People are inevitably shocked to discover that the two films Bob Clark directed just prior to A Christmas Story are the notorious raunchy teen sex romp Porky’s and its sequel. The three films just do not seem to fit together into a single person’s resume in any coherent way. (Clark also directed the very British and very Victorian Sherlock Holmes movie Murder by Decree just two years before Porky’s.)
The guiding influence above all others when it comes to A Christmas Story is writer/narrator Jean Shepherd, upon whose stories the screenplay (co-written by Shepherd and Clark and Leigh Brown) was based. Whether you subscribe to the auteur theory or know enough about how films get made to reject it as nonsense, there is no getting around the fact that the director of the film is not the “author” of A Christmas Story.
That being said, it is almost certainly Clark who is to be given credit for making A Christmas Story the single most ideal movie to air 24 hours straight on Christmas. The reason this is so is quite simple: you can drop in randomly at any point during those 24-hours and enjoy one of the vignettes without getting caught up in the plot, thus allowing you to drop out and come back later. The episodic structure of the movie may offer an explanation for why a movie cherished as an all-time classic today ended up making less money at the box office than movies released the same year such as My Tutor, High Road to China, Jaws 3-D, and Octopussy (not to mention Porky’s II: The Next Day). The structure makes it much better suited to watching on TV than the kind of movie where every scene (or most, anyway) is directly related to the main plot. Most of the classic moments everybody remembers from A Christmas Story have nothing at all to do with Ralphie’s pursuit of the BB gun and exist completely outside that storyline which is often referred to as the "plot" of the film.
Although Shepherd enjoyed a successful career as a performer (his narration of the movie gives an idea of what his radio shows were like), at heart Jean Shephard was a writer. As such, he saw short story writing as a coherent medium in which one scene linked to another naturally and for a purpose. Such was his adherence to this concept that he would collect unrelated short stories narrated by Ralph into a coherent collection that almost reads like a unified novel.
Bob Clark, by contrast, has a more visual mind that doesn’t seek the coherence of a logical narrative progression from scene to scene so much as a logical visual connection. (The most memorable example of this being the cut from Randy pulling his pants down as Ralphie finally allows him into the bathroom immediately to a shot of an unappetizing pot of brown mush cooking on the stove.)
Rather than attempting to unite the various set pieces into the storyline of Ralphie and the BB gun, Clark allows them to exist and play out in complete independence. There is nothing at all in any of the scenes which tells the story of the Battle of the Lamp that connects to or is dependent upon Ralph’s storyline. By jettisoning the natural tendency of a writer to seek coherence by connecting all his scenes together, Clark expresses enough confidence in the storytelling abilities of Jean Shepherd to make a film that feels much more like a collection of unconnected short stories than a novel. In doing so, he unwittingly created the perfect movie for a TV network to air on a 24-hour loop beginning in the early evening of December 24th.
