On the radio each December he read A Christmas Carol to the kiddies. But at Yuletide 1946, in Frank Capra’s upending of the Dickens story — where a good man (Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey) is visited by the ghosts of those lives that would have been poorer if he had not existed — Barrymore played Scrooge, the Grinch and Simon Legree in one craggy, crabby package. Potter calls George “a miserable little clerk crawling in here on your hands and knees and begging for help” and nearly drives him to suicide with the remark, “Why, you’re worth more dead than alive!” That Barrymore spat all this out from a wheelchair (the actor had been crippled by arthritis) makes Potter a fearless cartoon of miserly misanthropy.
