This February marks the 200th birthday of the man whom some have called the greatest novelist who ever lived. All kinds of tributes are in the works for Charles Dickens’ bicentennial, including biographies, festivals and three new adaptations (one feature film and two miniseries) of his novels.

Turner Classic Movies is getting an early start on the celebration. The cable channel will be showing classic Dickens films every Monday night throughout the month of December. The lineup is a stellar one, including such well-loved movies as David Lean’s “Great Expectations” (1946), and both the 1938 and 1951 versions of “A Christmas Carol.”

Also noteworthy are the 1935 “A Tale of Two Cities,” featuring a justly celebrated star turn from Ronald Colman, and the 1958 “A Tale of Two Cities,” with a performance by Dirk Bogarde that is less revered but, to my mind, even better than Colman’s.

But if, by some misfortune, you had time for only one of these movies, I’d recommend you make it “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” (1935), which is having its TCM premiere at 8 p.m. EST tonight. The film has never had a DVD release; in recent years, the only way to see it has been to snag an out-of-print VHS copy from a vendor on Amazon or eBay. It’s a case of criminal neglect, if you ask me, for “Edwin Drood” is a film that deserves to be much better known than it is.

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That’s right, a 1979 television movie starring The Fonz as Ebenezer Scrooge is ranked ahead of White Christmas. (Or, if you’re younger than a hundred, the Coach in “The Waterboy.”)

I have nothing to say in my defense and await your wrath.

Well, I do have one thing to say: Henry Winkler is a marvelously talented and underrated actor, and any opportunity to boost his Winkler-ness I’m taking. See also: Night Shift (1982) and an under-appreciated masterpiece called The One And Only (1978).  

Besides, Adam Sandler loves the guy. You want to argue with that?

Other than The Disco Ghost of Christmas Past, shifting the Dickens’ classic from Victorian England to Depression-era New England was an inspired idea that adds a nice spin to the story’s familiar template. Though the characters are given Americanized names (Scrooge becomes Slade), they’re all there including a very effective Tiny Tim. Another terrific spin is making the child Scrooge/Slade an orphan after the death of his parents. This added subplot not only helps to explain why Slade whould grow into a lonely old miser but adds something different and effective to his Christmas day reformation. (more…)

Those on the Left who have trashed George Bush for this entire decade claim they weren’t being rude or unpatriotic, but were simply talking truth to power.  That has a nice ring to it, so I think I’ll give it a shot.

Today, I’ll talk truth to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, potential justice of the Supreme Court Sonia Sotomayor, Pope Benedict XVI and President Barack Obama.  That’s a more powerful lineup than the 1927 New York Yankees, if I do say so myself.

I have almost begun to feel sorry for Nancy Pelosi.  After all, when you get past the facelifts and the Botox injections, the designer suits and the large private jet, you have an aging grandmother who, in a perfect world, would be home playing with the grandkids and letting the wrinkles show.  Instead, she’s constantly on TV, telling lies and looking like a small animal staring at oncoming headlights.  I think that instead of babbling about what she didn’t know and when she didn’t know it, she should claim the Twinkie defense just like that other two-bit San Francisco politician, Dan White.  In case you don’t recall, when he went on trial for killing Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone, White’s lawyers, in making their case for diminished capacity, claimed he had been suffering from depression, and that his depression had been made more severe by a junk food diet that included a lot of Twinkies.  I can see Rep. Pelosi taking that defense out of moth balls, dusting it off and blaming all of her recent insanity on cheap confections.  Heck, forget the pastries; she’d only need to mention having to sit through meetings with the likes of Harry Reid, Rahm Emanuel or Arlen Specter, and even I would lessen her sentence. (more…)

I must have missed a few subtle literary points in college when I was taking a Charles Dickens seminar.

I missed the spot where Fagin, in Oliver Twist, is wearing a gigoondo yarmulke.

Also, blasting right by yours truly—alas, never the best of students—is the part where Fagin abstains from eating pork chops because they’re not kosher.

Who knew that Fagin was an observant Jew? (more…)