The annual year-end announcement of new inductees into the National Film Registry is always cause for excitement. Some films are chosen for their aesthetic excellence, others for their social impact or historic significance. I was personally most thrilled by the inclusion of 1995’s Apollo 13. Having written a biography of the film’s director and guiding spirit, Ron Howard, I know just how special this film is, and how challenging it was to make. I was also pleased to see Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet on the list. This 1993 romantic comedy about a Taiwanese immigrant to the U.S. is hilariously funny. Yet it also presents a serious glimpse of the complexities of being gay while remaining a part of traditional Chinese culture. But the commentaries I’ve heard about the new list have tended to focus on the fact that this year’s crop includes two family-favorite holiday movies, 1993’s The Nightmare Before Christmas and 1990’s Home Alone.
These were hardly the first holiday films to make the list. A somewhat sardonic little flick called A Christmas Story was welcomed onto the registry ‘way back in 2012. A Christmas Story, released not long after Thanksgiving in 1983, at first attracted no particular attention. It then began winning awards, particularly in Canada, and has since spawned a cottage industry of sequels, both in theatres and on television. I became interested after recently seeing a stage musical version (score by rising stars Benj Pasek and Justin Paul) that debuted on Broadway in 2012 and is now belatedly touring the U.S. I’m not exactly a connoisseur of Christmas entertainment, but this was lively and fun.
A Christmas Story is based on a series of wry semi-autobiographical monologues created by radio humorist Jean Shepherd and published in his 1966 collection, In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash. Shepherd helped write the screenplay for the film (co-written by director Bob Clark) and he serves as its narrator, the now-adult Ralphie Parker. Young Ralphie (played by Peter Billingsley) is growing up in a small Indiana town, circa 1940. He lives in a large but creaky old house with his small brother, his loving mom (Melinda Dillon), his cranky “old man” (Darren McGavin), a highly temperamental furnace, a prize lamp that looks like a woman’s leg, and a pack of ferocious dogs next door. Christmas is coming, and Ralphie has set his sights on the perfect gift from Santa: a Red Ryder Carbine Action 200-shot Range Model air rifle. But whenever he makes his wishes known, he gets the same answer: “You’ll shoot your eye out.” (This refrain becomes the musical version’s very best number, performed by a grade-school teacher who metamorphoses into a slinky tap-dancing vamp.)
The movie has so many fans that the makers of the stage musical clearly felt obliged to include every memorable moment. There is, for instance, a crabby (and, yes, inebriated) department-store Santa who shoves little kids down a colorfully snow-decorated slide if they don’t respond quickly enough to his “What do you want for Christmas?” There’s the hideously pink bunny suit from dear Aunt Clara that poor Ralphie is required to model for his family. There’s the school buddy who responds to a triple-dutch-dare and gets his tongue stuck to a freezing flagpole. There are the hungry next-door dogs who make off with the newly-roasted Christmas turkey. (When it comes to theatre, no one can resist seeing live animals on stage.) And there’s the happy wrap-up scene at a local Chinese restaurant. Personally, I don’t think small boys and guns go together, but this amiable show is hard to resist.
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