Remember that one special Christmas when you were a kid? You were young enough to give Santa the benefit of a doubt, but old enough to dream big. No toy fire truck or Monopoly game would satisfy your yearning. Nosiree. You weren't just a dumb kid any more.
In A Christmas Story, nine year-old Ralphie Parker (Peter Billingsley) wants an official Red Ryder, carbine action, two-hundred shot range model air rifle, with a compass on the stock and this thing which tells time. He's going to make sure everybody within earshot knows just what he wants this Christmas. Beyond this quest, the heart of this story is found in its nostalgic and hilarious examination of Ralphie's family and friends. This sepia toned 1940s world may have long since passed us by, but these characters will live forever.
Billingsley is a thick-lensed, four-eyed, sibilant 's'-ing wonder in the key role of Ralphie. Never for a moment do we stop pulling for him, not when his teacher, nor the department store Santa, nor his mother rebuke him with their rallying cry, "You'll poke your eye out!" From his travails with the yellow-eyed schoolyard bully, to his accidental exclamation of The Big Profanity (which earns him a few minutes with the biggest bar of soap I have ever seen), Ralphie is a kid's kid. He's all our Christmas hopes and dreams.
Darrin McGavin plays Ralphie's dad (The Old Man, as he is affectionately called) – a man with a mouth like a sewer (his best cuss? Gotta be that aimed at the neighbours, "Sons-a-bitches! Bumpasses!" after their dogs eat the Christmas turkey) and the heart of a fighter. He dreams big (Ralphie comes by his daydreaming honestly) and refuses to let things like a decrepit furnace or a flat tire ruin his day. The Old Man is a classic movie dad, full of bluster and bluff, but a big softhearted teddy bear beneath it all. Fortunately, placed in the talented hands of McGavin, Ralphie's pop rises above cliché and into the realm of Classic Movie Character.
Jean Shepherd, author of 'In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash,' on which the movie is based, provides the narration, and his ability to combine sardonic world-weariness with enthusiastic childlike wonder provides the film with much of its charm.
Energizing a movie that could have become bogged down in its literary roots, director Bob Clark (Porky's, believe it or not) inserts hilarious sight gags between Shepherd's narrative pearls. In one scene, Ralphie races to the bathroom and the instant he lifts the up the toilet seat to take care of business, the camera cuts to a shot of the evening meal, stewing away on the stove. Clark also cleverly shoots Ralphie's daydreams in an infantile mock-heroic style that does a fine job of imitating the radio adventure-steeped mind of the dreamer.
A Christmas Story is a delightful movie, destined to become, like A Christmas Carol and It's a Wonderful Life, a staple in many family's Yuletide traditions.
