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From: ecl@ahuta.UUCP (e.leeper)
Newsgroups: net.movies
Subject: Re: A Christmas Story
Message-ID: <139@ahuta.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 4-Dec-84 19:20:39 EST
Article-I.D.: ahuta.139
Posted: Tue Dec  4 19:20:39 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 5-Dec-84 01:24:47 EST
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(Recycled from last year:)

                             A CHRISTMAS STORY
                       Film review by Mark R. Leeper

     One of the most poignant disappointments of my life was to move to the
New York area too late.  By the time I got here Jean Shepherd had already
left WOR radio.  For years his program was played on WOR and syndicated
around the country.  Shepherd's humor is so American it makes apple pie seem
like a Communist plot.  Shep (as his fans call him) would sit in front of a
microphone and tell the funniest stories imaginable about his youth in the
Midwest.  With a straight face he would invent stories of mythic proportion
about his youth, his adolescence, or his Army years.  After he left WOR the
same stories were framed as prose and published in magazines like PLAYBOY,
or went into one off several books.  PBS has even adapted them into TV plays
two or three times.  A CHRISTMAS STORY is the first (and in all likelihood
the last) full-blown Hollywood film based on Shepherd's works.

     Since Shepherd for years invented his stories to fit into an hour of
radio, his books tend to be disconnected anecdotes, each a chapter in
length.  Shepherd insists on calling his books novels though they read much
more like collections of short stories.  The first of these "novels," IN GOD
WE TRUST, ALL OTHERS PAY CASH, is the basis for A CHRISTMAS STORY.  To make
the film about Shepherd's 8-year-old alter ego Ralphie flow, the storylines
of the book have been intertwined to occur nearly simultaneously.

     A CHRISTMAS STORY is a cluster of funny stories glued together by a
somewhat less successful main storyline.  That glue is sticky sweet and
sentimentally maudlin like the 200th recounting of "The Night Before
Christmas."  The stories, however, are pure Shep and I think it has been
literally years since I have laughed so hard at a comedy.  Stories like the
Red Ryder Rifle and the pop-art lamp are every bit as funny on the screen as
when Shepherd told them on the radio, and the added visual elements are
perfectly orchestrated.

     In one way the medium does work against the story, however.  Shepherd's
stories about when he was eight years old are usually told with Herculean
mythic proportions.  To see them dramatized with real eight-year-olds really
does not work.  Not that Peter Billingsly, who plays Ralphie, is not an
excellent child actor, but even he cannot fill out the role that Shepherd
created for him.  Nor is Darren McGavin my idea of "the old man"; somehow he
seems too articulate and educated.  Melinda Dillion also seems a little more
delicate and sensitive than the mother in the stories.  These little
quibbles aside, the film really deserves to be seen.  I am really afraid
that a PG-rated film with an eight-year-old as the main character may end up
with only children for an audience.  If so, it will be the adult audience's
loss.

					(Evelyn C. Leeper for)
					Mark R. Leeper
					...ihnp4!lznv!mrl