Broadcast on ABC the same year Dr. Strangelove was released to theaters, Carol for Another Christmas (1964) reunites stars Sterling Hayden and Peter Sellers in Rod Serling’s impassioned plea to prevent nuclear war through international cooperation. Sponsored by the Xerox Corporation, the original teleplay was produced as one in a series of TV movies intended to build public support for the critical work of the United Nations. The only television film directed (and produced) by Hollywood iconoclast Joseph L. Mankiewicz (All About Eve, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir), Serling’s midcentury reworking of the Dickens classic features an all-star ensemble that includes Ben Gazzara, Pat Hingle, Steve Lawrence, Percy Rodriguez, Eva Marie Saint, Robert Shaw and James Shigeta, all of whom reportedly worked for union scale due to their belief in the controversial project.

Artistically resembling a feature-length Twilight Zone episode with key sequences draped in noir shadows; Carol illuminates the scale of suffering at Hiroshima, the plight of innocents displaced by war and the tragedy of hunger in a country of abundance. These harrowing scenes culminate with a wearily knowing Ghost of Christmas Future (Shaw) offering a hellish vision of a post-atomic Armageddon USA. There, in the burned-out landscape of a former civic hall, a demented, egomaniacal cult leader self-named “Imperial Me” (played with chilling comedic verve by Peter Sellers) wantonly drives a ragtag group of nuclear holocaust survivors to abandon all vestiges of civilization. 

Serling’s horror-tinged tale condemning isolationism was met with protests even before airing, with the John Birch Society launching a letter campaign decrying the film as “pro-communist.” Upon broadcast, press reviews were tepid, with the dark realism and forceful urgency of Serling’s message perhaps too much to bear on the heels of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Kennedy assassination. Screened today, Serling’s unflinching morality drama serves as a timely reminder of the human costs of war and an eerily prescient warning of the existential dangers wrought by humankind’s own hands.