On a recent episode of the Weekly Substandard podcast, co-hosts Victorino Matus, Jonathan V. Last, and Sonny Bunch discussed their favorite Christmas movies, including 1983’s A Christmas Story. While Jonathan isn’t a fan of the film, millions of Americans tune in every Christmas Eve and Christmas Day to watch a 24-hour marathon of the Jean Shepard classic on cable.
The movie, and its remarkable rise as a Christmas favorite, is the subject of a terrific new Vanity Fair article. Here’s an excerpt from the piece, which contains interviews with some of the movie’s stars:
It’s not A Wonderful Life anymore. It hasn’t been since 1983, the year of A Christmas Story—the now classic film about nine-year-old Ralphie Parker’s thwarted desire for a forbidden Christmas present: an official Red Ryder Carbine Action 200-Shot Range Model air rifle with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time. A sleeper of a movie, A Christmas Story forever changed the cozy, sentimental holiday-movie genre. When we think of pre-1983 holiday movies, we think of plum puddings like Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (the best of several incarnations being the 1951 version, in which Alastair Sim plays Ebenezer Scrooge); the 1942 Irving Berlin musical Holiday Inn and its 1954 cousin, White Christmas; the rather dark 1946 Frank Capra drama starring James Stewart, It’s a Wonderful Life; Miracle on 34th Street the following year—saccharine despite the bracing skepticism of an eight-year-old Natalie Wood, who refuses to believe in Edmund Gwenn as Kris Kringle. (She’s wrong, we’re told.) So when A Christmas Story premiered, in 1983, we suddenly had a new kind of holiday movie, one that acknowledged—even relished—the “unbridled avarice,” the commercialism, the disappointments, the hurt feelings, and all-around bad luck that, in reality, often define the merry season. In other words, what real Christmas was like in real families. It brought a bracing blast of satire and realism, wrapped up in a hilarious, pitch-perfect tale of a middle-class family negotiating the perils of Christmas, recalled through the eyes of a nine-year-old boy.
Read the whole thing here, and listen to the Substandard’s Christmas spectacular podcast here.
