Konterr Brilliant and touching

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Rio Hayward All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Tyreece Hulme One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

pynchonv-89350 This should be rerun now, and every year that our current president is current. The words of Peter Sellers' Imperial Me could've been written about Trump specifically. The nuclear devastation will be provided later. The script is Serling at his most pessimistic, and yet terrifyingly prescient.

oceanchick Thrilled to see the all-star "movie star" cast appearing in this piece, I watched this on TCM as part of their A Christmas Carol -a- thon. I didn't go into the movie expecting too much because I know it was made for TV and would be a very government film akin to Frank Capra's "Why We Fight" series. I sadly realized 4 minutes into the picture that this would be no better than the government message film "I Want You (1951)".I will not go into the how's and why's this made for TV "holiday" drama was made as it can be read in the synopsis and other reviews. I will not address the extreme pro-UN message it attempts to pound into the viewers heads. I will instead focus on the movie briefly from a technical viewpoint.Before I go into the flaws, I will point out that the movie has a couple sequences that are disturbing (in a good way), absurd and in the deepest darkness of a black comedy...namely the Sellers sequence. Sellers as Imperial Me pits narcissism against tolerant generosity in a Wells-ian fashion reminiscent of "The Trial" or the perverse nature of the Salem Witch Trials. The art-house theater sequences of the Ghost of Christmas Present show an attempt was made to make the movie thoughtfully. Unfortunately the demands of the script ruined it.Script: Too much talking. How can a script have too much talking? Normally dialog isn't an issue but it is when the actors don't know what to do with it. Statistics, factoids, history lessons, moral lessons, more statistics, more factoids, more lessons with more emphasis...repeat for 83 minutes.Acting: Sterling Hayden doesn't. He wore the same blah face as Dana Andrews throughout "I Want You" periodically tossing in a forced expression that looked more like constipation than any emotion I can pinpoint. I was looking forward to seeing Ben Gazzara, Eva Marie Saint and Peter Sellers (in his first return to screen post-heart attack role). I will always stop a moment to keep an eye out for a young James Shigeta and catch a glimpse of a handsome, hopefully sober Robert Shaw. All of these actors proved time and again in many roles that they are capable and believable in most of them. Yet in A Carol for Another Christmas, no one seems to do anything except recite lines in overtly Victorian style. Pat Hingle seemingly ignores Hayden and is the most convincing speaker in the movie but his government laden dribble slowly swallows even him. By the time he gets to the statistics of the hungry he looks crazed and Hayden honestly seems to not know the cameras are rolling because his eyes, presence, emoting of emotion, depth and dimension are all vacant. Sellers did do a great job, but he was an orator, not interacting with anyone except the audience. He did his best in his short time on screen. It became obvious scene after scene that the script was badly written and the actors were getting bogged down in it and with Hayden to react to, they were without hope. What's sad was that the director didn't do anything to amend the situation but rather continued to capture the tired disgrace of a movie.Lighting: Hard to believe someone would get this so wrong, but the interiors of the house are done with such hard lighting the stair railing casts shadows upstairs from *below* that make the upstairs walls look like a painted Arabian set. The Eva Marie Saint sequence is almost blown out, vastly over lit or possibly overexposed. With her super blonde hair, the DP should have dialed things down, but in what appears to be an attempt to compensate for the hats and scene look like the outdoors, the actors appear to be inside a nuclear reaction. The overall lighting schematic is one of excess or deficiency. The final sequence where Hayden goes to have breakfast with his black maid and butler, the faces of the latter two can barely be seen, and no distinction of expression is visible because they are not lit correctly. The interview with the Ghost of Christmas Present uses artistic lighting and reveals effectively, but it is lost in the bowels of this movie.Direction: Nowhere. No attempt seen to take the film past the superficial level. Since this isn't the first film w/ its history to turn out this way, it's becoming evident that believability was less important than rote facts being stated on screen.By the end of the movie, I wanted to take Peter Sellers' "Giant Economy Size" tin can gavel and knock some sense into it. If you enjoy forced government message films, (hey, some people do...i enjoyed some of the Why We Fight series) you should check it out. If you expect the actor immersion in the roles, you will be disappointed, though Sellers does manage a wicked glimmer in his eye. Perhaps it wasn't for the role but for the audience because he knew just how bad this movie would be.

trevillian2 First off I am a Rod Serling fan. Second I do not like this movie.. It is a once around as far as I am concerned. I know the story is not so cheery when the various ghosts visit and should end in a positive way with scrooge reforming and becoming a very pleasant person to know. In this version I don't think I would care to know him even after he has had his visits. It will shake you up, and make you think, but I have no desire to own it for secondary viewing. I was left feeling like the whole tale was a major bummer. It is very political and brings out anti-war feelings that were very strong in 1964. We were getting deeper into Vietnam, and of course Kennedy was fresh in every ones minds, so I am sure this hit hard with the message of this movie. I say see it if you are curious, but if you like the happier, upbeat versions this is not for you. By the way I don't like Scrooged either.

John Seal If Ayn Rand had watched this film when it was first broadcast on American television, she no doubt would have had palpitations. Carol for Another Christmas not only revels in bleeding heart humanism, it also drives a stake through the heart of the Randian philosophy of objectivism. That must have been galling for acolytes of Rand in 1964, but here we are in 2013, and after forty or fifty years of relentless anti-humanist propaganda we now live in a world where the quaint liberalism of Rod Serling has been displaced by - you guessed it - the selfish anti-communitarianism of Ms. Rand. This development would have disgusted the vast majority of Americans in 1964, who would have answered Daniel Grudge's (Sterling Hayden) question to The Ghost of Christmas Future (Robert Shaw) - 'must it be like this?' - in the negative. The ghost, however, doesn't respond - and now, sadly, we know the answer.