Ms. Scrooge

Title:

Ms. Scrooge

Format:

TV Movie

Country:

USA

Production company:

Power Pictures, for the USA Network

Year:

1997 (first broadcast on the USA Network on December 10^th that year)

Length:

87 minutes

Setting:

Contemporary United States

Background:

One of the major general-interest cable channels in the United States, the USA Network was also one of the first, being founded as a sports network in 1977 before transforming into its current more mixed format in 1980. Through the 1980s is began investing in original scripted programming, and by the 1990s was a major player in America cable ratings and a commissioner of various series, miniseries and TV movies such as this seasonal offering for Christmas 1997.

Cast and crew:

Scriptwriter John McGreevey was a very experienced hand in American television drama, having written for series going all the way back to the early 1950s, including twenty episodes of The Waltons in the 1970s. Ms Scrooge was his final credited work, produced when he was 75 years old. Director John Korty was an Academy Award winner, although not for a dramatic work – he won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature for Who Are The DeBolts? in 1977. During his career he also made animated  shorts for Sesame Street and directed the Ewok-based Star Wars spin-off Caravan of Courage in 1984.

Cicely Tyson stars as the rather-forcing-it ‘Ebenita Scrooge’; a hugely experienced and acclaimed performer in film and television, she had been nominated for an Oscar for her role in 1972’s Sounder and had previously worked with director Korton when she starred in his TV movie The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, which also garnered them both much acclaim.

Katherine Helmond as ‘Maude Marley’ was known for her starring role in the American sitcom Soap, and had also been a regular in Who’s the Boss?, the sitcom which was remade in the UK in the early 1990s as The Upper Hand.

Underdone Potato:

Ebenita Scrooge is a loan shark in Providence, Rhode Island, who runs a business giving loans to the desperate and needy and making a tidy profit in return. She has a few more employees other than Bob Cratchit, although he is the one of whom we see the most through the whole thing. There are a few other differences, too – it’s Marley’s name first in the business, although this is later explained, and Maude Marley died ten rather than seven years ago.

Nephew Fred is Reverend Luke here, the first sign that this version takes a more explicit leap into Christian territory than most versions of the Carol usually do, and perhaps even more so than Dickens’s original did.

There are some oddities once Scrooge has made it home for the evening. She has a cat, Mortimer, which she genuinely seems to have affection for. This seems an odd move as it gives her perhaps a chink of sympathy to her character a bit too early – the same issue caused by Scrooge being kind to a mouse early on in the 2001 animated version.

She also has various odd little novelty money boxes around the house, into which she puts various coins at the end of the day, which again seems a bit frivolous for her character. Speaking of money boxes, when Marley appears the boxes on her chains have been replaced by more modern-day items such as mobile phones. Oddly, although she draws attention to the chains almost immediately, they aren’t subsequently commented upon or explained in any way.

There’s an interesting difference to Marley here, too. Which in the original Marley says Scrooge’s chance at redemption is “a chance and hope of my procuring,” (one of my favourite lines from the book) here Marley’s motivations are much more selfish. If Scrooge is redeemed, she will apparently no longer have to walk the Earth – although Maud has it easier than the literary Marley, as she evidently only has to walk out once a year, at Christmas.

Maude Marley; a more selfish version of the character than usual.

Past:

The Ghost of Christmas Past is a jolly-ish late middle-aged man with the odd cutting remark, although he doesn’t actually appear all that much. Most of the past scenes are simply shown to us, with Ebenita and the spirit only occasionally present, with voiceover often being used instead of seeing them in the scenes.

We see Ebenita as a child, presumably just after the Second World War as her father mentions using his GI grant to start up a shop. This is also the only element of the story where we get any hint of racial tension – you might expect this to perhaps be more of a theme when the story is about a black woman who grew up in the American south in the middle of the 20^th century, but although it’s touched on here it never becomes a major theme of the piece. Of course, just because a story focuses on a black character it’s not somehow compulsory that it has to tackle racism. But it does enough to give the context of the time, I think, acknowledging it without it being a focus.

Ebenita’s father had given her the best Christmas she ever had as a child by giving her a puppy as a present, but gets himself into debt trying to start the shop, and then dies in a fire when it burns down. The fire scene perhaps echoes a similar event in An American Christmas Carol from 1979, one of the best-known US-set versions.

