40 Years of “A Christmas Story”

Released to cinemas 40 years ago this very day, the unlikely holiday classic A Christmas Story (1983).

I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t love this movie, ranging from people old enough to nostalgically remember the era it depicts (apparently the late 1930s) to those who more appreciate the edgy and hilarious realism of its comic approach. It’s a hair’s breadth from being cynical, unprecedented in its day in a holiday film, though it’s certainly now been surpassed in that regard many times over in things like Bad Santa (2003) and Krampus (2015). Yet the film’s depiction’s are also affectionate and basically gentle, which miraculously retains it in the camp of family entertainment.

I’m not sure if I was aware of A Christmas Story when it arrived in cinemas in 1983. I seem to recall discovering it on television a couple of years later. Like most people, I’ve probably seen it around 20 times. Unlike most people, I drilled down into it pretty extensively by participating in an unauthorized stage production several years ago. You won’t find it mentioned online. It was a workshop with but a single performance at the Brick Theatre in Brooklyn. My happiest memory of that experience was in getting to re-enact my favorite moment in the film, when the terrifying drunken department store Santa pushes an unwilling tike down a slide with the sole of his boot, uttering a mirthless “Ho. Ho. HO.”

You probably know that A Christmas Story was based on yarns by the great radio raconteur Jean Shepherd. You may not know that it was neither the first nor the last movie or TV show about which that is true. Shepherd wrote (and narrated) many shows with the same characters including Phantom of the Open Hearth (1976), The Great American Fourth of July and Other Disasters (1982), Ollie Hoopnoddle’s Haven Of Bliss (1988), and My Summer Story (1994).

Both A Christmas Story and My Summer Story were directed by Bob Clark, and his touch proved perfect, for these films live at the juncture of Clark’s two best-known previous films, the tongue-in-cheek horror flick Black Christmas (1974) and the period comedy Porky’s (1981).

Special citation for excellence is due to production designer Reuben Freed, who got the period detail so right on both Porky’s and A Christmas Story. Lovers of vintage culture will find much to appreciate in this movie, from the many examples of advertising art to the attachment the main character has for the Little Orphan Annie radio show, and the Red Ryder movie serials, both of them with material manifestations, in the first case a de-coder ring, and in the second a BB gun. Both had their origins as comics.

I’ve always loved the casting of the 60 year old Darren McGavin as The Old Man. The unusual choice of a sexagenarian actor as a crusty, profanity-spewing dad strikes one as a curiously realistic detail, especially for a movie set several decades in the past. Similarly, Melinda Dillon was 44 when she played the mom. This was clearly not a thing about glamor but about recognition. And talking of recognizability, how fortunate a find was young Peter Billingsley as Ralphie, who was not only talented and charming but a dead ringer for Shepherd (above)?

The magical alchemy of this film was never to be repeated, not in Clark’s and Shepherd’s own sequel My Summer Story (1994) with Charles Grodin,Mary Steenburgen, and Kiernan Culkin; nor in the posthumous, straight-to-video A Christmas Story 2 (2012), nor even in the enjoyable and interesting A Christmas Story Christmas (2022) which actually reunited some of the original cast, Billingsley in particular, but also Zack Ward (Scut Farkus), and various Bumpuses. Though Donder and Blitzen may be reliable, lightning never strikes the same spot twice.