Charles Dickens's classic Christmas tale gets a late 20th Century makeover with Bill Murray as our protagonist. Murray plays a hardboiled TV executive who only sees Christmas as a commercial opportunity to get the best ratings.
The usual ghosts from Christmases past, present, and future visit Murray and in a more contemporary idiom explain the error of his ways. No need to explain this universally beloved plot, I think other than the Christmas story itself, more people know this story than any other in the English speaking world.
A couple of Hollywood veterans John Forsythe and Robert Mitchum have some nice supporting roles. Both are TV executives, Forsythe from his past and who Bill Murray was something of a protégé. Robert Mitchum is the Bill Paley/David Sarnoff network tycoon and who already sees some flaws in Murray's approach and is grooming a smarmy John Glover to take his place.
The Bob Cratchit part is split in two with Murray's secretary going home to a not so Merry Christmas with the family when the expected bonus she was counting on doesn't materialize, she gets a network monogrammed towel like everyone else. She's played by Alfre Woodard and she's drowning in some real 20th century debt. The junior executive Murray fires is Bobcat Goldthwait and he doesn't take his Christmas Eve sacking in the resigned frame of mind the original Cratchit it. As this is the ever zany Goldthwait his method of dealing with it is unorthodox.
The spirits of the past, present, and future are played by David Johanssen, Carol Kane, and Michael J. Pollard. Of the three and in fact in the film Carol Kane is the best. She certainly has an original way of getting one's attention.
Karen Allen plays the girl that Murray loved and lost and Scrooged gives him an interesting opportunity to make that up as well as change his way of living.
Scrooged is first and foremost a Bill Murray show and Bill Murray delivers on all levels. All the spirit of Dickens is maintained, in fact when the cast in the finale starts singing Put A Little Love In Your Heart over the closing credits, isn't that what Charles Dickens meant to say what Christmas does?
