A Christmas Story (1983)

A Christmas Story is a 1983 American/Canadian comedy film based on the short stories and semi-fictional anecdotes of author and raconteur Jean Shepherd, including material from his books  In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash  and  Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories . Directed by Bob Clark, the film has since become a holiday classic and is known to be shown numerous times on television during the Christmas season.

Plot
The film is set in the fictional city of Hohman (based on real-life city of Hammond, Indiana). Nine-year-old Ralphie Parker wants only one thing for Christmas: "an official Red Ryder carbine-action 200-shot range model air rifle with a compass in the stock, and this thing which tells time." Between run-ins with his younger brother Randy and having to handle school bully Scut Farkus, and his sidekick Grover Dill, Ralphie does not know how he will ever survive long enough to get the BB gun for Christmas. The plot revolves around Ralphie's overcoming a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to his owning the precious Red Ryder BB gun: the fear that he will shoot his eye out. In each of the film's three acts, Ralphie makes his case to another individual; each time he is met by the same retort.

When Ralphie asks his mother for a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas, she says, "No, you'll shoot your eye out." Next, when Ralphie writes a theme about wanting the BB gun for Mrs. Shields, his teacher at Warren G. Harding Elementary School, Ralphie gets a C+, and Mrs. Shields writes "P.S. You'll shoot your eye out" on it. Finally, Ralphie asks an obnoxious department store Santa Claus for a Red Ryder BB gun, and Santa responds, "You'll shoot your eye out, kid. Merry Christmas! Ho, ho, ho!", before pushing Ralphie down a long slide with his boot.

One day after he gets the C+ on his composition, Ralphie is struck in the face with a snowball thrown at him by the bully Scut Farkus who then begins to tease and taunt Ralphie. Ralphie finally reaches his breaking point and then charges at Farkus knocking him down, and after knocking down Grover Dill, who tries to intervene for his pal, proceeds to beat Scut's face bloody. During the fight, Ralphie begins to swear non-stop as he lands blow after blow to the squealing Farkus. Ralphie's mother shows up and pulls her son off the bully, and takes him home. This part of the film occurs shortly after a scene where Ralphie gets into trouble for swearing while helping his father fix a flat tire. Ralphie is worried about the swearing and is sure he will be in big trouble when his father gets home from work. Instead, Ralphie's mother tells his father about the fight casually at the dinner table. She then changes the subject of the conversation to an upcoming Chicago Bears game, distracting his father and getting Ralphie off the hook in the process.

On Christmas morning, Ralphie looks frantically for a box that would hold the BB gun to no avail. He and his brother have quite a few presents, but he is disappointed because he did not get the gun. His disappointment turns to joy as his father points out one last half-hidden present, ostensibly from Santa. As Ralphie unwraps the BB gun, Mr. Parker explains the purchase to his none-too-thrilled wife, stating that he had one himself when he was 8 years old.

Ralphie goes out to test his new gun, shooting at a paper target perched on top of a metal sign, and predictably gets a ricochet from the metal sign. This ricochet ends up hitting just below his eye, which causes him to flinch and lose his glasses. While searching for the glasses, Ralphie ends up stepping on them, breaking them. However, he concocts a story to his mother about an icicle falling on him and breaking his glasses, which she believes. Suddenly, a horde of the next door neighbor's dogs, which frequently bother Ralphie's father, manages to get into the house, trash the kitchen and eat the turkey that was prepared for that evening's meal. Making a last-minute decision, Ralphie's father takes everyone out to a Chinese restaurant where they have a hilarious time eating what the narrator calls "Chinese Turkey".

At the end of the story, we see Ralphie lying in bed on Christmas night with his gun by his side. Randy is holding the toy zeppelin he received. The voiceover states that this was the best present he received or would ever receive.

Subplots
Several subplots are incorporated in the body of the film, based on other separate short stories by Shepherd. The most notable involves the Old Man winning a "major award." He entered a trivia contest out of the newspaper, which asked for the name of The Lone Ranger's nephew's horse (thanks to his wife, who supplied the answer: Victor). A large crate arrived and inside was a lamp shaped like a woman's leg wearing fishnet stockings, much to Mrs. Parker's displeasure. Just two days later, Mrs. Parker broke the lamp, infuriating the Old Man. The leg was the logo of the contest's sponsor, the Nehi bottling company (the details of the contest were not necessarily made clear in the film).

