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A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, commonly known as A Christmas Carol, is a novella by Charles Dickens, first published in London by Chapman & Hall in 1843 and illustrated by John Leech. It recounts the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, an elderly miser who is visited by the ghost of his former business partner Jacob Marley and the spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come. In the process, Scrooge is transformed into a kinder, gentler man.
Ebenezer Scrooge is a fictional character and the protagonist of Charles Dickens's 1843 short novel, A Christmas Carol. Initially a cold-hearted miser who despises Christmas, his redemption by three spirits has become a defining tale of the Christmas holiday in the English-speaking world.
"The Emperor's New Clothes" is a literary folktale written by the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, about a vain emperor who gets exposed before his subjects. The tale has been translated into over 100 languages.
John Carradine was an American actor, considered one of the greatest character actors in American cinema. He was a member of Cecil B. DeMille's stock company and later John Ford's company, known for his roles in horror films, Westerns, and Shakespearean theater, most notably portraying Count Dracula in House of Frankenstein (1944), House of Dracula (1945), Billy the Kid Versus Dracula (1966), and Nocturna: Granddaughter of Dracula (1979). Among his other notable roles was “Preacher Casy” in John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath. In later decades of his career, he starred mostly in low-budget B-movies. In total, he holds 351 film and television credits, making him one of the most prolific English-speaking film and television actors of all time.
Mary Higgins Clark was an American author of suspense novels. Each of her 51 books was a bestseller in the United States and various European countries, and all of her novels remained in print as of 2015, with her debut suspense novel, Where Are the Children?, in its 75th printing.
David Carradine was an American actor, director, and producer, whose career included over 200 major and minor roles in film, television and on stage. He was widely known to television audiences as the star of the 1970s television series Kung Fu, playing Kwai Chang Caine, a peace-loving Shaolin monk traveling through the American Old West.
A Christmas Story is a 1983 Christmas comedy film directed by Bob Clark and based on the 1966 book In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash by Jean Shepherd, with some elements from his 1971 book Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories and Other Disasters. It stars Melinda Dillon, Darren McGavin, and Peter Billingsley, and follows a young boy and his family's misadventures during Christmas time in December 1940. It is the third installment in the Parker Family Saga.
Black Christmas is a 1974 Canadian slasher film produced and directed by Bob Clark, and written by Roy Moore. It stars Olivia Hussey, Keir Dullea, Margot Kidder, and John Saxon. The story follows a group of sorority sisters who receive threatening phone calls and are eventually stalked and murdered by a killer during the Christmas season.
Melinda Ruth Dillon was an American actress. She received a 1963 Tony Award nomination for her Broadway debut in the original production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her roles as Jillian Guiler in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Teresa Perrone in Absence of Malice (1981). She is well-known for her role as Mother Parker in the holiday classic A Christmas Story (1983). Her other film roles include Bound for Glory (1976), Slap Shot (1977), F.I.S.T. (1978), The Muppet Movie (1979), Harry and the Hendersons (1987), Captain America (1990), The Prince of Tides (1991), To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995), How to Make an American Quilt (1995), Magnolia (1999), for which she was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award, and Reign Over Me (2007).
Emperor of the North Pole is a 1973 American action adventure film directed by Robert Aldrich, starring Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Keith Carradine, and Charles Tyner. It was later re-released on home media under the shorter title Emperor of the North, ostensibly chosen by studio executives to avoid being mistaken for a heartwarming holiday story. This original title is a homage to the historic joke among Great Depression-era hobos that the world's best hobo was "Emperor of the North Pole", a way of poking fun at their own desperate situation, implying that somebody ruling over the North Pole would reign over nothing but a vast, barren, cold, empty, and stark wasteland.
The Grinch is a character created by children's author and cartoonist Dr. Seuss. He is best known as the main character of the 1957 children's book How the Grinch Stole Christmas! He has been portrayed and voiced by many actors, including Boris Karloff, Hans Conried, Bob Holt, Walter Matthau, Anthony Asbury, Jim Carrey, Rik Mayall, Benedict Cumberbatch, Matthew Morrison, David Howard Thornton, and James Austin Johnson.
