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Please stay on topic–in this case the film A Christmas Story, fave holiday films,getting your mouth washed out with soap, what you really wanted as a holiday gift and never got..

If you want to jump in about anything else not about tonight’s topics please find a post elsewhere on FDL to do so. Thank you.

Please be respectful of our guest and of each other. And yeah, I tpye badly…

Hello everyone and welcome to Firedoglake Movie Night. And thank you all for being here tonight!

Lisa, great movie!! We had it on all day.

It’s was Bev’s idea. I had never seen it before.

Chinese food on Xmas is very LA tradition, my friend Juian Nitzberg (who directed the Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia, a Movie Night feature earlier this year) has an annual event he calls JewMass wherein we go out for Chinese food and then to some frolic. Oddly most strip bars in LA are closed now on Xmas night….

“self-poisoning” that’s a great bit.

The little orphan annie decoder ring is really tragic…what a lesson

I’ve been a fan of Melinda Dillon since Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The scary thing about that movie is those awful leg lamps actually existed.

Was that Martin Mull as the santa?

I think it is a lesson we all go through, the realization when Marketing “gets us”.

Not Martin Mull

It was Jeff Gillen

This film is largely responsible for our new tradition (just completed Year Three) of eating at our favorite Chinese place on Christmas Day. No duck, tho…

No duck, tho…

Oh man. Seems like you’d have to have somebody whack the head off with a cleaver.

i love this movie lisa. the voice over narration by the adult ralphie always makes me think back to christmas when i was a child.

Uuuuummmmm, the compass is in the stock, not the barrel…

Thanks, I dont knwo much about guns!

I always wonder if Randy ever grew up and ate a real meal with the family. But, really enjoy the mom that lets him be himself.

Yep. It sure does. I remember when my boys were little and they wanted these specific kind of trucks. Well, they got them. Turns out they were very disappointed because the trucks would not climb up hills and walls like the commercial showed.

we’ll fix it.

Love love love A Christmas Story! This movie never gets stale for me, even though I watch it every year. Best of all, it reminds me of my late mom who also loved the movie; she said it reminded her of her own childhood when she spent some growing-up years in Cleveland, where there was a Higbee’s department store. The family dynamics in the movie she didn’t share, but she just loved remembering the clothes, the music, how the houses looked, etc.

Flick Lives!
(Who woulda thunk it?)
I’ve never been able to see the film all the way through. I grew up listening to Shep on WOR since I was about 10 years old, and I heard all these stories “in the original”. The movie doesn’t seem to measure up to my childhood memories.
I did get my Dad to take me to the Limelight club when I was 13 to see Shep’s Saturday night show. He was an uptown guy, mortified to be in the Village with his kid in a bar amongst the hippies, but he took me.

This is interesting.

According to Director Bob Clark, Jack Nicholson was given the script and was very much interested in the role of Mr. Parker, “The Old Man”. Regardless, Clark says that Darren McGavin was still the better choice and was born to play the role.

Jack Nicholson as the “Old Man.” Hmm, I don’t know ……..

It soap poisoning, not self-poisoning!

That Red Rider BB gun was a big hit back then. Especially for little boys that had been bullyed in the neighborhoods.

Oh…wow, I have a dirty mind! I was wondering how he went from soap in mouth to doing that thin parent used to claim would make you blind!!!

“self poisoning” seemed like a reasonable and quaint term for masturbation

“I told you you shouldn’t have used Lifebuoy….”

I never heard if a Red Rider bb gun. I had a Daisy.

Farkis means wold in Hungarian, not the “peter and the Wolf” like music in the bg when Farkis is around, and his lupine expressions, his fur hat etc..

Daisy manufactured the Red Rider model I think, they movie showed the RR in a Diasy display

Ah! Maybe so then. Maybe it was the compass in the stock that made the difference. My dad took off the cheap plastic stock and replaced it with a wooden one that he made. My dad did lots of useful shit like that. :)

For any one thats interested they also made a summer version of this movie, I don’t recall the name but it was narrated by shepperd and had mary steenburgen as the mom and charles grodin ? as the dad, different actors but you forget about a few minutes into the movie.

Yes, Lisa. Thank You. Daisy did make the Red Rider and another little air pistol type thing that shot corks.

