Radio Days

 

Writer/director Woody Allen

Woody Allen and Mia Farrow

RADIO DAYS                       A-                                                                                                  USA  (85 mi)  1987

The scene is Rockaway.  The time is my childhood.  It’s my old neighborhood, and forgive me if I tend to romanticize the past.  I mean, it wasn’t always as stormy and rain swept as this.  But I remember it that way because that was it at its most beautiful.                                                   —narration spoken by Woody Allen, Radio Days (1987): Rockaway (22 seconds)

A terrific New Year’s Eve movie, a film about America’s fascination with radio in the 1930’s and early 40’s, with wall-to-wall jazz music of the times, this is Woody Allen’s heavily romanticized American counterpoint to the British autobiographical childhood recollections of Terrence Davies in Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992).  This comedic/dramatic hybrid film is where Allen begins to indulge in mixing mood and genre textures into his films, where the dramatization of old-time radio serves as an imaginative source of some of the giddiest fantasies and news of personal tragedies both at home and on the war front, often underestimated and overlooked when it was released, deserving of a rediscovery.  A filmmaker who speaks with such awe and admiration for both Bergman and Fellini, this was openly inspired by Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959) and Fellini’s AMARCORD (1973), with its rambling autobiographical account of his personal memories, though Allen may never be taken seriously as a director of art films, claiming in a 1987 interview with William Geist (Woody Allen: The Rolling Stone Interview), “I’m trying to make as wonderful a film as I can, but my priorities are always in order, and they’re never artistic.  Artistic accomplishment is always third or fourth.”  However, in this film, the period music and extraordinary production design add artistic elements that actually overshadow the script, evoking a strong feeling of nostalgia, offering a distinctly fictionalized, stream-of-consciousness tapestry of personal memoirs, yet despite the embellishments, it remains the most autobiographical of all of Allen’s films.  Following a string of accomplishments leading up to this film, Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979), Stardust Memories (1980),  A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (1982), ZELIG (1983), Broadway Danny Rose (1984), THE PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO (1985), and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), this is Woody Allen without the neurotic angst, as one might actually say he was relaxed and comfortable with his life when he made it, having time for walks around New York City, watching Knicks games, browsing around bookstores, seeing friends, always finding an available table at Elaine’s, while regularly playing clarinet at Michael’s Pub.  Living in a large duplex apartment overlooking Central Park, he was sharing a life with actress Mia Farrow and her eight children (five of them adopted) living on the other side of Central Park.  Not since Charlie Chaplin had any other actor been more recognized by their onscreen persona as Allen, often playing himself, or disguised by alter-ego representations, including childhood versions of himself, making him, in some way, the Woody Allen protagonist in all his films.  Early on, when television gag writer Allan Konigsberg changed his name to Woody Allen as part of his stand-up comedy act, his material was always about the person behind it, continuing this autobiographical connection in his films, transformed into Alvy Singer in Annie Hall, while here Allen narrates the drama, never appearing onscreen, instead his childhood is manifested as a young red-haired Jewish kid named Joe (Seth Green), living in the lower middle-class section of a windswept corridor of Rockaway Beach in Queens on the South part of Long Island with his parents, Martin (Michael Tucker) and Tess (Julie Kavner).  Always nearby are grandparents, and everpresent aunts and uncles, including Aunt Ceil (Renée Lippin), whose life is consumed by the fish her husband Uncle Abe (Josh Mostel, son of Zero Mostel) constantly brings home from Sheepshead Bay, and perpetually single Aunt Bea (the always delightful Dianne Wiest), who dreams of finding the right guy, but ends up having disastrous taste in men, abandoned on one date when the fateful Mercury Theater War of the Worlds broadcast on the radio describes a Martian invasion, her date fleeing in fear, or another when she comically realizes that she’s dating a gay man grieving over a dead fiancé named Leonard.    

