9 / 10
Official trailer
Peter Billingsley plays Ralphie, Darren McGavin the Old Man, Melinda Dillon Mrs. Parker, Ian Petrella Randy, Scott Schwartz Flick and R.D. Robb Schwartz, while Jean Shepherd narrates as the adult Ralphie remembering. Shepherd wrote the screenplay with Leigh Brown and Bob Clark, working from his own autobiographical stories.
The film was a modest commercial release in November 1983 and developed its enormous reputation primarily through television syndication, especially TBS’s 24-hour Christmas marathon that began in 1997. Ralphie’s campaign for that rifle cracks me up more than most grown-up comedies, because the film takes it exactly as seriously as he does. The leg lamp, the flagpole and the Lifebuoy soap are all given the weight a nine-year-old would give them, and I think that’s the whole trick. It’s a 9 because nearly every vignette lands.
What’s on screen is memory instead of plot. Shepherd’s adult-voice narration frames every incident as recollection. That gives the film permission to treat Ralphie’s small obsessions and small humiliations with the importance childhood assigns them. The Red Ryder campaign is a child’s stretched and weighted experience of waiting for something nobody else thinks is significant. Bob Clark’s direction matches that scale.
This movie treats the leg lamp delivery and the Bumpus dogs eating the turkey and the tongue stuck to the flagpole as events worth the same camera attention as the climactic Christmas morning, because in memory they were.
Jean Shepherd’s Voice
Shepherd’s narration is the film’s spine and its risk.
Voiceover narration usually flattens films. Here it works because Shepherd’s voice carries real adult perspective on childhood instead of nostalgic commentary about it. The narrator remembers Ralphie’s panic about Miss Shields reading the theme aloud with the exact pitch a person remembers real humiliation, even decades later.
Shepherd’s voice is what I’d miss first if anybody remade this. His delivery is dry and a little wounded, and I think his timing gets more laughs than anything on screen.
Shepherd had been telling these stories on WOR radio in New York since the late 1950s before the film adaptation. His voice carries the timing and pause-management of a broadcaster who knows exactly how long to let a beat hang. The radio background gives the narration its distinctive rhythm.
For Writers
Voiceover narration works when the narrator’s perspective is different from the visible action’s perspective. Watch how Shepherd remembers feelings instead of describing what’s on screen.
Darren McGavin’s Old Man
McGavin’s performance as Ralphie’s father is the film’s underappreciated foundation. The Old Man is volatile, profane, obsessed with the furnace and the neighbors’ dogs and his Major Award, and McGavin plays all of this without ever turning the character into caricature. The leg lamp arrival is famous, but the careful comic shape of the entire performance is what holds it together.
McGavin’s swearing scenes are blocked and edited so the audience never hears the actual words. The film’s PG rating depended on this. The performance has to communicate real volcanic obscenity without a single audible obscenity, and McGavin makes it work through volume, gesture, and Shepherd’s framing.
McGavin is my favorite thing in the film. Every furnace fight and every Major Award moment is funnier because he plays the Old Man as a man at war with the world, and I laugh harder at the swearing we never hear than I would at the real words.
For Writers
Communicating profanity without using it requires committed physical performance. Watch how McGavin’s anger is shaped to read as obscenity instead of mere annoyance.
The Episodic Structure
A string of vignettes, instead of a continuous plot, gives the story its shape. The Bumpus hounds, the Lifebuoy soap punishment, the school flagpole, the visit to Higbee’s Santa, the theme paper, the Christmas Eve dinner at the Chop Suey Palace: each is its own contained story. The Red Ryder campaign threads through all of them but doesn’t drive any single one.
The episodic shape was a commercial liability in 1983 and a reason for the film’s modest theatrical performance. Audiences expected three-act structure. Critics complained the film didn’t build. The television-era reappraisal benefited from the episodic shape: viewers could drop in mid-film, recognize the world, and stay.
The episodic shape works for me. The Bumpus hounds and the Chop Suey Palace would be cut from a tighter film, and I’d trade a three-act structure for them without a second thought. My small complaint is that a couple of vignettes run a beat long, and that keeps it at a 9.
For Writers
Episodic structure that frustrates theatrical viewing can become a strength in repeat viewing or partial viewing. The structure mirrors how childhood unfolds instead of how screenplays usually compress it.
Craft Note
Bob Clark, who two years earlier made Porky’s and four years earlier made Black Christmas, was an unlikely choice for the material. His comedy instincts and his willingness to trust Shepherd’s voice produced a film that’s something close to a memoir. The Indiana setting is Cleveland and Toronto, with the Higbee’s exterior provided by the real Cleveland department store that closed in 1992. The house used for exterior shots is now a museum.
Does A Christmas Story still hold up?
A Christmas Story is the closest American film has come to a definitive Boomer-era Christmas memory, and I rate it a 9 because it gets childhood’s sense of scale exactly right. Its climb from modest release to syndication staple is a strange path, and every step of it was deserved. Give it your full attention once instead of leaving it on in the background, and you’ll see how carefully it’s built.
