At the Movies with Governor Tom, Holiday Edition: A Christmas Carol and The Shop Around the Corner

"I know! I know! Sausages!"

And so was the very first line of dialogue spoken on the screen by actress June Lockhart, in 1938's A Christmas Carol.

Last night I attended a very special Christmas double feature of two...ancient!...movie classics. First up was the 1938 version of A Christmas Carol with Reginald Owen as our pal Ebenezer. Following that was the 1940 classic The Shop Around the Corner. Ever see that? It's one of Jimmy Stewart's earlier stuff, when he was in his early thirties. This was six years before It's a Wonderful Life. Back in the fall of 1998, The Shop Around the Corner was remade into that Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan flick You've Got Mail. I hadn't seen either The Shop Around the Corner or this version of A Christmas Carol before, so the prospect of being introduced to them on the big screen was kinda cool. What made this event an extra special holiday treat was that, between films, there was a Q&A with actress June Lockhart.

If you're my age or younger, it's likely you've never heard of June. While she was in some major motion pictures early on, soon enough her big thing became TV. Among her dizzying amount of credits is playing Ruth Martin (the mom) on the show Lassie back in the late fifties and early sixties. On the heels of that came Lost in Space, where she again played the mom, Maureen Robinson. After that came Petticoat Junction. And on top of all that, June's racked up a ton of TV guest star credits throughout her career, including recent stuff like Las Vegas, Cold Case, and Grey's Anatomy.

Her connection to last night's event was that the 1938 version of A Christmas Carol was her very first acting gig. She was all of 12, and her tiny role was that of Belinda Cratchit, one of the half dozen or so kids of Bob and Mrs. Cratchit. Bob, if you recall, is that poor guy who slaves away for Ebenezer Scrooge and whose several children include Tiny Tim. In the film Bob Cratchit's played by Gene Lockhart. Notice the same surname as June? Yes, you got it. Gene Lockhart was June's real-life dad. And Mrs. Cratchit was played by her real-life ma, Kathleen Lockhart.

Even if you've never read the original Charles Dickens story, surely you've seen one of the billions of movie versions that have been adapted from it. Released on December 16, 1938, and showing first only at Radio City Music Hall in New York City, this version of the tale is pretty straightforward. It starts with an establishing shot of London with a caption that says something like "A little more than a century ago..." So right off the bat you see that they're doing a faithful adaption. At only one hour and ten minutes, the story moves along pretty fast. First we're introduced to Ebenezer's nephew Fred (Barry MacKay) meeting Tiny Tim Cratchet for the first time on his way to his uncle's business. Then Fred arrives at Scrooge and Marley and gives a bottle of booze to the long-suffering Bob Cratchet. Before they can have too much fun, of course, Fred's good ol' Uncle Ebenezer shows up and spoils the party. And I tell ya, Reginald Owen was brilliant as that crusty old killjoy. I mean he was nasty. When these two solicitors show up to collect money for charity, they try to impress upon Ebenezer that if these paupers don't get money and a place to stay, they'll die a miserable death. And Ebenezer's like, "Your point being?"

Things go south from there in a hurry when Bob, on his way home and just trying to have some snowball fun with the other boys in the neighborhood, crafts the perfect snowball and unwittingly nails his boss square in that goofy top hat. Suffice it to say Scrooge sacks him on the spot. That doesn't spoil Bob's mood, though, even though he's got a wife and six kiddies to support, one of them requiring constant medical care. He stops by the food market and buys tons of stuff for dinner. When he gets home, he makes his kids try to guess the awesome feast that lurks under all that packaging. And this is where we get to our very own June Lockhart's acting debut and her one and only line of dialogue in the flick as she tries to guess what Dad brought home: "I know! I know! Sausages!"

I won't go too much into the rest of it. You know how it goes. Marley shows up and gives his old colleague a what for, the ghosts show up, and Reginald Owen does a terrific job showing us a guy doing a total one-eighty thanks to a healthy splash of spiritual cold water to his wrinkly face. As a side note, Lionel Barrymore, not Reginald Owen, was MGM's first choice to play Scrooge. Unfortunately, though, 1938 was the same year Lionel came down with arthritis so severe it confined him to a wheelchair. Still, he did get to play Mr. Potter, a Scrooge-type character, eight years later in It's a Wonderful Life.

