Is there a Christmas story more ubiquitous than the film literally called “A Christmas Story?” The movie was originally released in 1983, though its visual aesthetic and cinematography are so top-notch you could easily fool someone into thinking the movie was made in the era of its setting, the early 1940s.
Upon release, the film was ignored far and wide, dying on the vine in cinemas despite mostly positive reviews from the press (Roger Ebert gave it four stars and called it one of the best movies of the year). Despite industry buzz, the average ticket-buyer simply wasn’t interested. It released a week before Thanksgiving but by the time Christmas itself actually came, the movie was out of theaters.
By the time Turner Broadcasting acquired the rights three years later, the movie was almost entirely forgotten, giving it a fresh start on the small screen. Suddenly, the same people who passed on it at the cinema couldn’t turn it off in their living rooms. The movie made the shift from HBO to basic cable in the mid-’90s and found itself being aired multiple times in the days preceding Christmas, to strong ratings.
During Christmas week, 1995, it played six times across TBS, TNT, and TCM. In 1996 it played eight times in the three days before Christmas. By 1997, the movie was such a ratings winner, Turner began a new holiday tradition, the lazily-titled, “24-Hours of A Christmas Story.” As you might guess, the tradition goes something like this: Turner plays the movie over, and over, and over again, and you put it on in the background and watch it here and there throughout the day.
Now, over twenty years since the marathon-tradition began, and over thirty-five since the film was first released, A Christmas Story is one of the definitive holiday films, and one of the few “modern” films to completely break through the cultural zeitgeist and be accepted alongside old standards like Miracle on 34th Street, White Christmas, or It’s A Wonderful Life.
And the B.B. Gun isn’t even the best part.
Of course, the B.B. Gun is what most think of when they think of the film. Most summaries of the movie give the impression that the whole saga is built around little Ralphie’s quest to acquire an official Red Ryder, carbine action, two-hundred shot, range model air rifle, with compass and sundial in the stock. To be fair, that quest does provide a convenient through-line for the film’s loosely-assembled plot, as well as bring the film its most wholesome moment in the conclusion, but the movie never would have found its second life as an annual marathon with just the B.B. Gun story.
It was the episodic nature of the film that makes it so perfect for marathon-viewing. A Christmas Story is not one story but rather a half-dozen small tales in one. The quest for the B.B. Gun sort of flits in and out in between these other stories, and several smaller vignettes are peppered throughout as well, but the beauty of A Christmas Story is that it doesn’t require you to sit through the full ninety-minute presentation to enjoy it. If you only have five or ten minutes to spare, you can sit down and take in just one of the stories being told.
And if you are pressed for time, and can only catch one mini-story, let me help you out by ranking them, from least-best to very-best…
A Chinese Christmas Dinner
I place this one at the bottom because it’s the odd duck of the group, being that it has very little to do with Ralphie and that it doesn’t tell its story from his perspective. After the Bumpus’ dogs crash their Christmas morning, knock over their Christmas turkey, and eat their Christmas dinner, Ralphie’s family decides to go out to eat for the holiday. Of course, this being Christmas day in 1940, hardly anything is open except for the local Chinese establishment. What follows is a painfully hilarious attempt by the staff to provide a suitable holiday feast for their American guests, complete with duck (head attached) and a chorus of Deck the Halls. Is it racist? (That was a rhetorical question) But is it authentic to 1940? Yes it is.
A Visit to St. Nicholas
Early in the film, as part of his plot to secure the infamous B.B. Gun, Ralphie takes a visit to Santa’s satellite workshop in the mall, to sit on the lap of the big man himself and request his desired toy. The magic of the scene is in the way it captures how truly frightening it is for a child to be dragged to the lap of a strange, large man, who HOs in your face and begins interrogating you. Adults sometimes forget what it’s like to be a child with undeveloped minds and unperfected social skills. The use of a first-person camera here is particularly inspired, and the scene’s payoff as Santa repeats the odious warning “you’ll shoot your eye out” is great too.
