30 Movies to Get You Through the Holidays

There is nothing here of earthshaking originality, but Kate Montgomery, the writer-director, has such affection for these characters that we can feel it through the screen. They’re not simply pawns in the plot, we sense; they represent something she wants to say about the Native Americans she knows. And the actors, all with successful careers behind them, must be fed up with playing losers in social problem dramas; Greene, a natural comedian, expands magnificently as the vegetarian chef with an effortless line of patter about soy products, analogue foods, and healthy nutrition. There may be a sitcom job for him lingering somewhere near this role.

As for Ray and Tina, well, in all versions of basic romantic comedy, we want them to kiss, they want to kiss, and the plot perversely frustrates all of us. But at the end of Christmas in the Clouds, after everything has worked out more or less as we hoped it would, I felt a surprising affection and warmth. There will be holiday pictures that are more high-tech than this one, more sensational, with bigger stars and higher budgets and indeed greater artistry. But there may not be many with such good cheer.

A Christmas Story

PG, 94 m., 1983

Peter Billingsley (Ralphie), Darren McGavin (The Old Man), Melinda Dillon (Mother), Ian Petrella (Randy), Zack Ward (Scut Farcas). Directed by Bob Clark and produced by Clark, Rene Dupont, and Gary Goch. Screenplay by Jean Shepherd, Leigh Brown, and Clark.

One of the details that A Christmas Story gets right is the threat of having your mouth washed out with Lifebouy soap. Not any soap. Lifebouy. Never Ivory or Palmolive. Lifebouy, which apparently contained an ingredient able to nullify bad language. The only other soap ever mentioned for this task was Lava, but that was the nuclear weapon of mouth-washing soaps, so powerful it was used for words we still didn’t even know.

There are many small but perfect moments in A Christmas Story, and one of the best comes after the Lifebouy is finally removed from Ralphie’s mouth and he is sent off to bed. His mother studies the bar, thinks for a moment, and then sticks it in her own mouth, just to see what it tastes like. Moments like that are why some people watch A Christmas Story every holiday season. There is a real knowledge of human nature beneath the comedy.

The movie is based on the memoirs of Jean Shepherd, the humorist whose radio programs and books remembered growing up in Indiana in the 1940s. It is Shepherd’s voice on the soundtrack, remembering one Christmas season in particular, and the young hero’s passionate desire to get a Daisy Red Ryder 200-shot Carbine Action BB Gun for Christmas—the one with the compass in the stock, “as cool and deadly a piece of weaponry as I had ever laid eyes on.”

I owned such a weapon. I recall everything about it at this moment with a tactile memory so vivid I could have just put it down to write these words. How you stuffed newspapers into the carton it came in to use it for target practice. How the BBs came in a cardboard tube with a slide-off top. How they rattled when you poured them into the gun. And of course how everybody warned that you would shoot your eye out.

Ralphie’s life is made a misery by that danger. He finds that nobody in northern Indiana (not his mother, not his teacher, not even Santa Claus) is able to even think about a BB gun without using the words “shoot your eye out.” At one point in the movie, in a revenge daydream, he knocks on his parents’ door with dark glasses, a blind man’s cane and a beggar’s tin cup. They are shocked, and ask him tearfully what caused his blindness, and he replies coolly, “Soap poisoning.”

The movie is not only about Christmas and BB guns, but also about childhood, and one detail after another rings true. The school bully, who, when he runs out of victims, beats up on his own loyal sidekick. The little brother who has outgrown his snowsuit, which is so tight that he walks around looking like the Michelin man; when he falls down he can’t get up. The aunt who always thinks Ralphie is a four-year-old girl, and sends him a pink bunny suit. Other problems of life belong to that long-ago age and not this one: clinkers in the basement coal furnace, for example, or the blowout of a tire. Everybody knows what a flat tire is, but many now alive have never experienced a genuine, terrifying loud instantaneous blowout.