MasterChugs Theater: ‘A Christmas Story’

We’re a little busy here at the palatial SG Towers, so a classic from last year is being run in place for this week’s MasterChugs. Merry Christmas!

You’re now reading about what is my absolute favorite Christmas movie of all time. And speaking of reading, let’s get on with the review.

For the uninitiated, A Christmas Story ranks as the best holiday movie ever, better than Scrooged, better than A Christmas Carol (pick a variety), better even than It’s a Wonderful Life. Based on the book In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash by Jean Shepherd, it’s a period piece set in roughly 1940, telling a series of vignettes about a young boy that’s 9 years old in the weeks leading up to Christmas. He faces down bullies, witnesses a dare match over whether a tongue will stick to a frozen metal pole, gets his mouth washed out with soap, and sees the holiday turkey devoured by dogs… and all he wants is a BB gun! But as everyone tells him, “You’ll shoot your eye out, kid!”

And with that line, the movie went down into the annals of pop culture. But, there’s more to the film than just quotable dialogue. What makes this film so good? Hit the jump to find out why.

It’s the 1940’s and Ralphie (Peter Billingsley) is your typical Little Orphan Annie-listening young lad. All he really wants for Christmas this year is an official Red Rider B.B. gun. Yet every time he tells an adult his dream gift he’s greeted with the same response, “You’ll shoot your eye out.” A Christmas Story follows the lead up to Christmas, following Ralphie, his family and his friends as they get ready for yet another big December 25th. The film follows them to places like the department store, a visit with Santa, evenings in front of the radio and afternoons during the final days of class before the holiday break. We’re also taken into Ralphie’s imagination as he dreams of all the good he can do if he were to get the gun and the horror of hearing the same phrase about him shooting his peepers over and over again.

The film’s casting is nearly perfect. Peter Billingsley is Ralphie, the hyperactive lovable kid who lives in the moment and thinks he can outsmart adults. Billingsley’s cockeyed grin and wide-eyed expression make him instantly likable. Like Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone, his entire career has been defined by this single childhood role. Unlike Culkin, however, who wants to move on, Billingsley is happy to be known as Ralphie.

Darren McGavin had a diverse enough resume that typecasting was never a fear for the late actor, who stopped working in the late 1990s. Nevertheless, more people know him as “The Old Man” than even as cult-figure Kolchak. His approach to Mr. Parker is flawless – a gruff middle class businessman who loves his kids but doesn’t make a practice of showing it. He’s also a Mr. Fixit, turning flat tires and malfunctioning furnaces into opportunities to display his prowess when it comes to home repairs.

Melinda Dillon is the “Everymom” – more stable than her character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind but not fundamentally different. She’s a little on the overprotective side – not only does she reject Ralphie’s gift request but she dresses her youngest, Randy, so warmly that he can hardly move in his snowsuit. She provides enough nurturing to balance Mr. Parker’s hands-off approach to his kids.

A Christmas Story contains scenes and set pieces that stay in the memory. There are Ralphie’s trips to and from school with the bully Scut Farkus in hot pursuit. There’s the triple-dog dare that leads Flick to having his tongue attached to a frozen flagpole. There’s the arrival of the Old Man’s fishnet stockinged leg lamp, which he doesn’t recognize as the epitome of cheesiness. There’s the annual trip to the tree lot and the equally annual blown fuse when the decorated monstrosity is lit. There’s Ralphie’s discovery that not all soaps taste the same. There’s the trip to the mall to see Santa and his disgruntled elves (one wonders whether this scene was the inspiration for Bad Santa). There’s the Christmas morning race to open the presents and the moment when Ralphie wonders if his mother was right all along. (Anyone with glasses will sympathize with his terror when he hears the crunch beneath his feet. It’s something the non-bespectacled can’t relate to.) Finally, there’s the Chinese Christmas dinner, complete with Peking Duck and singing waiters. It’s those moments and others and the way they are tied together by Shepherd’s tongue-in-cheek narration that cements A Christmas Story as one of those rare must-see holiday movies, even for those who don’t celebrate Christmas.

Earlier, I asked what makes this film so good? It’s so sweet but it has the cynical heart of post-WWII America. None of this happy ever after nonsense; our hero has to have Christmas dinner at a Chinese restaurant! Billingsley is so perfect as Ralphie that you simply don’t want his adventures to end – and in fact, they didn’t; there are two earlier films and two sequels (many made for TV), following the Parker family; none of them have the magic of the central installment. A Christmas Story also has the most hilarious dream/fantasy sequences ever put to film, and the way it pillories our nascent commercial culture (“Be sure to drink your Ovaltine!”) makes the film perfect for the whole year, not just Christmastime.

A Christmas Story has something no other holiday film – new or old, comedic or serious – can boast: perfect nostalgia. That quality fuels this modern-day classic and has made it one of the season’s most beloved motion pictures. It says a lot when a movie can instantly transport a 26 year old like myself to a time that I know nothing about. One of the Turner cable stations (it was once TNT, now it’s been TBS as of late) annually runs the movie non-stop for 24 hours and that’s the mark of something with which people feel comfortable. Like I’ve mentioned earlier, the movie takes place in the early 1940s, but so much material in the film is universal that, irrespective of your birth date or religious affiliation, you’re likely to find more than one familiar thing contained herein. Those born before 1940 will see this as a collage of memories brought to the screen. Those of a younger age will mix their own memories of Christmas with a wistfulness associated with how they imagine the holiday once was (and, if it truly wasn’t, how it should have been).

Let’s face it. Most kids love Christmas for the presents. As much as we’d like to make them believe that it’s all about the giving, they prefer the toy fire truck or the Baby Wets Her Pants over watching Dad open up yet another striped tie or seeing Mom shout with glee over a diamond necklace. It’s all about the ripping open of the presents and reveling in seeing Santa demolish their Christmas wish list just as fast as the remote control car crashes once too many and heads off to the toy graveyard. Director Bob Clark has made a movie that captures this sense unlike no other holiday film I have seen.