Love the Movie.
Had Chinese Food for Xmas Eve.
Gave my son a Red Rider gun many years ago. And, yes we hid it behind the tree. One more present left.
And, we have a small version of the leg lamp.
Ha. That’s just how it is in my house.

It was called “It Runs in the Family” OR “My Summer Story” and had Keiren Malkulkin as Ralphie

whoa! my dad had a bb gun growing up. It looked like a glock

The house is here in Cleveland, and one can visit it at Christmastime. Every time my parents watch the movie and see all the cords & plugs sticking out of the sockets, blowing fuses, they say it looks just like my Cleveland Heights home! And it almost is, we just use surge protectors now. And we still use genuine fuses in our box that blow out when someone uses the microwave and heater at the same time. Cursing, too.

Thanks,I thought it was a great movie as well.

The house–located in Cleveland– is now a museum, bought by a fan of the movie. Here’s the Wiki quickie

In December 2004, Brian Jones, a San Diego entrepreneur and fan of the film since childhood, bought the house on eBay for $150,000. Jones used revenue from his business, The Red Rider Leg Lamp Company, which manufactures replicas of the “major award” Ralphie’s father won in the film, for the down payment.

The previous owners had reconfigured installing modern windows, and covered the original wood siding with blue vinyl. Watching the movie frame by frame, Jones drew detailed plans of the interiors — which had been filmed on a Toronto sound stage — and spent $240,000 to gut the structure, reconfigure it to a single-family dwelling, transform it into a near-replica of the movie set, and restore the exterior to its appearance in the film.

The year before directing “A Christmas Story,” Bob Clark directed another
heart warming family classic: “Porky’s. Ha!

My house used ot have those kind of fuses, glass screw ins– you could put a penny in if they blew (BAD IDEA).

The electircal ssystem has been updated somewhat, but we can still shut down everything with a misplaced floor heater

The movie kinda shows you parents are NEARLY right, like Ralphie ALMOST puts out his eye.

So I wonder if it is saying parents are right or wrong?

Santa was soooooo scary!

Well, I got my mouth washed out with soap and it wasn’t Christmas! (I think it was Thanksgiving, but that was long, long ago. (No wind through the olive trees either!)

Why do think this has become so popular a film?

It is really sweet and idealized and stuff. I dont know anyone who had this sort of xmas, or family even.

Jack Nicholson was weirdly the director’s first choice ss the Old Man! FREAKY. Redrum!

It is fun. A string of sight-gags. The old fashioned comedy where no one really gets hurt. And …. a happy ending.

And lessons are learned. Loved the Farkis getting what-for. Weirdly Farkis has braces (sign of economic upscale back then) but his sweater has holes.

The language in the narration is awesome too.

I was stunned when I was like 7 and my step mom told me she had stuck her tongue on a pump handle in freezing weather (she was from PA).. she said they got it of by heating the handle. Her dad was a fire man so he knew what to do

I went out for Chinese food my first time ever on Christmas day this year, and all I could think of was this movie! I have been pretty much celebrating Christmas for a month, and I had a huge Xmas friend party plus the family on Christmas eve. My sister is down this year, so I went to her place on Xmas day and she took me out to a Chinese restaurant. It was hopping, so much so that there was a wait to get a table by the time we left. It was really fun, I could see going every year!

Ouch!

The Old Man about mom’s present:

Oh it’s a blue ball!

as he unwraps the bowling ball

Because so many of the aspects really do happen and exist. It’s a composite. Many people could do worse than having been raised in that family. I think.

I love chinese food on Xmas, but this year I had dinner party for 20–my ladies cooked turkey and filet, I made desserts and we used the sterling and china… goal is next year to have stemware for at least 20! It was really fun. And all the vegetables got eaten, very nice!

Thank you all for joining in A Christmas Story, next week we have Phil Ochs: There But Fortune, wiht the director and Phil’s bro Michael (the photographer) and daughter Meeghan a civil rights activist.

As a late comment, I still use the A ++++++++++ comment when I think someone has done something great. Only a few people get it.

This must be a young audience, A Christmas Story (filmed in Cleveland) was exactly how it was here in Cleveland, and the Midwest until about 1965, I would estimate. I don’t think peopel realize what we have lost in this country…

Many of the scenes were filmed in Cleveland. The parade is on Public Square, with its Soldiers’ and Sailor’s Monument, what’s now Tower City and what used to be Higbee’s (the filml used the retailer’s real name and its windows were once famed for their Christmas and other shopping holiday wonders). The house is on what’s called the near West Side. But Ralphie’s school is 20 miles east of downtown; it’s now the middle school in Chagrin Falls.

