“You’ll shoot your eye out.” That’s all poor Ralphie hears from adults when he answers the question what do you want for Christmas with the one thing that he’s just dying to have: a Daisy Brand Red Ryder repeating BB carbine with a compass mounted in the stock. Now this story’s set in the late 1940s in small town Indiana, so don’t go getting the wrong idea.
Based on Jean Shepherd’s (much better, I thought) novel In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, A Christmas Story was almost unnoticed when first released before Thanksgiving 1983; word of mouth pulled more and more people into theaters after it almost closed before that Christmas but the real turning point was its release on video and now cable station TBS has a 24 hour (12 repeats in a row!) showing every year starting on Christmas Eve.
Ralphie (Peter Billingsly, the cute kid co-host of the then hit TV proto-reality series Real People) is a pretty basic kid and the movie wastes little energy fleshing his character out. The two biggest bits of character development are his fight with a bully and his disillusionment after finally receiving a secret Little Orphan Annie decoder sent away for weeks previously. Mainly he’s deadlocked on getting that rifle.
Mom and Dad are Melinda Dillon and Darren McGavin; mom’s mainly a stickfigure housewife, dad a midwestern cliche. Ralphie’s little brother has one big scene, where he refuses to eat his dinner until Dillon suggests he pretend his plate is a trough and he a pig. There are friends too, one of whom gets to show us what happens when a gullible boy licks a flagpole in winter.
I suppose writer/director Bob Clark, coming off the first two Porky’s teen schlockers, was looking for a movie that would show a bit more of his creativity but Shepherd’s material–which I’d read ten years or so earlier–doesn’t offer a story of sufficient depth to drive a feature-length film. His best works are short stories and even the novel from which the movie comes is more episodic, a series of connected incidents. Clark’s script tries to work in many of these, the father’s leg lamp award, ongoing battles with the neighbor’s pack of dogs, Christmas dinner at the Chinese restaurant, but is constrained from really making a meal of them.
Then there’s the cultural obsolecence of A Christmas Story, a distance from our own times that grows greater every year but doesn’t reach the classic resonance of, say, A Christmas Carol or Miracle on 34th Street. I’m not sure why, maybe the movie’s too new or we’re not far enough from 1948, but as I listened to the frequent voiceovers, Shepherd himself as the adult Ralph, I couldn’t help but wonder why he was talking so much.
recommended because I seem to be about the only person who didn’t warm to this tale.
BillSaysThis 