Before I go on, I should point out that the Spirit of Christmas Past was played by Ann Rutherford. You know her? If you've seen any of those Andy Hardy movies with Mickey Rooney, then I know you've seen her. She played Polly Benedict in those. At the time of A Christmas Carol, Ann was all of 18 years old. Yes, 18, and her acting career had already been going at full steam since she was 15. She was only 17, for example, when the Hardy gig came along. And just weeks after finishing A Christmas Carol, she scored a role as one of the O'Hara brood in Gone with the Wind. Soon after that came Pride and Prejudice. Ann never lost a beat in her career until she retired in the mid 1970s, when she was in her mid fifties. And yes, she's still alive.

The Shop Around the Corner was adapted from a play called Parfumerie by a Hungarian writer named Miklos Laszlo. Like the play, the film is set in Budapest. And also like the play, and plays in general, the film tends to stay at one setting for long stretches. Here's the gist of the plot. Jimmy Stewart plays a chap called Kralik, Alfred Kralik, the longest-working employee at this Budapest gift shop called Matuschek's, which is owned and operated by a guy named, you guessed it, Hugo Matuschek. When the story starts, Alfred's already been engaged in a sort of pen pal relationship with an anonymous woman he met through a singles ad. They've exchanged four letters so far. Originally he'd been browsing through the paper looking to buy a used encyclopedia or something. He'd been growing weary of singles events and thought he'd try more scholarly pursuits. That's when he came across those singles ads with women saying they wanted to correspond with guys about various cultural things like books and what have you. So Alfred said sure and signed up.

On the day the movie starts, a woman shows up at Matuschek's desperate for a job. Her name's Klara Novak (Margaret Sullavan), and her predicament at the time was all too common. Remember that this was 1940. Pretty much the whole world was still financially depressed. Alfred tells her they have no openings, but Klara demands to see the boss. She simply won't take no for an answer. She makes a sale that impresses Hugo Matuschek, and he hires her on the spot.

The film jumps forward a few months. Christmas is approaching. Alfred and Klara are feeling anything but the holiday spirit. They ram horns on pretty much a daily basis. Klara's good at what she does. Alfred doesn't admit it, but he feels threatened by her. He's been there a long time and figures he'll run the store when Hugo retires and doesn't want any whipper-snapper upsetting his plans and making him look bad. As I'm sure you've guessed by now, Alfred and Klara are each other's secret pen pal.

And they're secretly having a ball exchanging letters with someone they don't know. In fact, after months of it, they've finally agreed to meet in person. Unfortunately, that's the same day that Hugo Matuschek sacks Alfred on the spot for no reason. Down in the dumps and in no mood to go on a blind date, Alfred decides not to meet his pen pal, but he does show up at the cafe where they'd agreed to meet just so he can see what the mystery woman looks like. When he sees that it's Klara, he goes in and pretends that he was just stopping by, and of course they trade a few barbs simmering with sexual tension. You know they want each other, and that Alfred's secretly thrilled that Klara turned out to be his pen pal.

Meanwhile back at the store, Hugo Matuschek tries to kill himself. He would've done so had one of his employees not shown up at the last second to grab the gun. You see, Hugo fired Alfred because he thought Alfred was having an affair with his wife. But then a P.I. informs Hugo that nah, it was someone else. So Hugo gets pissed at himself for firing Alfred, and he's kind of glum that his wife's cheating on him. Hence the suicide attempt.

Anyway, Alfred comes back to work. Hugo's spirits go back up as his store makes a ton of money in Christmas sales. And finally of course, Alfred reveals to Klara that he's her pen pal. That's the very last scene, and it's very well written. It's my favorite scene in the film, which says a lot considering there are a lot of great scenes with terrific and clever repartees flying every which way. If you haven't seen it, please do yourself a favor and chuck it onto the ol' Netflix queue. And just as a side note, You've Got Mail wasn't the first remake. In 1949, not even a decade later, it was remade into the Judy Garland vehicle In the Good Old Summertime.

