A Christmas Story

A Christmas Story (Bob Clark, 1983) It started with Jean Parker Shepherd Jr.'s radio show on WOR in New York, where he would hold sway playing records and telling long rambling fictionalized stories about childhood and army service. Since he had experienced both, he had plenty of material to draw from. He was encouraged by Shel Silverstein to write stories and publish them, but Shepherd was reluctant to do so, not thinking himself a writer...or his picture of what a writer does, stuck in a garrett with an old Smith-Corona, bordered on one side by a large stack of hopeful, flawless white paper, and on the other with the disgruntled crumpled remains of them. But, Silverstein recorded and transcribed his shows, and with Shepherd's editorial assistance, they made their way into Playboy Magazine, and eventually, after three years of tinkering, Shepherd's 1966 book "In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash" was released.

The collection of stories became the basis of A Christmas Story, co-written (and narrated) by Shepherd and his collaborator, director Bob Clark, who had made a name for himself with low budget films, particularly the high-grossing "Porky's" series. The film did not do well at the box office or with critics—The New York Times' Vincent Canby grinched: "There are a number of small, unexpectedly funny moments in A Christmas Story, but you have to possess the stamina of a pearl diver to find them. The movie’s big comic pieces tend only to be exceedingly busy. Though Mr. Billingsley, Mr. Gavin, Miss Dillon and the actress who plays Ralphie’s school teacher (Tedde Moore) are all very able, they are less funny than actors in a television situation comedy that one has chosen to watch with the sound turned off"—but became a cult classic on video and has a perennial 24-hour run at Christmas-time on Ted Turner's stations WTBS and WTNT (as it does today).

It tells the story of Ralphie Parker (a Charlie Brownish Peter Billingsley), whose dream for Christmas is a genuine Red Ryder air-rifle—the one that comes with a shockproof compass and a sundial set into its stock—and it is his 9 year old life's desire. Trouble is, if you say that to an adult, the first thing out an adult's mouth is "the deadly BB gun block": "You'll shoot your eye out with that thing." Ralphie begins a campaign with all adults in his vicinity to show himself worthy of his "oiled steel blue beauty," a quest both practical and magical, born of the superstitions that could only emanate from the mind of a child (or any true believer).

That story, borne from Shepherd's chapter "Duel in the Snow: or Red Ryder Nails the Cleveland Street Kid," forms the spine of the movie, but there are others that fill out the fabric: "My Old Man and the Lascivious Special Award That Heralded the Birth of Pop Art," "Grover Dill and the Tasmanian Devil," and "The Counterfeit Secret Circle Member Gets the Message"—all little parables of how the schemes and failings of others can dim the sparkle in a child's innocent eyes...especially during Christmas-time. Not to mention shooting them out.

Clark was no one's idea of an auteur, or a master film maker, but he caught lightning in a bottle with A Christmas Story. He did, after all, grow up in the '40's, he had the period down and kept the war out of it, keeping it focused with Red Ryder's precision aim on the world—real and fantasy—of a child. Given that warped perspective, veering from naked avarice to bewilderment over the actions of adults to both the magic and horror of "The Season," and ricocheting to melodrama and cartoonish fantasy, anything is very game.

So, it is quite unfair to cite the performances of the actors (as Canby does) for any forcefulness beyond realism, when the perspective is from the sugar-plum-infested perspective of a 9 year old. Even without that charitable perspective, the performances are nail-hitting (as opposed to nail-biting). Billingsley's might be my favorite comic child performance, alternating from empty cluelessness to a naked "go-for-broke" expansiveness that doesn't have any of the calculation of what passes for child-acting these days. 

I've always been a fan of Darren McGavin as he has an arch quality that plays well for villains or for comedy, sometimes simultaneously, but his performance as "The Old Man" goes far beyond Shepherd's depiction of a put-upon with a linguist's mastery for cursing. There's a quality of a Job-like tolerance that comes unstuck with a voluble ferocity whenever something does not go as he envisions—which one can usually clock at half-hour intervals. It's one of those performances where you worry about the actor's blood-pressure while you're watching it. Melinda Dillon's mother is another of her iconic resourcefully tolerant portrayals of motherhood for which she was typecast in the 1980's—you always believed that she had the patience of a saint.

But, perhaps the best performance of the bunch is Shepherd's Narrator (no one would be foolish enough to replace him) as, despite having done the thing so many times, his enthusiasm for the material shines through with a boyish glee that, if the rest of the cast were performing in Noh masks, would be more than enough to communicate everything one needed to know down to the minutest detail. Not so much narration as telepathy.

These days, when it's a bit hard to decipher exactly what a Christmas movie is (The Large Association of Movie Blogs just had a poll for "The Best" and it came down to The Muppet Christmas Carol just barely winning out over Die Hard—Bah! Humbug!), one would do well to have a snowball to the face for reality and re-visit this gem of a movie. 

I double-dog dare you.