Reviews

On the one hand we have Tyrone Power and Betty Grable, and they make a great couple.

On the other hand we have the typical 1940s disregard for anything remotely resembling accuracy about airplanes and the military. As an example, an early scene involves a leaflet drop over Berlin from Lockheed Hudson coastal patrol bombers, which sported four (or five) .30 cal machine guns - two fixed firing forward, two in a dorsal turret, and (MK II on) one firing down and aft.

The Luftwaffe would have had the airliner-derived patrol bombers for lunch, as they were pretty much defenseless from below except from behind.

I have collected five different versions of Dickens' Christmas classic, from Alastair Sim's 1951 Scrooge to Patrick Stewart's 1999 version (plus the Muppets). Of these I believe George C. Scott's 1984 version is my favorite. His Scrooge begins as a very believable cold, bitter man, on whom the three ghosts make their magic - Edward Woodward being particularly good as the Ghost of Christmas Present.

A technical note. The Internet Movie Database carries the film's aspect ratio as

Aspect ratio 1.33 : 1 (television ratio) 1.85 : 1 (theatrical ratio)

indicating that - while it was shot in 35mm full-frame for 4:3 TV broadcast - it was framed so that it could be cropped *in projection* to 1.85:1 widescreen. The same can be approximated on a widescreen TV by (on my Panasonic) the "zoom" function which fills the frame horizontally, clipping the top and bottom. when I do this, I find the picture was framed perfectly.