Another favorite movie

"A Christmas Story." The tale of Ralphie Parker, and his scheming and planning to get the Red Ryder BB gun (with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time!), set against a backdrop of early 1940s northern Indiana (though actually partially filmed not too far from where I grew up, and I had to read the credits hard the first time to be sure that the school shown therein was not the Oviatt Street School in Hudson where I went to third grade*)

Here's an older Vanity Fair article giving some of the backstory of it

(*It wasn't. And also, sadly, the school has since been torn down. But I remember what it was like, and every year when I watch "A Christmas Story" I am reminded of it)

One thing: the fact that Jack Nicholson was considered for the dad. I think their choice - Darren McGavin - was far, far, far better. Just as a Jim Carey version of Buddy the Elf would not, I think, have been nearly as good, I think Nicholson would have brought too much of a sneer to the Old Man for it to be so enjoyable. McGavin played it gruff, but also likeable, and he had enough goofy enthusiasm (the leg lamp, the turkey, his quiet glee watching his son FINALLY unwrap the BB gun).

And the mom, played by Melinda Dillon. She's clearly younger than The Old Man, and she loves him, but there's also a little subversiveness there; on a few occasions she sides with her kids against him. (Or, famously: lies a little to cover up the extent of Ralphie's fight**)

And she can be wonderfully silly - the whole "How do the little piggies go" bit.

(**I'm reminded of something my paternal grandmother once said - she converted to Catholicism to marry my grandfather, who was VERY Chicago Irish Catholic at that time in his life- she said she got tickled by the priest telling her, "Now, you should never lie to your husband, but you don't have to tell him everything." I think what amused her the most was that a man who never married would know that and recognize that)

The article there is interesting - the observation that the movie is basically about "nothing" - a family preparing for Christmas and one of the kids wants a BB gun - but sometimes? "nothing" is everything. It's the silly little family anecdotes that I remember from my childhood, more than the bigger things. (I daresay that I remember the time my dad blew up an egg, by mistake, in the new microwave, than I remember ANY Christmas morning of my childhood). I suspect for a lot of people their memories are episodic like the episodes in the movie - "that time when...."

(They also explain in the article something I ALWAYS wondered about - how Flick got his tongue to look so realistically trapped. I figured they couldn't ACTUALLY have let him freeze it to an ACTUAL pole, and they did not)

I think for a lot of people of my age (and a bit older) the movie is relatable, even if in reality, If Ralphie were a real person, he'd be close to 90 now. (movie is set in 1941-ish, Ralphie is about 10 in the movie....). A lot of it "feels" familiar - I grew up long before the WWW, grew up before cable was widespread (it existed, but we did not have it: we had maybe five channels, and there was relatively little kid-oriented programming. The comment in that article about the do-it-yourself-ish nature of the dad seeming to imply "financial trouble" actually does not really ring true to me - when I was a kid, my dad did lots of stuff around the house and we weren't on the brink of poverty. My dad was just frugal, so he changed the oil in the cars himself, and he fixed the faucets when they started to drip, things like that. I do SOME of that kind of stuff myself (but I pay someone to change my oil, because they can dispose of the used oil responsibly more easily than I can and modern faucets are harder to fix....it's not just a matter any more of taking off the handle of the tap and changing out a rubber washer).

But the whole "neighborhood" arrangement, and the family dinners, and the kid-interactions....it all rings sort of true. Oh, of course there are differences - we had a TV instead of a radio, and the tree-lots were mostly visited in daylight (and for a number of years we went to a tree farm and cut our own trees), and we didn't have the horrible, dangerous "octopus" of cords piled upon cords in a socket....but when I think of it, that is more reminiscent of things of my childhood than a movie set 12 or 15 years AFTER I was a child would be....changes have accelerated to that point. (Though really - my childhood in the 1970s was closer to Ralphie's 1940s childhood, chronologically, than my niece's childhood now (in the 2010s) is to my childhood. She will be 10 in 2022; I was 10 in 1979, Ralphie was 10 in 1941. A 43 year gap for her and me; a 38 year gap between me and the fictional Ralphie. (And also, as I said: I think the rate-of-change in our culture has been faster post 1985 or so than it was in the 40-some years before.)

And they do note in the article, it was a "small" movie in the box office (I remember a friend of my mom's saw it, she said it was "cute" and that it seemed to capture how kids think) but I think it did really reach cult status with the 24-hour marathon thing....lots more people saw it then, they saw how entertaining it could be. And it's a good "marathoning" movie because of its episodic nature and perhaps-slightly-inconsequential plot: you can dip into it at almost any point and just ride along. (And if like me, you've seen it 50 times....you can pretty much know exactly where in the movie you are when you come in to it)

And even if the plot is fairly "small" - in some ways, it's a happy movie. It has a happy enough ending. Oh, not a perfectly happy ending: the family turkey is destroyed by the Bumpas dogs, and so an alternate meal must be found; Ralphie very nearly DOES shoot his eye out - but isn't that real life? That the best you can hope for is not-perfectly-happy-but-still-happy? And maybe that's the real appeal of the movie, for many people.