Title:
Ebbie
Format:
TV movie
Country:
USA
Production
company:
Crescent
Entertainment, for the Lifetime cable network
Year:
1995 (first
broadcast on Lifetime on December 4th that year)
Length:
96 minutes
Setting:
Contemporary
United States
Background:
The cable network
which became Lifetime had been set up in the US as BETA and then Daytime in
1982, gaining the name Lifetime the following year. Since the start it has been
aimed at women, with programmes based around women’s issues, but was initially
mostly a non-fiction channel with various discussion and health-related
programmes. In the late 1980s they began to show more drama, repeats of older
series but also new original commissions, which became more central into the
1990s. These would usually have female-led casts or be based around issues
which may be more of interest to women, and Ebbie was a festive offering
for 1995.
Cast and crew:
Susan Lucci stars
as Elizabeth Scrooge, known as ‘Ebbie’, which as with some other female versions
of the character seems to be needlessly pushing it a bit. Lucci is evidently a
bit of a television legend in the United States, having starred in the daytime
soap opera All My Children from 1970 until 2011, at one point apparently
earning over $1 million a year for her role, which is pretty good going by any
era’s money.
Canadian actress Wendy Crewson as the Cratchit character is worth mentioning as she has some pedigree
with Christmas films. The previous year she had co-starred in The Santa Clause,
and would go on to appear in its two sequels. Made in Canada, Ebbie also
has a Canadian director in the form of Hungarian political refugee George Kaczender, who’d made Don’t Let the Angels Fall in 1969, the first
Canadian film to be entered into the main competition at the Cannes Film
Festival.
Writers PaulRedford and Ed Redlich were both fairly early in their careers at this point,
but would go on to write scores of American TV drama episodes between them.
Redford in particular would carve out a niche working on Washington-set shows,
working on The West Wing, Madam Secretary and Designated
Survivor.
Underdone Potato:
 |
| Jeffrey DeMunn as Jake Marley. |
This version
takes place in a department store, Dobson’s, owned and run by Scrooge. We begin with her walking around the store handing out rather meagre
Christmas bonus envelops to employees, with her assistant Roberta Cratchit in
tow. Ebbie’s nice niece Frannie comes to try and persuade her to come round the
next day and is rebuffed, as are two rival store owners who want her to
contribute to fund for the needy.
Ebbie also fires
the store detective, Luther – a man who looks about as inconspicuous as Blackadder’s
giraffe in dark glasses trying to get into a polar bears-only golf club – and
tells Cratchit that she has to come in on Christmas afternoon to help prepare
for the launch of the big Boxing Day sales. Not that I suppose they call them
Boxing Day sales in the US.
A bit of
info-dumping during the charity section tells us that Marley died just one year
ago rather than the traditional seven. After Ebbie goes home for the night,
Marley shows up in her TV set and then takes her on a ghostly elevator ride,
while being badgered on a mobile phone by his mysterious boss. He warns her
that she has to ‘take three meetings’, at the oddly specific times of 12.01, 1.11
and 2.15. She asks if she can take them all at once, as a ‘conference call.’
Past:
 |
| The Ghost(s) of Christmas Past. |
It’s always nice
to be surprised by a version of the Carol, and I was here. Several
versions show the ghosts as other characters before they visit Scrooge, but
it’s done with a touch more subtlety than usual here (and certainly more so than, say, the 2004 musical managed), so I hadn’t predicted
that the two employees from the perfume counter were going to turn up as the
Ghost(s) of Christmas Past. Once they had done it was easy to then guess just
from the look of him that Luther the store detective was going to be the third
spirit, but I couldn’t work out the second.
Having two of
them is a nice change, and there’s an interesting habit they have of changing
costumes for each different vision that they show Ebbie. We see a glimpse of
her childhood and her abusive father, her life seemingly kept happy by her
older sister; also called Frannie, and played by the same actress who portrayed
her daughter, Ebbie’s niece, earlier on.
We visit Frannie’s
‘tiny’ flat – actually enormous and quite plush-looking – later on when Ebbie
is now a young woman, and as begun working at Dobson’s. Frannie is heavily
pregnant and not feeling well, but insists that Ebbie go to the party, the
equivalent of the Fezziwig Christmas ball.
The Dobsons
themselves are a nice couple, with Marley one of their main employees who is
teaching Ebbie some of the tricks of the trade. At the party – which Ebbie had
joked to her sister about being the ‘belle of the ball’ at – we meet the Belle
equivalent, Paul, who actually comes over as something of a sleaze. It probably
isn’t helped by the fact that they do such a good job of making Lucci look much
younger for these scenes that Ron Lea as Paul actually looks far too old for
her.