Filled with witty charm and a warm glow captured by the stunning honey-tinged cinematography of Carlos di Palma, who also shot Hannah and Her Sisters, as well as Antonioni’s BLOW-UP (1966) and RED DESERT (1964), the neighborhood recollections are scenes of innocence, like teenage girls in bobby socks sitting at the soda shop counter and sighing in unison while listening to crooners on the radio, much to the disgust of neighborhood boys who find it much too ridiculous for their tastes.  Violence in school is little more than a spitball fight in noisy classrooms, while sex was just boys on rooftops hungrily looking through binoculars at a nude woman dancing in her apartment to the strains of Babalu, 29 Xavier Cugat w. Richard Hayes - Babalu (Radio Days) YouTube (2:37).  Joe’s teenage cousin Ruthie (Joey Newman) dances in front of her bedroom mirror, her head wrapped in a towel turban, to the sound of Carmen Miranda’s energetic 1940 tune South American Way, Dias de Radio. Woody Allen. 1987. YouTube (1:12), while the men in his family easily slip into fantasy lip-synching, briefly turning their own lives into art, something that has been the root of Allen’s filmmaking since the beginning.  Released just a month after the Neil Simon written film based on his early play BRIGHTON BEACH MEMOIRS (1986), there are similarities in period locale and adolescent coming-of-age reflections, often feeling interchangeable.  It’s a fairly slender and plotless film, yet the extensive use of an ensemble cast, with many appearing only for brief cameos, is positively stunning, more effective than any other film in his entire career.  At $16 million dollars, this was Allen’s most expensive film up to that point, where a major slice of the budget went to clearing the rights for the music, where a whopping 43 songs were used, hand-picked from Allen’s own massive music collection, many of them period pieces reflecting specific memories that play out in a stream of connecting vignettes, with Allen injecting plenty of humor, exaggerating the sense of dysfunction within his family to the point of absurdity, with everyone huddled around the radio in the evenings, tying the entire country together in an era before television, looking for snippets of war reports mixed together with each family member’s favorite radio shows.  Joe’s favorite was The Masked Avenger, a super hero (ironically played by balding, diminutive actor Wallace Shawn) who always found his way out of tricky situations while warning the general public to be on the lookout as he flies over city rooftops, “Beware, evildoers, wherever you are!”  Joe’s cartoonish view of the world adds an exaggerated imitation of what real-life people are like, examining lives on both sides of the radio, contrasting the ordinary lives of his eccentric family with the more glamorous worlds of their favorite radio personalities, but it’s the incidental tales of the daffy radio personalities that come alive, with his mother hooked on her favorite show, Breakfast with Irene and Roger, conjuring up images of chic, sophisticated people living in glamorous Manhattan penthouses, spending their evenings at the Stork Club, formally dressed for celebratory drinks and dancing while mixing in civilized conversations with other radio celebrities.  In this gloriously imagined world, Mia Farrow enters as Sally White, the down on her luck King Cole Room cigarette girl at the upscale St. Regis Hotel, her sixth appearance in a Woody Allen film, where her impossibly thick Brooklyn accent stands in stark contrast to the suave elocution of Roger (David Warrilow), who can’t keep his hands off her, pleading with seedy come-ons to have a moment alone, both rushing onto the rooftop for a quickie rendezvous, with her cigarette tray continually getting in the way, where her reaction afterwards is priceless, “Boy, that was fast!  Probably helped I had the hiccups.”         