During the Browns vs Ravens football game in Cleveland on Sunday they showed an interior shot of the house with the leg lamp and “the soft glow of electric sex gleaming in the window.”

That’s after Melinda Dillon’s character drops the still-wrapped bowling ball into his lap. A great big of stage business from two fine actors.

The ending perfectly captures the mix of their daily life and romance. The kids are abed, the lights are down low, snow falls softly outside the front porch, and Dillon and McGavin sit by the lit tree, slowly wrapping their arms round each other at the end of the day and the holiday.

Jumping in late, also (watched the movie 2 and a half times this weekend)– having had most of my childhood in central Indiana in the ’50′s – a bit later than the movie period – which could be any time from the 30′s to the ’40′s (Jean Shepherd was 9 in 1930, but much about the movie still lingered in the early ’50′s), I find much familiar about it.

My 1st husband grew up farther south in a small Indiana town, more like Shepherd’s Hammond, in a way, though with stone quarries instead of steel mills. He identified with it even more. Or rather, with Shepherd’s books, from which the movie was drawn. I’m sorry the movie hadn’t come out while I was still with him…we’d have laughed ourselves silly.

My father was nothing like Ralphie’s, but I knew dad’s who were. The overloaded plugs, the fuses blowing…dad’s who tinkered with repairs…
Picking out the real Christmas tree; Moms sweet-talking dads past their possible anger with the kids without quite lying to them..
And yes, getting my mouth washed out with soap. Though my mom did it differently…I’d never heard of sticking the bar of soap in the mouth like that.
My mother soaped up a washcloth and washed the inside of my mouth with it. As far as I remember…I was about 4, more than 50 years ago.

Oh yeah, and distant relatives who hadn’t seen you in years and couldn’t picture you as a “big kid.”
And waiting in line for Santa at the department store, the main store downtown! After gazing stupefied at the wonderful windows, full of detail.

Yep, much nostalgia for one of my age; apparently it appeals to younger folks, too.

Who didn’t learn their “golfing” vocabulary from their dad working on the furnace, the car, the kitchen sink?

Eggzackly. : )

Also, I remember lots of discussion(in childhood) about how quickly your tongue would freeze to something metal outdoors in winter…don’t recall anyone daring anyone else to prove it…but then, I was a little girl. 8-)
We were very well-behaved.

But, yeah, Randy wrapped up like a sausage to go to school – exaggerated, of course, but enough truth to be hilarious.
When I was in grade school, we girls had to wear skirts or dresses to school, even in winter, so we wore these heavy wool leggings that buttoned up the sides, or had zippers. Also, of course, wool hat, scarf, mittens, heavy coat.
It took the poor teachers in the early grades, kinder to about 3rd, forever just to help the kids out of their outerwear in the morning, and into again in the evening.

And of course, when my friends’ smaller siblings were all well wrapped in their snow clothes….then the sibling would whine that s/he had to go to the bathroom. That was what I was waiting for when I first saw that scene!

Jean Shepherd appears in the movie as the guy telling Ralphie where the end of the line is in the scene where they’re waiting to see the department store Santa.
As a young teenager, I first discovered Mr Shepherd’s writing in the pages of Playboy. His ‘Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories’ is particularly hilarious.

That Red Rider BB gun was in the last page – or the back cover – of every comic book in the 40′s (it came out in 1938).

I know I wanted one but my Dad said only bad peoples kids had guns they shot near the house (he had 2 rifles and a shotgun and hunted and I was allowed to walk behind and carry the open shotgun – and to later hunt – we hunted for meat on nearby farms and woods where hunting was permitted – hunting for the evening meal – but I never could have a BB gun on the street around the house to shot stop signs like the lucky kids did).

The movie was so real it hurt – one of the best ever made.

I’ve been a fan of Melinda Dillon since the original Broadway production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (she played Honey)

Many years ago I had the enormous pleasure of Meeting Darren MCGavin at a film event. A veteran actor of enormous skill you can’t imagine how much he appreciated the iconic-level fame A Chrstmas Story brought to him. At the time it was simply another job. No one connected to the film had the vaguest idea it would become a classic.

Sadly he died in a horrendous automobile accident here in L.A. several years back.