strokes loose and sprightly. In each scene, swaths of colour and life pour out, white snowflakes dotting the brush strokes." The illustrations later appeared in a book, Scrooge, by Elaine Donaldson and published in 1970 by Cinema Center Films. Production Filmed in London and on location in Buckinghamshire between January and May 1970, the film sets at Shepperton Studios included fully reconstructed Victorian streets. Reception Box officeScrooge opened on two screens in Los Angeles and Chicago, grossing $36,000 in its opening week. It earned $3 million in distributor rentals in the United States and Canada. Critical reaction Gene Siskel of The Chicago Tribune awarded the film three-and-a-half stars out of four praising Finney's "masterful performance". Arthur D. Murphy, reviewing for Variety, favorably wrote the film was "a most delightful film in every way," in which he praised Finney as "remarkable" and Bricusse's "unobtrusive complementary music and lyrics; Ronald Neame's delicately controlled direction which conveys, but does not force, all the inherent warmth, humor and sentimentality to both younger and audiences". Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that Finney's performance was "absurd, sentimental, pretty, never quite as funny as it intends to be, but quite acceptable, if only as a seasonal ritual." Overall, he felt the adaptation was "surprisingly faithful", and complemented Ronald Neame for directing "the movie with all of the delicacy possible after a small story has been turned into a comparatively large, conventional musical. The settings — London streets and interiors, circa 1860 (updated from the original 1843)—are very attractive, somewhat spruced-up variations on the original John Leech illustrations." Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three stars out of four feeling the film "works very nicely on its intended level and the kids sitting near me seemed to be having a good time." However, he was critical of Bricusse's songs, writing that they "fall so far below the level of good musical comedy that you wish Albert Finney would stop singing them, until you realize he isn't really singing." Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times applauded Scrooge as a "lovely movie, one of the few genuinely family-wide attractions of the whole year, calculated to please equally all those who have loved the Dickens work forever, and all those enviable youngsters who are about to discover it for the first time." Reviewing for the New York Daily News, Ann Guarino wrote Scrooge was