Bob Clark

Director Bob Clark, and his adult son, died in a car crash last week. He'll be remembered for two films, Porky's and A Christmas Story.

I was living in Ann Arbor when Porky's came out. I'd actually heard about it before it opened--it was supposed to be this amazing gross-out comedy. I'd loved Animal House, so I was looking forward to it.

It wasn't for me. While everyone in the audience was cracking up, I just thought it was stupid. This is why a friend of mine calls Porky's one of the most influential films of the last fifty years--Animal House, for all the wild humor, had wit, while Porky's was a lot more obvious, so Hollywood realized how easy it would be to imitate this formula, and countless such comedies followed.

The thing I remember best about the film is scenes where people on screen were trying to suppress their laughs. I had no problem.

When A Christmas Story came out, I was living in New Jersey. I saw it in a theatre in Upper Montclair. It was relatively unheralded (no one expected much from the director of Porky's) and turned out to be a pleasant surprise.

It starts with narration by Jean Shepherd, whose stories it's based on. I grew up in the Midwest, and he was more a phenomenon of the East Coast, so I found his voice rather off-putting. But once the story settled down, and concentrated on Ralphie trying to get his Red Ryder BB Gun, it worked pretty well.

The film is no classic (though it has a cult that thinks it is), but it does capture a period, and a feeling, and is certainly unlike anyting else Clark directed. Clark worked most of his career on projects that got little respect, so it must have been nice for him to have a film that critics and audience alike fondly recall.