Redux #020: A Christmas Story.
Cast:
Peter Billingsley (Ralphie Parker), Jean Shepherd (Narrator), Ian Petrella (Randy Parker),
Melinda Dillon (Mrs. Parker),
Darren McGavin (Mr. Parker - The Old Man), Scott Schwartz (Flick), R. D. Robb (Schwartz), Zack Ward (Scut Farkus), Yano Anaya (Grover Dill), and
Tedde Moore (Miss Shields) Directed by
Bob Clark.
Review:
From my review on December 25, 2010:
This film, is a classic. it's a film that has decent acting (albeit with some overacting at points), a story that has many themes to go with it that connect into one (with some...fantasies by Ralphie) It's funny, but it can also be serious. It's a timeless classic that was once overlooked back in 1983, but it is now considered to be a classic in the Christmas spirit. Merry Christmas, and I hope you watch this film at least once this year, if not twice (as it's on a marathon right now...).
If you have not encountered this film on cable television or on the video shelves, it would be quite a curious achievement for a film that has grown in stature since its release in November of 1983, which is now forty years old. The making of the film was a long and lengthy process that really should start with Jean Shepherd and his unique place among the art of telling a narrative to others. Born in Chicago but raised in Hammond, Indiana, Shepherd had served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during the second World War before getting into radio that saw him move around various places such as Indiana and Ohio (there was also an attempt at late night television) before his most noted run came at WOR in the New York area, where he broadcasted for over two decades beginning in 1956. Somehow, with a timeslot of 1:00-5:30am, it all came together for those
monologues (as opposed to playing music records). Probably his most notable stunt came with
I, Libertine, a practical joke novel born in 1956 out of making fun of how bestseller lists were done (where people would just go to libraries and ask for it, complete with listing a publisher and a fake author name), which became such a noted phenomenon that an actual book was created (written by Theodore Sturgeon based on an outline by Shepherd). Shepherd kept busy even when not on radio all the time, whether that involved segment work, commentaries on other radio outlets / in magazine form / the college circuit, or, well, script work in television and this film. In 1966, Shepherd's novel
In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash was published, which came about after Shel Silverstein had encouraged him to put his musings from tape into book form, which saw him help Shepherd with editing and developing. His musings were loosely inspired by experiences that aren't exactly autobiographical but are, well, ones that might seem real to you or me in the ways that matter - it was a hit book. A couple of Shepherd works had reached television (with him as narrator) before and after the release of this film, such as The Great American Fourth of July and Other Disasters (1982) for TV. Shepherd apparently envisioned the film as "Dickens’s Christmas Carol as retold by Scrooge.” Shepherd, along with his wife Leigh Brown, wrote the film with Clark. The Louisiana native grew up in Alabama and Florida and had dabbled in philosophy and football before entering film in horror, such as with
Black Christmas (1974). He had an interest in making a film of Shepherd's stories, but he couldn't get funding from MGM until the success of
Porky's (1981). The film was done in Toronto for interiors and Cleveland for exteriors, but in that manner of low-budget films having to improvise, a lack of snow meant a variety of tricks used for snow, such as foam. You could watch the film in any one scene and feel right at home, whether that involves the reveal of that primal instinct coming out in going from tears to drawing blood in a fight or those imagined sequences of being a gunfighter or being blind from soap that isn't too different from the delusions one can find as an adult when it comes to assurances.
The mundane things that make us who we are really do come into account for this film, one that runs for an efficient 94 minutes. Sure, it has the softening of nostalgia (as per Clark to the chagrin of Shepherd), but at the end of the day, we are weird little people every day of the year with our own little things to get hung up on, and such weirdness can be really funny to look at again and again. It was a modest success with audiences of the time, don't forget that part. But why do people like me come back to this film every now and then? Shepherd once put it best: “Ah, life is like that. Sometimes at the height of our revelries, when our joy is at its zenith, when all is most right with the world, the most unthinkable disasters descend upon us.” One can be playing with their present and boom, something comes up to remind us that things will come and go the way you cannot control, holiday or not. Billingsley proves more than just a vessel for Shepherd to narrate the observations of memories past with his worthwhile timing that make for useful delight. It is a film for the kids and adults because it doesn't dawdle on BS'ing you about where things stand. There are no weak elements to the kid actors because they seep right into the story with no pretensions of being anything other than who they are: vessels to show us the weirdness of growing up in the pains and very few pleasures. Dillon and McGavin hold the film as the paragon of lovingly human people that hold it all together in that great connection of showing family in the clearest sense of making it work in spite of itself. Probably the best way to show that is in that fateful reveal of the last Christmas present where you see the faces of the two as Billingsley opens it (notice that through the previous parts of the film, McGavin's character never talks to Billingsley about a "Red Ryder BB Gun"). The film may seem like one all about the pursuit of an object, but really it is about who we are when it comes to the basic elements deep inside us, whether the calendar says December 25 or not. We lash out in those certain moments, we imagine others as witches or people to liberate with our perspective (hey, saving people with a "BB gun" or writing a theme isn't that too different), we try to do our job until we can start getting the shoes ready to head out, you get the picture. The film may be set in that time of the 1940s, but those desires and impulses are timeless and Clark knows what he can show in a film that doesn't stoop awkwardly in its perspectives. There are no dull moments shown here, and it is that tinge of bittersweet nostalgia that makes it all count in spite of whatever Shepherd may have thought of the whole thing. We connect with the material because there is a chunk of it in us more than we think it is. The films of the old in Christmas-flavoring like Miracle on 34th Street (1947) did their thing in holiday magic of belief, but this is a representation of holiday homespun honesty in the ideal way.
It was at the turn of the 1980s that Shepherd thought to drive an idea for a follow-up to this film. Perhaps it only made sense that he called it purely an exercise to try and make money, since he saw the following that was growing with rerun showings (i.e., royalties), which apparently saw a bunch of showings around the Thanksgiving season rather than just on Christmas Eve (1997 was when the whole tradition of Turner Broadcasting running it for 24 hours straight started, incidentally).
My Summer Story (formerly referred to as It Runs in the Family) (1994) retained Clark as director and Shepherd as narrator, which is amusing considering that the two hadn't got along in the first film because of the incessant suggestions that Shepherd tried to give on set that led to Clark not allowing him to be there at all. The second
Story film came and promptly died in little-run theaters.
A Christmas Story Christmas, a film with a handful of returning cast members, was released in 2022 to a streaming service (gag). At any rate, the enduring element of the film that became more than just a low-budget sleeper is the everyday aspect that makes us chuckle in the holiday sense of the word. The item that one desires and the ways we toil in that wish (child or adult) is amusing when you really look at things, and it only makes sense that it has endured for generations as one to blare from the rooftops again and again. The inflections of mundane life and the odd nature of trying to look back at such things in life make for a great contradiction in the grand scheme of things that make an enduring winner that could only come from Clark and Shepherd in the best of ways.
Overall, I give it 10 out of 10 stars.
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Review #1391: The Man with the Golden Arm.