The exquisitely lush production design by Santo Loquato, using a high Art Deco style, is simply stunning, especially that Times Square rooftop, complete with a large neon Camel cigarettes billboard with a smoker blowing smoke, seemingly something that should have been preserved in a showcase museum.  Manhattan is depicted as a fairyland in bright lights, with posh nightclubs showcasing jazzy Latin bands, as Tito Puente is seen holding singer Denise Dumont’s chihuahua as he conducts, while she symbolizes the exotic chanteuse in Tico-Tico no Fubá, Woody Allen's Radio Days - "Tico Tico" YouTube (46 seconds).  This New York never really existed, as it’s a beautifully conjured dream of memory, a jarringly different impression than the seedy realism, sporadic gunfire, and wandering dispossessed souls that characterize the New York films of Martin Scorsese.  According to Charles Dickens in Great Expectations, “I’m not going to tell you the story the way it happened.  I’m going to tell it the way I remember it.”  Even the hallowed annals of baseball becomes an amusing target of satiric absurdity with the legendary story of Kirby Kyle, Radio Days 1987 YouTube (1:49), a Monty Pythonesque parody of real-life pitchers Monty Stratton (on one leg) and Pete Gray (with one arm).  Yet it’s the utterly adorable Mia Farrow who really steals the show, a dim-witted yet ambitious Judy Holliday kind of blonde who momentarily forgets herself when inviting a room full of society people up to the roof of a building on New Year’s Eve, bookending the seediness of her earlier scene, yet she also has the most memorable line when her first live radio show is interrupted by an emergency announcement that Pearl Harbor has been invaded, when she innocently asks, “Who is Pearl Harbor anyway?”  We follow her zany saga as she changes her ditzy gangster’s moll accent into a cultured speaking voice by taking diction lessons, Radio Days (1987) - Sally and her diction lessons - YouTube (1:43), a radical transformation that leads her into commercial opportunities, seen receiving surprisingly intense emotive directions for a laxative commercial.  Among the multiple storylines swirling around the life of Sally White, she actually witnesses a mob hit, forcing the killer (named Rocco, of course, played by Danny Aiello) to knock her off, leaving no witnesses to the crime, but while driving her to meet her inevitable fate, he learns they’re both from the same neighborhood in Brooklyn, developing a special bond, stopping first to have dinner with his mother (Gina DeAngeles), who politely urges her to “Have some more cannoli honey.  You’re so thin. (Turning quickly to her son) So where are you going to dump her body?”  Through a strange twist of fate, it’s actually the mob that exerts their notable influence to conveniently jumpstart her career, finally finding her place, eventually becoming a radio star.  Allen is a master of small touches like that, moments of intimacy that go haywire, sprinkling little moments of poignancy throughout the film, like his uncle Abe going next door to quiet their communist neighbor (Larry David) for blasting their radio on the day of the Sabbath, as they are fasting while quietly atoning for their sins on the Jewish high holidays, and returns confessing that he snuck an unkosher pork chop while spewing slogans of the Communist Manifesto.  Impeccably weaving in a veritable stock company of recognizable Allen regulars who are perfectly cast, there are moments of magic in this film, yet the most ecstatic moment is Joe’s first visit to the magnificent Radio Center Music Hall theater, ascending the stairs in an exhilarating cathedral-like experience that he describes glowingly, “My most vivid memory connected with an old radio song I associate with the time that Aunt Bea and her then-boyfriend Chester took me into New York to the movies.  It was the first time I’d ever seen the Radio City Music Hall and it was like entering heaven.  I just never saw anything so beautiful in my life,” as Sinatra sings 'If You Are But A Dream' in Woody Allen's 'Radio Days' YouTube (1:58).  Supposedly a favorite of venerated director Stanley Kubrick, it’s really one of Allen’s greatest creations, certainly among his ten best, as this film links radio’s relationship to the imagination and to filmmaking, and by extension to real life, by exhibiting with dramatic immediacy all the many ways that radio can transcend the ordinary world we live in, while also connecting it to the impermanence of memory.   

Performance

 

Nicolas Roeg

Roeg with Mick Jagger

James Fox rehearsing a scene

Mick Jagger with Anita Pallenberg

Pallenberg with Donald Cammell

PERFORMANCE                  B+                                                                                              Great Britain  (105 mi)  1970  d: Nicolas Roeg        co-director:  Donald Cammell

The only performance that makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness.             —Turner (Mick Jagger)

