A Christmas Story did the voice-overs so well. The set design, music and voice-overs combined to truly make you feel like it was the 1940s rather than a movie made in 1983. "The Wonder Years" (a TV show with great and similar voice-over use)did the same thing in the late 1980s with their 1960s-70s timeframe. One of my favorite voice-overs in "A Christmas Story" is this: Scut Farkus! What a rotten name! We were trapped. There he stood, between us and the alley. Scut Farkus staring out at us with his yellow eyes. He had yellow eyes! So, help me, God! Yellow eyes!" It's a great internal monologue that also adds humor and makes the bully an even more ominous presence. On a side note, it's terrible that they recently released "A Christmas Story 2." I refuse to watch it, so I'm not sure if voice-overs are implemented or how they sound, but the Christmas classic shouldn't have been touched. It's like making "It's Still a Wonderful Life" without James Stewart or "Ernest Saves Christmas Again" without Jim Varney.

Certainly with "Double Indemnity" and "The Shawshank Redemption" there were risky elements to those movies (a main character agreeing to murder an innocent man so he could be with that man's wife, and a prison movie involving platonic love between heterosexual prisoners) which called for the VO narration to keep viewers fully involved in the movie. It's obvious that VO narration allows viewers a chance to get even closer to a character. It seems that it's had an undeserved bad press - it's not just a device for lazy or less-skilled writers but a valuable piece of the writer's armoury to be used in certain cases.