The 1951 version was not, however, an instant classic. In fact, for decades it fell in the shadow of the 1938 version starring Reginald Owen. After being released in its native England under the title Scrooge, the film was shipped to America (retitled A Christmas Carol) for its holiday premiere by United Artists, its North American distributor. It was scheduled for a showing at Radio City Music Hall until the Hall's management expressed the belief that the film was too depressing for its audience. What movie the management of Radio City Music Hall was thinking of remains a mystery.

When A Christmas Carol was finally released in the states, it didn't help that its premiere night wasn't Christmas but... Halloween. Well, it is a ghost story, it's true, but the spirit of the story belongs in a different hemisphere altogether. The box office was meager and as quickly as it came, it went. Three years later, it received a television showing and slowly, like another Christmas classic, It's a Wonderful Life (1946), it began to gain ground in the realm of Christmas Carol adaptations. As the decades rolled on its popularity increased until, by the eighties, it was the most beloved adaptation of the novella committed to film. A large part of that success is due in part to the extraordinary talents of Alastair Sim.

Although there will always be dispute over which is Alastair Sim's finest screen performance, there's little doubt as to which is the best known. His 1951 characterisation of Charles Dickens' notorious curmudgeon Ebenezer Scrooge is not only generally regarded as definitive, but is also the only one of his films to achieve wide circulation in America, where it became a Christmas television perennial to rival The Wizard of Oz (US, 1939). There, it was known by the title of Dickens' original story A Christmas Carol, but in Britain it was named after the lead character.

This movie is is over 60 years old, but has aged beautifully as the acting, the lighting, the editing, the musical score, the thorough backstory and the timing, deliver to the viewer a depth not reached in other versions. Especially effective was the stark black and white contrast, because instead of making the film look dated, it did just the opposite, enhancing the cold misery and the horror in grand noir style. No one suffered more from the cruel self-reflection than this Scrooge, Alastair Sim, perhaps the most awesome actor to ever fulfill this role. This hard-hitting version revealed more vividly the events that shaped Scrooge’s actions and attitudes as portrayed by the Ghost of Christmas Past.