Female Friday
As I stated in last Friday’s post, the last decade of the 20th Century introduced the first adaptation of A Christmas Carol where the main character of Scrooge, at least, is portrayed as a female instead of male. Ebbie is the first big production version of A Christmas Carol to feature a woman in the role/in place of Scrooge. It’s a Lifetime cable channel movie from 1995. An alternate title is Miracle at Christmas: Ebbie’s Story, such as on the DVD release. Back when it was originally presented, it was innovative as a full-length feature with a female Scrooge. ACC adaptations with female since are becoming banal.
Soap opera star Susan Lucci (All My Children) is Elizabeth “Ebbie” Scrooge. Scrooge is not presented as senior in age, but a forty-something fashionista. As the owner of Dobson’s Department Store, she only cares about Christmas as a time of retail opportunity. Her assistant is single mother Roberta “Robbie” Cratchet. Her niece is Francine aka “Frannie.” Francine is also the name of Ebbie’s dead sister, her niece’s mother. Ebbie’s sister and niece is a dual role played by Molly Parker.
The standard template of A Christmas Carol is followed. However, it is only one year since Ebbie lost her mentor and business partner, Jake Marley (Jeffrey Dunn, Dale from AMC’s Walking Dead). A creepy ghost of Marley whisks Ebbie from her home back to her department store while he also starts receiving eerie sounding phone calls from “his boss.” Jake sets up three meetings for her, one for each ghost she will encounter.
This is a version that goes the MGM Wizard of Oz route where the ghosts are doppelgangers of familiar faces. (Note: this isn’t the first ACC adaption to do this. (The 1954/55 U.S. television version was first). The Ghost of Christmas Past is actually two ghosts; a pair of young woman who happen to have the appearance of perfume counter clerks seen earlier in her department store. As if to cover their poor acting, the pair of ghosts wear tasteless attempts at period costumes but instead look like late 1960’s cheap dance hall girls. For each period of the past they take Ebbie to relive, the ghosts’ outfits change to fit the decade – unsuccessfully and always trashy. We see Ebbie’s childhood, the cruel father, and the beloved sister. Here, the sister is not younger, but older by many years. Ebbie sees herself in the early years as a low-ranking employee of the department store she now owns. The Past introduces the heavily emphasized love story between her and Paul, the male equivalent of Dickens’ ACC character Belle (remember, this was made by Lifetime). Ebbie expands the past with her sister beyond Dickens. We see Ebbie as a young adult with her elder sister and when her sister is pregnant. We are also shown the sister’s death.
We move into learning how Ebbie and Marley acquired the department store. They started under the wings of original storeowners, Mr. and Mrs. Dobson. Over time, Marley and Ebbie finagle public shares of the store and take it from the Dobson couple. The Dobsons are this version’s Fezziwigs. Although this is not canon in the traditional Dickins story, it is a heavy borrowing from the 1951 A Christmas Carol film (Alastair Sim version) when Scrooge and Marley treat the Fezziwigs horribly and foreclose on them.
The Ghost of Christmas Present is another store employee (who happens to be the store’s gift wrapper of presents – get it?) in a silly costume. Many of the standard ACC events are here, particularly Roberta Cratchet’s children, including sick son Timmy (played by Taran Noah Smith, known as one of the children on the 1990’s U.S. sitcom Home Improvement). In this version, Ebbie only allows her Cratchit a half-day off at Christmas and insists she works the other half.
The Future gives us one more employee, the one that Ebbie fired from her store on Christmas Eve earlier in the movie. An unusual twist is that Ebbie sees her demise and lonely death instead of merely seeing her grave after the fact. (A similar scene was in the 1910 silent version.) Two years later, the next female version, Ms. Scrooge, would do something similar yet again. Then it’s on to the usual, bland reworkings of our reformed anti-heroine’s Christmas Day yahoos.
Acceptable Holiday viewing, but for a good helping of A Christmas Carol, this is more like an artificially sweetened dieter’s special. Though this was the first of the female Scrooge portrayals, it was done better in other versions that followed.
