establishing wickedness on Christmas Eve is to foreclose on the mortgage of a Black farm family, repossess the orphanage's piano, and demand to liquidate the town bookstore's stock as "scrap paper, a penny a pound" when the proprietor can't make his payments.
- Similarly, subtext definitely being for cowards, Benedict Slade (Scrooge) also pooh-poohs a rare first edition of A Christmas Carol the bookstore owner begs him not to tear up, just for salvaging the leather binding.
- This version's Cratchit analogue (Thatcher) is played by R.H. Thomson, who basically looks like if teenage Dave Foley was a linebacker. Slade fires him (on Christmas Eve!) for daring to suggest that, as the richest man in town, he might have the capital to buy and reopen the quarry.
- The Marley figure is named Jack Latham, and the way Winkler mumbles I had to double-check on IMDB to make sure it wasn't - as would be bizarrely ironic - Jack Layton.
- But regardless, you'd best start believing in Cancon time-wasters, you're in one; the quaint New England town (consisting of a small main street and some 19th-century industrial buildings) was filmed in Elora, ON (and the nearby Elora Gorge) not far from Guelph. Recent other productions shooting there include 2017/2019's It, and 2007's Lars and the Real Girl!
- Young Slade breaks up with his girlfriend explicitly because he's a Henry Ford-like/Taylorist assembly line booster for the sake of the profit margin, rebelling against the insistence of his boss (her father!) on hand-made quality workmanship in their furniture mill.
- Which...that's actually a little clever, with regards to the Americanization, of making him an industrialist figure in the 19th century and a financier in the 20th? There's a whole scene of him pitching Latham (Marley) on how the future of consumer goods is rent-to-own, because a smart businessman can soak the customer for 150-200% of retail, considering interest...more, if you repossess and resell their furniture. Which, in the Present, he very much does, going around with Thatcher and a couple of movers to seize goods with court orders, and dump them in his ramshackle warehouse/living area.
- 2/3 of the Ghosts are pretty boring here; Christmas Past and Present are just played by the same actors as the characters Slade has wronged that morning (the orphanage director, the bookseller) being all coy and twee about it. Conversely - see above! - Christmas Future (previously seen as the proud dirt farmer who won't give Slade the satisfaction of begging for an extension on the mortgage payments) is for some reason representing the far future, by which I mean he's dressed like he walked out of a disco in 1979...?
- However, re: Christmas Past, the mustache they give Winkler for Middle-Aged Slade is fucking hilarious.
- It seems pretty on brand for this version that Slade's version of being a better man is being a better, slightly less surly capitalist? In fact, he's reverting to industrialist in the end, and intends to reopen the old handmade furniture mill by apprenticing an orphan like he was - including the creepy pitch of an old man actively recruiting an orphan boy into capitalism. This is not heartwarming, and I'm not sure why the movie thinks it is.
FINAL RATING: 2/10. An oddball curiosity, only of note to aficionados or Henry Winkler completionists.