I know The Shop Around the Corner has nothing to do with June Lockhart, but it's one of those Christmas movies that doesn't get shown on TV very much. I'd always wanted to see it but never got around to it. Seeing it on the big screen was a nice bit of gravy on top of what was already a cool holiday screening event.

As for the Q&A, it struck me right away how un-82 years old June Lockhart is. Seriously, she could easily pass for a gal in her fifties or so. I'm not just talking about her looks, but her whole being and bearing. She's so alive, very animated and spirited and always smiling or laughing. They did have a moderator up there to ask questions and stuff, but he became redundant in no time flat. June ran the show. In fact, it was kinda funny. After the Q&A, during the break before they started The Shop Around the Corner, I hopped on out to the concessions to get a refill on the 'corn. Nearby I could hear the moderator talking to someone. He was like, "This was the easiest Q&A I've ever done. I didn't have to do anything." He told his friend he'd done so much research on her career and came prepared with all these random trivia questions, but he never needed them.

Regarding A Christmas Carol, June said that at the time it didn't seem like a big deal at all. At her household, they would always put on their own little productions of A Christmas Carol with her parents and some of the actors they knew. For instance, the guy who ended up playing Marley in the film, Leo G. Caroll, always played Scrooge at their house parties. So when time came to make a film version, it was ho-hum, just going through the motions one more time. The entire film was shot, by the way, at the MGM backlot in L.A., so of course all that snow was fake.

Among other memories she had of the film was the huge crush she had on Barry MacKay, the dude who plays Scrooge's nephew Fred. Apparently he could sing quite the tune, and you can sort of tell that when you watch it, just by the whole way he delivers simple lines like, "Hey, how are ya?" or whatever. During the Spirit of Christmas Future segment, when Scrooge sees the Cratchit family mourning Tiny Tim, June said that prior to shooting that scene, director Edwin L. Marin played Schubert's "Ave Maria" over and over and over to make the actors unbelievably depressed. Whenever she watches that scene, she always wells up at the bit when her dad Gene pats the back of her little head while she's sitting on the floor and he's sitting in a chair telling everyone how he'd just run into Fred on the way home. She also got to meet the film's producer, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who was only 29 at the time. If you recognize his name, that's 'cause he went on to become fairly huge in the biz. He wrote and directed stuff like Guys and Dolls, All About Eve, and Cleopatra.

Before anyone could ask her, June explained that the reason she didn't get any screen credit was mainly because there was no union like the Screen Actors Guild at the time. Although she does only have that one line of dialogue, June is on the screen more than once, especially during the Tiny Tim mourning scene. She definitely would've gotten screen credit today. As June put it, these days even the person who serves coffee on the set will get their name in the end credits.

As for her parents Kathleen and Gene, you're not going to believe how they met. They were introduced to each other by Thomas Edison. Come on now, how many people can say the frickin' inventor of light played matchmaker to Mom and Dad?! You see, the thing is, Tom had this sort of caravan type deal that he'd travel with once in a while to promote all of his awesome inventions. Part of this caravan included actors and performers and various peeps who'd put on shows at every stop. Enter Gene Lockhart, an actor from Canada who became part of this caravan deal. Kathleen Arthur was an immigrant from England trying to establish an acting career on this side of the pond. After they each auditioned successfully for this one Edison caravan production, Tom brought them together and said, "Dudes. You'll be working together. Now get those lines down pat." Or something. Anyway, how cool is that?!

One little interesting tidbit about June's growing up that shows just how tiny a globe this really is, is that when she started high school soon after A Christmas Carol, the high school she went to was the Westlake School for Girls in Bel Air. That just happens to be the same high school my mom went to about 20 or so years later. The difference is that June actually lived there. She'd go on Sunday night and board at the school until Friday afternoon. Meanwhile her parents kept working, which meant June got to know all these awesome actors on the weekends. The way she told it, every time she came home for the weekend during her Westlake years, there'd always be get-togethers and social gatherings of one sort or another. Talk about making contacts to break into the biz! June was barely out of Westlake's doors when she landed supporting roles in stuff like Meet Me in St. Louis and Son of Lassie.

