The Word Cloud

I didn't plan on leaving it quite this late in the day but here is the second part of my Christmas blog and as I am writing it the film itself is about to start on Channel 5. But don't worry about missing it because it's the colourised version which really does rob it of a lot of its charm. There is considerable argument about which is the best version of the oft-filmed Dickens story 'A Christmas Carol' and based on the response I got last week there is a considerable movement in favour of the Muppet version, but there is far less argument about who is the best Scrooge; it is the part that Alistair Sim was born to play. He was one of our finest comic actors anyway but as Scrooge he simply excelled.
But of course I'm not here to talk about Sim I'm talking about Noel Langley who did this particular screen adaptation, and it would be wrong to ignore the contribution that script makes to the film's success (which goes way beyond Sim's dominating central performance).
I just assumed that the writer of Scrooge would have a raft of Ealing comedies and small British films I had never heard of on his CV, but Langley is actually quite intriguing. He was born in South Africa but worked predominantly in the US, though Scrooge is far from his only UK cedit. His best known credit I was shocked to find is for The Wizard of Oz, a job he won on the basis of his successful children's book the Tale of the Land of Green Ginger. Oz famously went through 3 directors but it was also worked on by 18 writers! Including some I have already blogged about (John Lee Mahin is one of the most surpising names), Langley was one of only 3 to get a credit, ironically since he hated what was done to his script and didn't like the finished film to the extent that he tried to make a sequel using the bits of his original which were cut out.
Adaptation seems to have been a something Langley specialised in; he adapted Dickens again for a largely unregarded version of Pickwick Papers, as well as Tom Browne's Schooldays and Svengali. Swashbucklers seem to have been another interest (and I should make it clear that I'm interpreting from his CV here, I know next to nothing about the man!), he scripted Knights of the Round Table, Prisoner of Zenda (The Stewart Granger version) and, most famously, Ivanhoe.
Though the screenplay work seems to have stopped in the fifties I have to say that my main interest in Langley is his abilty to write in different media. As well as film he was a novellist and playwright, he wrote for both television and radio as well as being a short story writer for various magazines. As a jobbing writer myself who has tried his hand at everything and will happily go where the money is, I identify with this and admire it. A writer isn't a writer unless he writes, doesn't matter what, and Noel Langley was clearly a writer through and through.