When Paul drives
her back to check on her sister after the party, it turns out that she’s been
rushed to hospital, where her baby has been born early but Frannie herself dies in Ebbie’s
arms. Ebbie becomes a much harsher and harder person after this, culminating in
Paul leaving her and then her and Marley buying the Dobsons out of their own
business and taking the store away from them. I wondered if this latter aspect
were perhaps inspired by what Scrooge and Marley do to Fezziwig in the famous
1951 film version.
We then come
almost up to date with Marley’s death the previous Christmas, as he sits down
to dinner with Ebbie. As illness overtakes him he seems to have something of a
reflective epiphany, reminiscing about the old Christmas parties they used to
have in the Dobsons’ days, and asking Ebbie what she’s actually saving all her money for. It’s quite an effective scene and is perhaps my favourite
addition in this version of the story.
Present:
 |
| Christmas present, get it? |
The Ghost of
Christmas Present takes the form of Rita, another of the employees Ebbie was
short with earlier on. She takes the ‘Christmas present’ idea almost as
literally as The Jetsons’ version does, with a costume consisting of
wrapping paper, pairs of scissors, etc.
We see Roberta’s
apartment, once again described as being a poor and humble place, and once
again flippin’ massive and luxurious. She has two children, Martha and Tim, but
no sign of a Mr Cratchit nor any explanation for his absence. Martha goes on
about what a bitch Ebbie is for making her mother working on Christmas Day. Tim
has the requisite crutch an once again a mystery, sinister illness. He rather
loses sympathy when he starts some treacly singing, however – yeuch!
We drop in on
Frannie’s, and her drip of a husband’s. She toasts her aunt’s health but Ebbie
notices she doesn’t take a drink and thinks she doesn’t mean it – but it turns
out that she’s pregnant! This upsets Ebbie, but the spirit assures her that
Frannie is a strong, healthy woman.
We also get an
interesting version of the second Belle scene, transplanted from past to
present as was also done in the 1979 version. Paul is in his happy family home,
contemplatively looking out of the window, and he explains to his wife that he was
thinking of an old girlfriend with whom he split up at Christmas. On the basis
of seeing her for about ten seconds, Ebbie decides that Paul’s wife is
‘lovely’.
We finish off the
section with a bit of Ignorance & Want, with the latter renamed ‘Poverty’
in this version. The two raggedy children do a spot of interpretative dance,
and the present draws to a close.
Yet to Come:
 |
| If this doesn't work out, he can always try for a job as a Commander Data impersonator. |
Luther the store
detective turns up, without much to say but fully visible, similarly to how the
Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is depicted in some other US TV movie versions with contemporary settings.
He shows Ebbie
that she is eventually forced out of Dobson’s in the same way she and Marley
forced the sweet old couple out, with the store being bought-out and
closed-down to make way for a multiplex cinema. Ebbie then gets herself run
over, and dies alone in hospital without anybody coming to see her or being at
her side when she dies.
What’s To-Day:
In common with Ms. Scrooge from two years later, we see Scrooge laughing in delight and joy when
she wakes, a laugh referred to in the book but only sometimes shown on screen. Instead
of calling down to a boy outside the window, she buzzes Ralph the
commissionaire at her apartment building on the intercom to find out what day
it is.
Weirdly, she still
has the red dress that she went to the Dobson’s Christmas party in all those
years ago – she specifically says it’s the same one – but it’s at least impressive that she can still fit in it, I suppose. Quite often in these
adaptations when Scrooge goes around buying presents for everyone you wonder
where was open to sell them, but at least in this version there’s the
convenient fact that she owns her own department store.
She makes amends
with her employees and with her family, visiting the Cratchits and Frannie,
before going back to the Cratchits for dinner and another chorus of Tim’s
saccharine bloody song.
Review:
Quite a well
put-together version with nice modern equivalents for a lot of the situations
and lines. The fact that original lines from the book only occasionally crop up
in their unaltered form is more forgivable in a contemporary adaptation than
one set at the time of the book, and somehow lends those few lines more power
here when they do emerge – most notably Marley’s ‘mankind was my business!’
Lucci and most of
the cast are excellent, although I’m not convinced by the character of Paul. As
I mentioned above, he just comes across as a bit of a sleaze, and is only
really effective in his more reflective scene with the woman he eventually
married when he’s thinking back about Ebbie on Christmas Day.
Tim and the
Cratchits may be a touch too saccharine – are they ever not? – but the
character of Frannie the niece is quite sweetly winning. I suppose I shouldn’t
be too surprised given that I’ve been pleasantly surprised by others in this
sub-genre, but this is another contemporary US version with a female lead made
as a cheap-and-cheerful TV movie but which is actually rather better than you
might expect.
In a nutshell:
Not a classic, but
neither is it awful. Probably not worth making a special effort to seek out,
but amiable enough if you happen across it on TV one afternoon over the
Christmas holidays.
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