圣诞故事 A Christmas Story review by JAMES PLATH

The year it premiered, A Christmas Story didn't play in theaters over Christmas. It opened around Thanksgiving and was pulled shortly before the big holiday because it lost money. Since then, the film has paid big dividends as one of the season's most beloved-but-irreverent classics. And while the new digital transfer isn't as dramatic an improvement over the original DVD as we'd have wished for, the addition of a widescreen (2.20:1) option should be as exciting a gift for fans as a brand-new Red Ryder 200-Shot Carbine Action Air Rifle.
The movie is based on Jean Shepherd's autobiographical novel, In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, and it's Shepherd's narrative voice we hear as the adult Ralphie, who recalls Christmas Past with Scrooged-like tongue planted in cheek. All young Ralphie (Peter Billingsley) wants is a BB-gun, but all he hears from just about every adult, even Santa, is "You'll shoot your eye out!" The unrelated episodes that form this satiric patchwork of American family holiday life ring truer than a Salvation Army chorus. Virtually all the vignettes are memorable, and the cast and production crew somehow managed to avoid the dated look that plagued many films made in the '80s. From the minute Ralphie and his eight-year-old friends press their noses up against the Higbees department store window to admire the tin toys and BB-guns, viewers are transported to a different period. Some of the antics are pure time capsule (like the bar of Lifebuoy soap applied to Ralphie's foul mouth, the furnace-fighting father, or the leg lamp he wins), while others (a bully and his toady, a father who overloads the electrical circuits, and a mother who overzealously bundles up her child for winter) remain funnily familiar. A Christmas Story touted itself as "the movie that pulls off Santa's beard," and certainly the bartering for a Christmas tree, a tongue-stuck-to-a-flagpole incident, a visit to a cranky department-store Santa, hilarious gifts, and a Christmas dinner disaster all wreak enough comic havoc to satisfy that claim. But it's the solid performances that sell the movie. Darren McGavin and Melinda Dillon could be everyone's Dad and Mom, while the young cast members' reactions are right on the money.

Maybe that's because, as we learn on the excellent commentary with Billingsley and director Bob Clark, Clark often hid things from his cast. When "the old man" uncrated his "major award" lamp and Ralphie ran his hand up the leg, it was an honest, unscripted moment because the kids hadn't seen the prop before. Same with Mom's laughter when a Christmas duck, complete with smiling head, was set down in front of them in the now-classic scene at a Chinese restaurant. Disc one features full and widescreen versions, with or without commentary, in English and French Dolby Digital 2.0, with English, French, and Spanish subtitles. There's also a gift of an Easter Egg—a red present that appears when you hit the up/down arrow buttons that lead to scripts from several deleted scenes (including Ralphie's Flash Gordon fantasy). Disc two has a fun feature in which the director and younger actors reminisce onscreen, and fans will delight in seeing Billingsley, Zack Ward (bully Scut Farcus), Scott Schwartz (Flick), and R.D. Robb (Schwartz) on camera as adults. Rounding out the features are a decent short about the Daisy Red Ryder BB-gun, a lame extra about the leg lamp manufacturer, a not-so-tough trivia game, "decoder match challenge"—the promise of more Easter eggs—the trailer, and several radio-style readings from Shepherd.

It's a Wonderful Life is king of the wholesome, feel-good Christmas flicks, the original Miracle on 34th Street has a lock on the top whimsical, heartwarming spot, A Charlie Brown Christmas edges out the other cartoons, and Holiday Inn splits the musical honors with White Christmas. But in the crowded Christmas-comedy field, A Christmas Story was tops in a recent poll citing it as one of the best family-friendly holiday laughfests. That's more than ironic, if you recall that Clark also directed the raunchy and much-despised Porky's. And it's interesting to hear Clark say, on this 20th anniversary DVD, that he made A Christmas Story because of Porky's and the terrible reaction it produced—though he was quick to add, in his defense, that the kids in A Christmas Story grow up to be the same sort of kids as the ones in Porky's.

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