BOB CLARK was never really famous.
As a Hollywood director, he was responsible for a string of best-forgotten movies, from “Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things” to “Baby Geniuses.” He made some real money in the early 1980s with “Porky’s” and “Porky’s II: The Next Day,” a couple of mean-spirited coming-of-age movies that did well at the box office.
If his career had been limited to those films, his death this week in a traffic accident in California would have caused hardly a ripple.
But Bob Clark was also the director of “A Christmas Story,” and that made all the difference.
In that one movie, made almost a quarter of a century ago, everything came together for Clark: a sweet, wry script about a little boy, Ralphie, who wants a BB gun for Christmas; a matchless cast including Darrin McGavin, Melinda Dillon and Peter Billingsley; and a crew who lovingly recreated the look and feel of a small Indiana city in the 1940s. What could have been — and almost was — just another Christmas screen filler became instead a classic.
“A Christmas Story” does not have a real Santa Claus like “Miracle on 34th Street” or an angel like the soppy “It’s a Wonderful Life.” What it does have is an accurate, if nostalgic, portrayal of mid-20th-century American childhood and a portrait of a loving family that has not been air-brushed into blandness. It also has delightful excursions into Ralphie’s imagination as he plans, plots and connives to get the “official Red Ryder carbine-action 200-shot range model air rifle” of his dreams.
The movie, which almost disappeared after a short run in 1983, was saved by audience word-of-mouth and by a few critics, who clamored for its return. Year by year, its following grew. Now, one national television channel runs “A Christmas Story” for 24 hours straight on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. The movie has become part of the national culture.
“You’ll shoot your eye out, kid” has become part of the national patter and lamps shaped like a chorus-girl’s leg always get a laugh.
So when Bob Clark died this week, he did not die a Hollywood hack. His name was barely known, but he had made his masterpiece.
All his other work was just filler, packed around “A Christmas Story” like excelsior around a leg lamp.