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Saturday, Nov 28, 2009
With "Miracle on 34th Street," we're back in Capra territory. The original is another piece of late-'40s Hollywood whimsy, written and directed by Capra's friend George Seaton. The miracle is that the real Kris Kringle has taken a job at Macy's as Santa Claus. Seaton uses this premise to establish a toddler-level debate between imagination, in the form of Santa (Edmund Gwenn), and stern reason, represented mostly by Macy's promotion director (Maureen O'Hara). When imagination wins, you wonder why it never took root in any of the moviemakers.
The film criticizes department store materialism while praising Santa for delighting hordes of kids with gifts. It holds Christian faith above pragmatism, but confirms Santa's identity in a court of law. And though O'Hara's daughter (8-year-old Natalie Wood) learns that faith is its own reward, she achieves certain belief only when Santa gives her what she wants for Christmas -- a house on Long Island. (In the flop 1994 remake, Richard Attenborough is Santa while Mara Wilson assumes Wood's part and Elizabeth Perkins takes O'Hara's; the biggest difference between the two is that Macy's is now the fictional Cole's.)
Then there's "White Christmas," a flagon of flat eggnog served up by old Hollywood hands, including director Michael Curtiz at his least adept. Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye are Army buddies who use their postwar nightclub act to bail their general, now retired, out of debt. They even ship their entire old regiment to his Vermont inn. Apparently, in 1954, audiences were already nostalgic for the purposefulness and unity of the Second World War. In the course of rehearsals, Crosby and Kaye fall in love with a sister act -- Crosby with singer Rosemary Clooney, Kaye with dancer Vera-Ellen. Kaye is wasted, but Clooney's slightly husky voice blends well with Crosby's husked one.
"White Christmas" was the first film to use the big-screen process called VistaVision -- which must have given theater audiences enormous views of Vera-Ellen's legs. The movie has the overstuffed ambience of hard-sell '50s productions; even the lighting is too rich, with reds and greens that would look better on upscale Tannenbaum ornaments.
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Perhaps in reaction to such plush ostentation, video renters and TV audiences have catapulted the cheerfully ragged "A Christmas Story" (1983) into the holiday-film stratosphere of "It's a Wonderful Life" and "A Christmas Carol." Indeed, if you're at home Friday at 11 a.m. PST or 2 p.m. EST, you can see it once again on TBS. This adaptation of Jean Shepherd's memoirlike novel "In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash" was the first movie that director (and co-producer and co-writer) Bob Clark made after "Porky's" and "Porky's II: The Next Day." It's not as big a leap as you might expect. When I interviewed him in 1982, Clark told me he thought the key to "Porky's" was that "the whole movie springs from the notion that if 17-year-old boys have their sexuality repressed, outlandish behavior results." Just substitute "if 9-year-old boys have their natural aggressiveness repressed" in the previous sentence and you have "A Christmas Story."
Round-faced, bespectacled Ralphie sets his Christmas gift hopes on a 200-shot carbine action Red Ryder air rifle -- a BB gun. Much of the action revolves around the obstacles to his getting his wish, from the wisdom held by mother and schoolmarm alike that he'll take his eye out with it to his near paralysis in the lap of a gruff department store Santa. Peter Billingsley was born to play Ralphie: Even at his most relaxed, his expression is wide-eyed. He's the ideal camera subject for a director like Clark, who aims to bring exuberance to the obvious.
Our hero's home in frigid Hohman, Ind., circa 1940 (duplicated in Cleveland, circa '83), afflicted with a sputtering furnace and rampaging hounds from the hill folk next door, supplies Clark with a setting that suits his penchant for hyperbole. Shepherd provides archetypal incidents, from a tongue frozen on a flagpole to Ralphie's first walloping of a bully (a creep named Scott -- pronounced Scut -- Farcus, who has yellow eyes), that fulfill Clark's desire to tap folkloric roots.
Clark admitted to me in our interview that he knew "the ratio of broadly farcical elements to reality will vary" from filmmaker to filmmaker. "Mel Brooks might be 6-to-1," he said, "'Animal House' 4-to-1, Woody Allen 2-to-1. 'Porky's' is probably only one-and-a-half-to-1." He applies the same ratio to "A Christmas Story." But here he has actors like Melinda Dillon and Darren McGavin, as Ralphie's mom and dad, who enter right into Clark's preferred mode of gritty slapstick, especially when McGavin wins "electric sex" in a contest: a lamp in the shape of a female leg.
"A Christmas Story" is so full of high jinks that I often wondered what it had to do with Christmas at all. Then I remembered a line from Irving's essay on "A Christmas Carol": "Dickens' celebration of ghosts, and of Christmas, is but a small part of the author's abiding faith in the innocence and magic of children; Dickens believed that his own imagination -- in fact, his overall well-being -- depended on the contact he kept with his childhood." What links "A Christmas Story" and "A Christmas Carol" is Shepherd's remark in his narration that "the entire kid year" revolves around Christmas. By the end, you can imagine Ralphie proclaiming, a bit like Tiny Tim, "God bless us every one -- except for yellow-eyed Scut Farcus!"
