MAGNET contributing writer Jud Cost is sharing some of the wealth of classic films he’s been lucky enough to see over the past 40 years. Trolling the backwaters of cinema, he has worked up a list of more than 500 titles—from the silent era through the ’90s—that you may have missed. A new selection, all currently available on DVD, appears every week.
A Christmas Story (1983, 93 minutes)
A Christmas Story is adapted from the writings of Jean Shepherd, a disc jockey/raconteur who once improvised free verse to the title track of jazz legend Charles Mingus’ 1957 LP The Clown. Taking place in the fictional town of Hohman, Ind. (borrowed from the lyrics to “Back Home In Indiana”), A Christmas Story taps the fertile root of every American kid’s favorite holiday, as surely as Dickens did with A Christmas Carol in Victorian England.
Ralph Parker (Peter Billingsley), a nine-year-old kid in owl-like glasses, wants nothing more for Christmas than the weapon of choice of every pre-teen: a Daisy Red Ryder carbine BB gun. His mom (Melinda Dillon) dismisses the idea over breakfast with the same dire warning issued by mothers everywhere: “You’ll shoot your eye out.”
On snowy days, Ralph’s mom bundles up his younger brother Randy (Ian Petrella) in so many layers of jackets, sweaters and scarves the poor kid can’t get up when he falls down on the sidewalk. During recess one frigid day, Ralph’s pal Flick (Scott Schwartz) is forced into touching the school’s flagpole with his tongue after being “triple dog-dared” into the reckless deed. The fire department has to be summoned to free the tongue of the hysterical boy, frozen stiff to the pole.
On their way home from school, Ralphie, Flick and Randy walk down a seldom-used alley only to hear the maniacal laughter of Scut Farkus (Zack Ward), the biggest bully in town. Dressed in a ratty Davy Crockett coonskin cap with orthodontic braces covering teeth unbrushed in weeks, Farkus has real, honest-to-god yellow eyes. Ralph and his pals hightail it in the other direction, only to face Farkus’ crummy little toady, Grover Dill, with his snarling lips curled over green teeth.
As the Parkers, belting out a tone-deaf rendition of “Jingle Bells,” are bouncing home with a Christmas tree strapped to the roof of their ’37 Oldsmobile, a large blast resounds from the undercarriage. “Damn it! Blow out!” says Ralph’s dad (Darren McGavin, one-time star of TV series Kolchak The Nightstalker). “Time me. Four minutes!” he says to his wife, who allows Ralphie to venture outside to help his dad, a big deal for the youngster. “Actually, my old man loved it,” says Shepherd as narrator. “He always saw himself in the pits at the Indianapolis Speedway for the 500.” Ralph is allowed to perform an integral function in the tire change, holding the removed lug nuts in the hubcap. But calamity strikes when he accidentally turns over the hubcap, scattering the nuts into a snowbank. “Oh fudge!” says Ralphie. “Only I didn’t say ‘fudge!'” Shepherd reveals. “I said the Big One, the queen mother of dirty words.” And with Santa Claus up there taking notes, to the young boy this looked like the Christmas death penalty.