But again, soon enough June's big thing became TV. Lassie was a good steady gig that almost wasn't. Her role was originally played by Cloris Leachman, but Cloris dropped out after 20 episodes. June took it from there. On this night, though, the audience really wanted to hear about Lost in Space, which came right on the heels of Lassie, when June was in her early forties. This one guy in the audience, for example, asked June who the greater miser was: Ebenezer Scrooge or Lost in Space creator Irwin Allen. June laughed a healthy hearty laugh at that one. Irwin Allen, she said, was great at what he did. The slight little flaw in his character was that he was a raging weirdo. For example, Irwin decreed at one point that, going forward, June and Guy Williams (who played her husband) were no longer allowed to touch each other. That's right. Mr. and Mrs. Robinson, even though they were a couple 'n all, were not allowed so much as to hug. As June put it: "All we could do was look at each other longingly." She said that Irwin Allen was sensitive to all the kiddies who watched his show, and he didn't want any risque content. Like a married couple hugging.

One episode in particular that she talked about was "The Great Vegetable Rebellion." Apparently many people in the audience remembered that one because no sooner was the episode title out of her mouth than everyone laughed. This was the second to last episode of season three, which turned out to be the last season of the show. June said the idea for this episode came about because the writers had run out of ideas. The gist of the plot is that the Robinson family lands on a planet where plants are just as smart as people. The family gets kidnapped by this giant carrot named Tybo, who threatens to turn them into trees. Dr. Smith, meanwhile, becomes a giant stalk of celery. At this point in the Q&A, June actually got up and acted out a scene in this episode where several of the characters were supposed to walk down a set of stairs. But apparently the producers of the show were too poor to film this scene with a set of stairs. So what the actors did, as June demonstrated for us, was walk off screen while bending their knees more and more, so that it looks like they're going down. And then eventually they had to do the same thing in reverse to simulate walking back up the stairs. She said the whole thing was so absurd--the giant talking vegetables, the simulated stair climb--that she and one other cast member couldn't help laughing their asses off between takes. Irwin Allen finally got so pissed that he decided to suspend June and her castmate from the show for two episodes. June said it didn't bother her so much because she still got paid for those two episodes. And as it turned out, Lost in Space only had one more episode anyway before it became lost to TV viewers.

Here's one more example of Irwin Allen's eccentricity that June talked about. Despite the fact that the writers were scraping the barrel for episode ideas, the ratings were good, and the network really wanted the show back for a fourth season. All they needed, right? Was for Irwin Allen to submit brief synopses for every episode idea he had for season four. He never submitted jack. With no explanation at all, he simply decided not to submit any episode ideas, and the network was forced to drop the show unceremoniously. But again, as "The Great Vegetable Rebellion" sort of hints at, the reason Irwin didn't submit any more ideas was because he was probably out of them.

As I mentioned way up above, June is still working, mainly with one-off guest spots on network TV. She did mention this one film she just finished shooting called Wesley. It's about John Wesley, the English Anglican minister and Christian theologian who helped kick-start the Methodist movement. He's also the namesake of Wesleyan College in Georgia. June plays his mom, Susanna Wesley. She was pretty blunt in saying it wasn't much more than a job. If it played on any screens outside those of Methodist church basements, she'd be surprised. Ohhhhh-kayyyyyyy.

Watching her parents on the big screen just before the Q&A got her all nostalgic, so she went back to talking about them. She's obviously proud of Kathleen and Gene. When someone asked if she was an only child, she said yes and that was just fine with her. She loved being the center of her parents' universe. One interesting piece of trivia about her dad Gene was that he wrote plays as well as acted in them. At age 28 Gene Lockhart wrote his first play, a musical called The Pierrot Players. Gene wrote the book and the lyrics and starred in it. Among the songs he wrote for it was none other than "The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise." Have you heard that one? It's fairly popular because it's been covered by everyone and their cousin. I mean you've got music legends like Oscar Peterson, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, and Django Reinhardt who did their own versions of that. In 1949 Les Paul and Mary Ford did a cover of it, which went on to sell zillions of copies. So the next time you hear anyone covering "The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise," you know what to say:

"I know! I know! Gene Lockhart!"