The School Bully – Scut Farkus
The sublime line “Scut Farkus, what a rotten name” is how we are properly introduced to Ralphie’s schoolyard bully. The character appears more than once in the movie, but it’s not until later in the story–after Ralphie has reached his personal breaking point–that the true magic occurs. When Farkus chucks a snowball at Ralphie’s face and then taunts him with that horrid laugh, Ralphie loses it; he dives on top of the bully, pummeling his face, bare-knuckled, and spews a string of swearwords the likes of which would make a whore blush. Poor Randy hides under the sink, convinced that his dad is going to kill his brother for what he did; instead, mom covers for him and the two share a quiet moment of understanding that is sweet and subtle enough to go over the heads of most kids, but parents will appreciate it.
Little Orphan Annie
In short, Ralphie gets hoodwinked into thinking his favorite radio show really cared about its storyline and audience when actually all it wanted to do was sell advertising. It’s a harsh reality for the kid to learn but better to learn it now than face that sad realization later. Along the way, we’re treated to some of the realist moments of the movie, like the way Ralphie locks himself in the bathroom because it’s the only place in the house he can have peace and quiet. That moment means more to me now as an adult than it ever did as a child.
Triple Dog-Dared
What’s ironic about this memorable sequence is how it meta it has become now that the movie’s best lines and moments are in the public vernacular and consciousness. How could Flick not stick his tongue to the frozen post; he’d been Triple-Dog-Dared. Schwartz created a slight breach of etiquette by skipping the triple-dare and going right for the throat; in the end, Flick gave in to the pressure, found himself stuck and abandoned (“the bell rang!”) and, in what is the most gruesome moment in the whole film, had his tongue wrapped in some kind of barbaric 1940s-bandage with a little bow on top. The moment is now so engrained in our culture that more and more kids every year are attempting what Flick foolishly did, simply to see if it works as the movie showed. If that’s not a testament to the film’s enduring legacy nothing is!
Fudge
What other scene in the movie so perfectly captures the lighting in a bottle moment that nearly all children have encountered when, after swearing all school day long with friends, a word you know better than to say in front of your parents ends up slipping out in a moment of reckless abandon?
The movie does a great job running interference for poor Ralphie. First, we’re shown how his Dad could, as Ralphie himself puts it “in the heat of battle, weave a tapestry of obscenity that as far as we know, is still hanging in space over Lake Michigan.”
In addition, there’s the intense pressure that comes with being inches from moving traffic, your intimidating father at eye-level, and his shifting into the “time for you to learn this” mode that all fathers slide into from time to time, turning them from patient parents into intolerant lecturers. When the tire bolts went flying (an action caused, mind you, by the dad knocking them into the air), poor Ralphie said what his own father would have said; what his own father probably had said in the past.
The payoff, of course, comes when Ralphie–after being fed a bar of soap as punishment–envisions a future where, as an adult, he returns home to visit his parents, stricken blind from “soap poison.” Let’s also not forget poor Schwartz, Ralphie’s childhood friend, who was thrown under the bus for no reason other than “panic.” We’ve all been there, on one end of that betrayal or the other.
The Leg Lamp
The top spot, for me, belongs to the sequence that brings me the most joy every time I rewatch the film. It is the other mini-story that isn’t narrowly-focused on Ralphie, though it does feature one of the movie’s best lines as spoken by him as the narrator. After his dad correctly solves a write-in puzzle (thanks to an assist from his wife), he wins “a major award” that turns out to be a lamp that doubles as a to-scale model of a sultry, fishnet-draped leg. The saxophone motif that plays when the item is first revealed absolutely makes the moment, but it’s not until little Ralphie rubs his hand alllll the way up the leg that I lose it. Every year. Multiple times.
I’m laughing right now
The best line–and perhaps the most splendidly written line in the whole movie (which has a ton of them)–comes as Little Orphan Annie’s radio show begins, and Ralphie’s attention is finally diverted from, what he calls “the soft glow of electric sex.” That’s poetry, ladies and gentlemen. That’s the kind of prose you don’t get from just any Christmas movie. It’s what makes A Christmas Story so special. It’s what makes it so re-watchable year after year.
Multiple times a year.
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