Other vignettes include:
 * Ralphie's friends Flick and Schwartz disputing over whether a person's tongue will stick to a frozen flagpole. Schwartz ultimately issues Flick a "triple dog dare" (the most serious of those used by the kids), and Flick's tongue gets stuck to the pole, much to his terror. A suction tube within the flagpole was used to simulate the freezing of Flick's tongue to the pole.
 * Ralphie receiving his Secret Society decoder pin from the Little Orphan Annie radio show. After weeks of anxious waiting, and missing out on the daily "secret message" (which to a kid appeared very important) Ralphie finally is able to participate. *However, he learns a lesson in being ripped off, as the secret message turned out to be an Ovaltine radio commercial.
 * Ralphie and his friends dealing with the neighborhood bully, Scut Farkus (Zack Ward).
 * The Old Man's legendary battles with the aging and malfunctioning furnace.
 * Ralphie letting slip the dreaded "Queen Mother of Dirty Words", the F-dash-dash-dash word (after his father knocks a hubcap from his hands, spilling its contents, the lug nuts from a flat tire) and later, when asked where he'd heard the bad word, falsely blaming his friend, Schwartz, and not pointing out that his father utters the word daily. After Ralphie's mother telephones Schwartz's mother to inform her that her son had been responsible for passing along the bad word to Ralphie, we hear Schwartz getting what appears to be the thrashing of his life at the hands of his hysterical mother. To keep it censored, Billingsly says "fudge" on camera (the narration points out that he really didn't say "fudge").
 * The numerous smelly and bothersome bloodhounds of the next door neighbors, the Bumpuses, including the dogs destroying the Christmas turkey (prompting the family to go out and have Peking duck instead, resulting in a giggling fit by the mother and the boys).
 * Several fantasy sequences depict Ralphie's daydreams of glory and vindication, including the vanquishing of a small army of villains dressed in stereotypical burglar costume of flat caps, black masks and striped shirts with his Red Ryder BB gun obtaining his parents' gratitude, an extremely good grade for his written theme about the BB gun, and parental remorse over a case of "soap poisoning" (related to his cursing).
 * Mrs. Parker's misadventures in overly bundling Randy up for the winter weather by wrapping him in sweaters and a jacket so tightly he is unable to put his arms down, then Randy getting inadvertently knocked down and unable to get up under his own power (his only defense when they are confronted by Scut Farkus.)
 * Randy's refusal to eat a meal on his own incites hilarity between him and his mother at the dinner table.

Cast

 * Peter Billingsley as Ralphie Parker - The film's protagonist, a nine-year-old imaginative dreamer.
 * Jean Shepherd as adult Ralphie - the narrator (also has an on-screen cameo; see below).
 * Ian Petrella as Randy Parker - Ralphie's younger brother, who hasn't voluntarially eaten in over three years.
 * Darren McGavin as Mr. Parker (The Old Man) - Ralphie's dad is at the center of the Major Award vignette, and is depicted using colorful nonsensical invective.
 * Melinda Dillon as Mrs. Parker - Ralphie's mom is the primary dispenser of the oft-repeated phrase, "You'll shoot your eye out." Her first name is never revealed either.
 * Scott Schwartz as Flick - Ralphie's friend, who learns about tongues and cold metal the hard way.
 * R.D. Robb as Schwartz - Ralphie's other friend, on whom Ralphie pins the blame for his knowing "the 4-letter word beginning with F".
 * Zack Ward as Scut Farkus - The neighborhood bully, who torments Ralphie and his friends en route to and from school.
 * Yano Anaya as Grover Dill - Scut's toadie.
 * Tedde Moore as Miss Shields - Ralphie's fourth grade teacher.
 * Jeff Gillen as Santa Claus - The rather frightening and cranky department store incarnation of "the Head Honcho," who delivers the last blow to Ralphie's hope for a BB gun.
 * David Svoboda as Botox Boy - Weird little boy in line waiting to see Santa Claus, wearing aviation goggles.
 * Drew Hocevar as one of the two Christmas elfs - He is the one paired with the Department Store Santa.

In the DVD commentary, director Bob Clark mentions that Jack Nicholson was considered for the role of the Old Man; Clark expresses gratitude that he ended up with Darren McGavin instead, who also appeared in several other Clark films. He cast Melinda Dillon on the basis of her similar role in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Peter Billingsley was already a minor star from co-hosting the TV series Real People; Clark initially wanted him for the role of Ralphie, but decided he was "too obvious" a choice and auditioned many other young actors before realizing that Billingsley was the right one after all. Ian Petrella was cast immediately before filming began. Tedde Moore had previously appeared in Clark's film Murder by Decree, and Jeff Gillen was an old friend of Clark's who had been in one of his earliest films.

