Scrooge (1935 film)

Although according to The Internet Movie Data Base A Christmas Carol was filmed at least four times prior, this 1935 version is the earliest one that most people are likely to see. It starred Seymour Hicks as the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, by Charles Dickens’s account, “a wrenching, grasping, covetous old sinner”.

This version is fairly faithful to the novella, and notably includes a sequence portraying the grand Christmas dinner at the Lord Mayor’s residence; juxtaposed against the extreme poverty of Victorian England, it accurately reflects Dickens’s concern for social justice.