Clark: A Christmas Story (1983)

At one level, A Christmas Story is an adaptation of the oeuvre of writer, radio presenter and raconteur Jean Shepherd, gathering a series of his most iconic anecdotes about growing up in late 1930s Indiana into an impressionistic, atmospheric Christmas period piece. However, given that Shepherd’s body of work was largely oral, that no two versions of the same anecdote were ever quite identical, and that Shepherd himself co-scripted and narrated the film, it perhaps makes more sense to describe it as an illustration, an attempt to imagine how Shepherd’s audience might have imagined the vivid stories he was painting for them on his radio broadcasts and college circuits. While it is nostalgic, then, it’s not quite nostalgic in the same way as a lot of other 80s period pieces – this isn’t a vision of the past made for the present, it’s a vision of the past made for people who still remember the past, however distantly or remotely. In other words, it’s essentially a radio play, or another one of Shepherd’s gigs, not hugely different from watching the earliest efforts of more contemporary stand-up comedians to cross over into feature-length film, except it’s less anxious to make the crossover convincing; the rambling digressions of Bob Clark’s direction and mise-en-scene are part of the charm. That perhaps explains why it wasn’t a huge hit at the time, but it also explains why it was a sleeper hit, since the essence of Shepherd’s anecdotes is that they were repeatable, and lent themselves well to familiarity, becoming more idiosyncratic and surreal even as they became ever more comforting. In that sense, it’s a film made for rewatching, rather than watching – however many times you see it, there’s always likely to be an anecdote you forget, just as you’re unlikely to ever quite recall the exact order of anecdotes; it has a malleability and elasticity that made it perfect for the early thrills of VHS rental, as well as subsequent twenty-four hour TV marathons.