The film was written by Jean Shepherd, Leigh Brown and Bob Clark. Shepherd provides the movie's narration from the perspective of an adult Ralphie, a narrative style later used in the dramedy The Wonder Years. Both Shepherd and Clark have cameo appearances in the film; Shepherd plays the man who directed Ralphie and Randy to the back of the Santa line and Clark plays Swede, the neighbor the Old Man was talking to outside during the Leg Lamp scene.

Origin
Three of the semi-autobiographical short stories on which the film is based were originally published in Playboy magazine between 1964 and 1966. Shepherd later read "Duel in the Snow, or Red Ryder nails the Cleveland Street Kid" and told the otherwise unpublished story "Flick's Tongue" on his WOR Radio talk show, as can be heard in one of the DVD extras.[5] Bob Clark states on the DVD commentary that he became interested in Shepherd's work when he heard "Flick's Tongue" on the radio in 1968. Additional source material for the film, according to Clark, came from unpublished anecdotes Shepherd told live audiences "on the college circuit."

Critical reception
Initially overlooked as a sleeper film, A Christmas Story was released a week before Thanksgiving 1983 to moderate success, earning about $2 million in its first weekend. Critics were severely divided on the film, with the majority of reviews on the negative side. Leonard Maltin proclaimed it a "Top screen comedy," while Roger Ebert proclaimed it "Funny and satirical . . . a sort of Norman Rockwell crossed with MAD magazine. Vincent Canby's mostly negative New York Times review echoed the more common response. Critics seemed focused on the fact that Bob Clark, director of the critically reviled Porky's was the man behind the camera, and could not grasp the concept of Clark coming up with an instant classic like A Christmas Story The film would go on to win two Genie Awards, for Bob Clark's screenplay and direction. Years later, Ebert would re-evaluate the film, this time more favorably, writing that "some of the movie sequences stand as classic."

By Christmas 1983, however, the film was no longer playing at most venues, but remained in about a hundred theaters until January 1984. Gross earnings were just over $19.2 million. In the years since, due to television airings and home video release, A Christmas Story has become widely popular and is now a perennial Christmas special. Originally released by MGM, Warner Bros. (through Turner Entertainment Co.) now has ownership of the film due to Ted Turner's purchase of MGM's pre-1986 library and Time Warner's subsequent purchase of Turner Entertainment.

Television
The film first aired on television on HBO during the mid-eighties and quickly attracted a growing following. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the film began airing quietly on then-SuperStation WTBS and Superstation WGN (now known as of 2009 as WGN America). From 1988-1992, the film had a short-lived tradition of airing on the American Thanksgiving night (or the night after Thanksgiving) to open the holiday television season. In 1988, then-fledgling FOX aired the movie the night after Thanksgiving. In 1989-1990, TBS showed it Thanksgiving night, while in 1991-1992, they aired it the night after.

Turner, now a part of the TimeWarner umbrella of cable networks, has maintained ownership of the broadcast rights, and since the mid-1990s, airing the movie increasingly on TBS, TNT and TCM. By 1995, it was aired on those networks a combined six times over December 24-25-26, and in 1996, it was aired eight times over those three days.

Due to the increasing popularity of the film, in 1997 TNT began airing a 24-hour marathon dubbed "24 Hours of A Christmas Story," consisting of the film shown twelve consecutive times beginning at 7 or 8 p.m. on Christmas Eve and ending Christmas Day. This was in addition to various other airings earlier in the month of December. In 2004, after TNT switched to a predominantly drama format, sister network TBS, under its comedy-based "Very Funny" moniker, took over the marathon. Clark stated that in 2002, an estimated 38.4 million people tuned into the marathon at one point or another, nearly one sixth of the country. TBS reported 45.4 million viewers in 2005, and 45.5 million in 2006. In 2007, new all-time ratings records were set, with the highest single showing (8 p.m. Christmas Eve) drawing 4.4 million viewers. Viewership increased again in 2008, with 8 p.m. Christmas Eve drawing 4.5 million viewers, and 10 p.m. drawing 4.3 million.

In 2007 the marathon continued, and the original tradition was revived. TNT also aired the film twice the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend (November 25). In 2009, the 24-hour marathon is scheduled to continue on TBS, for the 13th overall year, starting at 8:00 p.m. ET/PT on Christmas Eve.

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