A Christmas Story - 1983

 

A Christmas Story (1983) perhaps unlike any other Christmas movie, has reached icon stage in American pop culture.  Its meteoric rise in stature—to the level where the house in Cleveland where some exterior scenes were shot has been turned into a tourist attraction, and Major Award Leg Lamps are to be found for sale as T-shirts, earrings, tree ornaments and actual lamps.  The movie’s dialogue has become a universal language.  Even hallowed favorites among classic film fans like White Christmas (1954) or Christmasin Connecticut (1945) have not become so widely quoted, merchandized, or watched.

This is the final film in our series on holiday movies.  I’ll link to the other movies we discussed below.  This series was meant to lead up to the release of my newest book—a collection of essays on Christmas classic films, but life, as the saying goes, got in the way.  That book will have to wait a little longer, and I’ll discuss that more next week.

While I don’t personally consider A Christmas Story a classic film (my criteria follows that it must be produced before 1965), nobody who loves classic films can deny the special attraction this movie has for classic film fans.  It achieves a unique quality of being a “retro” movie by virtue of its setting in about 1940, but unlike other movies, even very good and well-researched movies set in the 1930s and 1940s, it accomplishes this with effortless submersion into a world that most viewers, even in 1983, did not remember personally but understood instinctually.  This was achieved without mawkishness, or parody.  Though the movie is clearly a love letter to the era, it is never sentimental, and yet is it still without the brutish pseudo-sophisticated sarcasm of modern films and TV shows.

It is a look at the travails of Christmas through the eyes of a child, yet it is narrated by the adult the child has become and we also see the parents’ and other grown-ups’ view of things.  There is no linear story, but the movie is told in splintered vignettes woven together as Christmas draws ever closer, with the anticipation of marking off the calendar.

Directed by Bob Clark (who also has a short role as “Swede,” the guy to whom Ralphie’s father brags about his Major Award), the movie was co-written by humorist Jean Shepherd (who also appears briefly in line waiting for Santa) from his series of semi-autobiographical stories.

Peter Billingsley had the role of a lifetime as Ralphie, a wide-eyed bespectacled kid who is innocent but not naïve, and who desperately wants a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas, despite being warned by every grown-up he encounters that “You’ll shoot your eye out.”

Darren McGavin is his father, or “the Old Man.”  I love him in this role.  He is the perfect curmudgeon with the soft heart who eventually grants the boy’s wish.  His thrill at watching his son open the box is priceless.  His grumpiness is true to life and hysterical.  My favorite line of his: “You used up all the glue on purpose!”  He reminds me of my own father.

Melinda Dillon is the mother, who in every way is the perfect consort to the blustering McGavin.  I will say, though, the only thing I don’t like about the movie is her hairdo.  It should have been more of a 1940s style.  She looks too modern.  Her battle at getting Randy into the snowsuit is epic.

Ian Petrella plays Randy, and Ralphie’s pals are R. D. Robb as Schwartz, Scott Schwartz as Flick, and the bully Scut Farkus is played by Zach Ward and his toady Grover Dill is played by Yano Anaya.  The movie was made nearly 40 years ago and yet these guys will always be kids whose place in pop culture is so cemented as to override the fact that they were really just actors saying lines. 

Tedde Moore is the longsuffering teacher Miss Shields, who meets every obstacle with a raised eyebrow.  I love her arch inspiration of announcing to the students they are to be given the assignment of writing…a theme.

It’s hard to say if the blueprint of this movie—script, casting, storyboard, cinematography—is a masterwork of brilliance in the planning or if the sum total of the movie’s parts were just a happy accident.  There is a feel of serendipity about the film and where it takes us.

The details are there to enjoy that have little to do with the plot: the teacher’s drawer full of confiscated trinkets including Big Little books (I had some, did you?), and my favorite, the Terry and the Pirates comic strip on the back of the newspaper Darren McGavin is reading on Christmas morning.

The Orphan Annie decoder was a particular topic of discussion in my family, as my mother, who as a child in the 1930s—and a huge Orphan Annie fan (I learned the theme song at her knee as a young kid…”Who’s the little chatterbox, the one with pretty auburn locks? Whom do you see, it’s Little Orphan Annie….”)—and who could not afford to send for the decoder to get Annie’s secret messages, cleverly figured out the cipher key herself on paper.  She would not affirm that each message was about Ovaltine, the sponsor, but agreed the commercialism was pretty heavy-handed.

“Fragile—must be Italian,” and not sticking your tongue to cold metal are scenes so indelible this must be the one film where the plot—even though there is one—seems unnecessary at times.

We are taken on Ralphie’s rollercoaster emotions of the season and face trials of how to ask for the present he knows his parents won’t approve of, facing the frightening experience of a too-loud Santa in a line of fretful kids, an especially facing the awful bully.  Using the "oh fudge" line rather than explicitly using the vulgarity is actually funnier than if we had been allowed to hear Ralphie's uncensored slip into profanity, just as Mr. McGavin's indecipherable sputtering is funnier than if we had been able to understand his frustrated rant over the furnace. 

About the only aspect of Christmas missing from the movie that many of us would identify with is the religious themes and overtones, which we catch only a glimpse of at the beginning of the film with the church choir singing on the street corner.  Missing are the mysteries of the Nativity, which most kids comically mix up and about which they come to very strange conclusions.  I have always personally enjoyed the kids’ reenactment at church of the First Christmas with unruly shepherds, sheep that won’t stand still, and angels that shove Wise Men when they step on their line.  The theatricality of Christmas could be another movie, but it’s not something Ralphie has to endure. He has enough on his plate.

At the end of it, Ralphie gets his heart’s desire, and the adult voiceover rejoices and confirms that it was his best Christmas present that he would ever receive.

There is a poignant note of sadness in that.  Never to have topped the Christmas when you were eight years old?

Perhaps that is because as children, all our experiences, big and small, happy and sad, hit us so acutely.   It is not just believing in Santa or in wishes that come true, but rather that we live the season so passionately, down to our bones. 

We look for messages in Christmas films, if only because most of them, at least the modern Hallmark versions, bludgeon us with them.  If A Christmas Story has any message for us, it is just to take the holiday season for what it is, make the best of it, and keep your sense of humor.  And if there are any good memories, keep them.  Treasure them.  Stretch them in the retelling.  They will sustain us long after the much-desired presents of childhood have been broken and thrown out.

But the reason for the film's popularity and ascendance to pop culture icon is not only due to the film's excellence.  Many wonderful movies have not reached this stage of familiarity or have been entirely lost to us.  It is because of the canny repetitive broadcasting every year, not just once but several times, even an annual 24-hour marathon on one cable station. That, like Orphan Annie's Ovaltine "secret message" Ralphie was desperate to decode, is pure clever marketing.  There is nothing sentimental about that, but you can't argue with success.

I wish you all a very Merry Christmas. 

The films in this series were:

Cover Up (1949)

The Lemon Drop Kid (1951)

Fitzwilly (1967)

It Happened on 5th Avenue (1947)

Big Business (1929)

Beyond Tomorrow (1940)

 

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century. Her newspaper column on classic films, Silver Screen, Golden Memories is syndicated nationally.  Her new book, a collection of posts from this blog - Hollywood Fights Fascism - is available here on Amazon.