The Daydreamer is a 1966 stop motion animated–live action musical fantasy film produced by Videocraft International. Directed by Jules Bass, it was written by Arthur Rankin, Jr. and Romeo Muller, based on the stories of Hans Christian Andersen. It features seven original songs by Jules Bass and Maury Laws. The film's opening features the cast in puppet and live form plus caricatures of the cast by Al Hirschfeld. Among the cast were the American actors Paul O'Keefe, Jack Gilford, Ray Bolger and Margaret Hamilton, and the Australian actor Cyril Ritchard as the voice of the Sandman. Three of the voice actors: Burl Ives, and Canadian actors Billie Mae Richards and Larry D. Mann, were the voice suppliers for Videocraft's stop motion Christmas television special, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964). Some of the character voices were recorded at RCA Studios in Toronto, Ontario, under Bernard Cowan's supervision. The "Animagic" puppet sequences were staged by Don Duga at Videocraft in New York, and supervised by Tadahito Mochinaga at MOM Production in Tokyo, Japan.
A Christmas Carol, the 1843 novella by Charles Dickens (1812–1870), is one of the English author's best-known works. It is the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, a greedy miser who hates Christmas but who is transformed into a caring, kindly person through the visitations of four ghosts. The classic work has been dramatised and adapted countless times for virtually every medium and performance genre, and new versions appear regularly.
National Lampoon's Vacation film series is a comedy film series initially based on John Hughes' short story "Vacation '58" that was originally published by National Lampoon magazine. The series is distributed by Warner Bros. and consists of five main films, two of which are not sponsored by National Lampoon, and one spin-off. In recent years, the series has been the inspiration for various advertising campaigns featuring some of the original cast members. The series portrays the misadventures of the Griswold family, and in particular family patriarch Clark Griswold - whose well meaning attempts to provide his family and children with the perfect vacation continually go awry in spectacular fashion, landing them in the middle of various disasters and strangely embarrassing predicaments.
Silent Night, Bloody Night is a 1972 American slasher film directed by Theodore Gershuny and starring Patrick O'Neal, Mary Woronov, James Patterson, Astrid Heeren, and John Carradine. The plot follows a series of murders that occur in a small New England town on Christmas Eve after a man inherits a family estate which was once an insane asylum.
A Ghost Story for Christmas is a strand of annual British short television films originally broadcast on BBC One between 1971 and 1978, and revived sporadically by the BBC since 2005. With one exception, the original instalments were directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark and the films were all shot on 16 mm colour film. The remit behind the series was to provide a television adaptation of a classic ghost story, in line with the oral tradition of telling supernatural tales at Christmas.
Billy is a fictional character from the Black Christmas film series, first appearing in Black Christmas (1974) as a deranged murderer who taunts and kills a group of college students during the Christmas season. Created by Timothy Bond and A. Roy Moore, the character was partly inspired by the urban legend "The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs", as well as a series of real murders in Montreal during the 1943 holiday season.
A Warning to the Curious is a short film, the second of the British supernatural anthology series A Ghost Story for Christmas. Written, produced, and directed by the series' creator, Lawrence Gordon Clark, it is based on the ghost story of the same name by M. R. James, first published in the collection A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories (1925) and first aired on BBC1 on 24 December 1972. At 50 minutes it is the longest instalment in the series' original run.
References
- 1 2 3 Weaver, Tom (2024-10-15). John Carradine: The Films. McFarland. ISBN 978-1-4766-1164-8.
- ↑ Gaines, Caseen (2013-10-01). A Christmas Story: Behind the Scenes of a Holiday Classic. ECW Press. ISBN 978-1-77090-415-6.
- ↑ "From Horrifying Comedy to Darkly Funny Horror: Bob Clark Films, PopMatters". www.popmatters.com. 2020-05-29. Retrieved 2024-12-11.
- ↑ Davies, Clive (2015-03-06). Spinegrinder: The Movies Most Critics Won’t Write About. SCB Distributors. ISBN 978-1-909394-06-3.
- 1 2 Williams, Amy Bennett. "Hunting for 'A Christmas Story' director Bob Clark's debut reveals one of Lehigh Acres' oddest chapters". The News-Press. Retrieved 2024-12-11.
- ↑ Films in Review. National Board of Review of Motion Pictures. 1979.
- ↑ La Revue du cinéma, image et son, écran (in French). Ligue française de l'enseignement et de l'éducation permanente. 1981.