We then see Ebenita having moved north as an adult, having a romance with a man named Steve and getting a job working for Marley. Marley in this version combines both the traditional role for the character and that of Fezziwig, although with none of Fezziwig’s jolliness. Marley is hard and pragmatic, and these traits start to rub off on Ebenita. When Steve decides to move back south she doesn’t go with him, receiving a promotion in Marley’s firm but a couple months later learning that her brother Perry has been killed in action in Vietnam.

The Ghost of Christmas Present. I'm not sure about that baseball cap...

Present:

The Ghost of Christmas Present is played by Shaun Austin-Olsen, an actor about whom very little information appears to be available but who seem like the sort of person you’d get for a role where you can’t get hold of Simon Russell Beale. He’s British, middle-aged, only moderately bearded and not particularly jolly. Intriguingly, he mentions that he usually resides in a “toasty place,” suggesting that he is doing this as penance for his own failings.

We see Bob sliding on the ice with Tim, who unusually in this version does actually have his illness specified – it’s a slow-growing tumour. His crutch does look very Victorian, perhaps either a hint at how poor the Cratchits are or else a deliberate throwback to the original version. There’s the toast scene at the Cratchits, with Mrs Cratchit – actress Arsinée Khanjian, whose accent I couldn’t place so looked her up afterwards and found she was Armenian-Canadian – being irritated by it as per the book.

We are taken to nephew Luke’s, but of course him being a reverend it’s not a party we’re dropping in on, but a church service. He tells a story I remember being told in primary school about everyone in the afterlife having to eat with very long cutlery, but those in heaven feeding each other while those in hell go hungry.

Looking like Death-not-even-all-that-warmed up.

Yet to Come:

Julian Richings as the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come looks like an undertaker, and it’s no surprise to learn that he does seem to have made something of a career out of playing Death. Although his face is seen he is still mute, similar to what was done with James Cromwell in the 2003 A Carol Christmas.

Fred knows the Cratchits more than he does in the book, as they go to his church. Rather than seeing the aftermaths of Tim and Scrooge’s deaths, we actually see them dying, with the Inland Revenue Service taking all of Ebenita’s money, much to her disgust. There’s an interesting line from Cratchit when he turns up at her funeral as the one and only mourner – even though she had fired him – when he tells Fred that he “grieves for who she might have been.”

What’s To-Day:

Tyson does a good job of Scrooge being overtaken by a joyous laugh after she awakes, and the boy – or “young man” – outside of the window gets a name in this version, Chris Logan. He’s sent to the supermarket to buy the turkey for the Cratchits, and has a fun line when he gets back with it about the person in the store at first not having believed the fifty dollar note Scrooge gave him was real, or that he hadn’t stolen it.

As the Cratchits receive the turkey, Scrooge makes amends with some of those she wronged or turned down for money at the start – although not all of them, which makes me wonder whether some material was cut here for time – and leaves bonuses in envelopes for her employees to come into on Boxing Day.

One employee receives a personal visit, however – Bob, whose wife at first thinks she’s come to fire him, until Tim points out it must have been her who sent the turkey. Scrooge doubles his salary, makes him vice president of the firm and says they’ll be instituting a healthcare plan. She also has presents for all and sundry, including a Punch & Judy toy referred to by name, which surprised me as I didn’t think they had Punch & Judy shows in America. She also gets Tim a puppy, echoing her father’s gift to her all those years ago, which must have been in that box for a hell of a long time before she gives it to him, but it seems happy enough.

The film ends with Scrooge paying a visit to Fred’s church service as the choir is in full song with Go Tell It On the Mountain, and he’s surprised but pleased to see her arrive.

I bet the Cratchits were *thrilled* that she got Tim a puppy without even asking them first.

Review:

This is a pretty well-done contemporary version, and it makes an interesting comparison to ADiva’s Christmas Carol from three years later. Both contemporary US-set versions with female leads made for American cable television channels – and both shot in Canada – and both managing to tell decent versions of the story in very different ways

Whereas A Diva’s Christmas Carol goes primarily for the comedy, here scriptwriter John McGreevey has very much gone for a serious version of the tale. Neither approach is more valid than the other, of course, but although I can appreciate the work done here I actually probably found the fun of Diva a little more to my taste.

But that’s not to say this is in any way bad. It’s not. It’s a good film, and more directly acknowledging the Christian aspect of Christmas marks it out from a great many other versions. As a serious US-set version, however, it’s probably somewhat in the shadow of An American Christmas Carol, which I don’t think it quite manages to match.

In a nutshell:

While it’s not in the first rank of Carol adaptations, it’s certainly not bad and worth a watch if it happens to be on.

Links:

Wikipedia

IMDb