The most confounding film of its time, part of the 60’s psychedelic movie milieu, yet defying expectations of viewers, this rarely seen, small gem of a film is crazily indulgent and equally fascinating, now viewed as a cult film, filled with drug-induced attitudes and pseudo-philosophies of the 60’s that one might expect with Rolling Stones lead singer Mick Jagger in a starring role, the first rock star to work with Roeg before David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) and Art Garfunkel in BAD TIMING (1980).  Roeg had previously understudied David Lean and worked exclusively as a cinematographer for François Truffaut in FAHRENHEIT 451 (1966), John Schlesinger in FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD (1967), and Richard Lester in PETULIA (1968).  Taking viewers completely by surprise are some jaw-droppingly sadistic elements that may leave many scratching their heads in disgust, as the film really uglifies any remnants of a peaceful drug experience and instead shatters all illusions with grisly violence, heavily infiltrated by a toxic crime element, perhaps mirroring the ritualization of violence in the Hell’s Angels crashing the party at Altamant, culminating in a grotesque murder in the crowd while the Rolling Stones were performing onstage, as depicted in the Maysles Brothers Gimme Shelter (1970) released that same year.  Talk about a downer, this film is a glorified head case, an early proclamation announcing the end of the 60’s.  Written by Scottish painter turned screenwriter Donald Cammell, who was part of the London underground scene, and filmed by Nicolas Roeg, who provides the hallucinatory effects, they are indistinguishable collaborators on this film, often blending two or three shots into a single image, continually contrasting sharply defined images with free-form flashbacks, implementing a disjointed editing style while uniquely exploring identities, seen here as the merging and loss of individualism and gender.  Set in the waning days of the Swinging London era of 1968, defined by Twiggy, Carnaby Street, and the British Invasion, represented by films like John Schlesinger’s DARLING (1965), Karel Reisz’s MORGAN! (1966), or Antonioni’s BLOW-UP (1966), this delves into a shadowy, considerably seamier side of London, where the performers are James Fox as Chas Devlin, an ultra-violent and ambitious hired East End thug who is part of the protection racket of London gangsters, using threats and extreme violence to frighten and coerce people (Marlon Brando was initially considered for the role as a brash American), perhaps a precursor to Malcolm McDowell in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) without the cocky humor, while Mick Jagger plays Turner, a fallen rock star living a life of narcissistic seclusion, with the mesmerizing, often naked or semi-clad Anita Pallenberg as Pherber (the girlfriend of Keith Richards, and former girlfriend of Brian Jones, causing extreme jealousy, leading to Richard’s refusal to perform on the soundtrack) and equally mysterious Michèle Breton (who never made another film) as Lucy playing his ménage à trois bed partners.  Their paths cross and there is a struggle and transference of identity, two dissimilar men hiding under the same roof, with lots of explicit sex, drug use, and strange mind games, including a hallucinogenic experience that takes a turn for the worse, with subtle references, mysterious dialogue, and disorienting filming techniques, continually blurring the lines of reality.  In this film, nothing is what it seems, evolving into a psychedelic head-trip, shot with extreme emotional detachment, shown in an elliptical, non-linear style that simply drove studio bosses up the wall.  Completed in 1968, Warner Brothers, hoping to tap into the burgeoning youth market, was shocked by its frank depiction of drug use and what they described as pornographic sex, declaring the film “unreleasable,” so appalled by the results that the film sat on the shelves until 1970, unceremoniously released without a publicity tour, when it was almost universally vilified by critics, described by Richard Schickel for Time magazine as “The most disgusting, the most completely worthless film I have seen since I began reviewing.”  With Jagger signed on to play a lead role, the biggest rock star on the planet at the time, studio heads were drooling at the thought this might resemble Richard Lester’s playful use of the Beatles in A HARD DAYS NIGHT (1964), yet they couldn’t have been pleased with John Simon’s review in The New York Times, The Most Loathsome Film of All? - The New York Times, which reads, in part, “You do not have to be a drug addict, pederast, sadomasochist or nitwit to enjoy Performance, but being one or more of those things would help.”     

Film historian Colin MacCabe calls it the best British film ever made, listed at #7 in the Time Out magazine list of best British films of all time, Best British Movies | 100 Best British Films of All Time - Time Out, while in his 15-hour British documentary on the history of film, THE STORY OF FILM: AN ODYSSEY (2011), Mark Cousins offers his view, “Performance was not only the greatest seventies film about identity, if any movie in the whole Story of Film should be compulsory viewing for filmmakers, maybe this is it.”  The grotesquely exaggerated, in-your-face style may be off-putting to some, using extreme close-ups, intrusive jump cuts, and repetitive sound bites to undermine any connection to character, with events shown out of sequence, using Moog-like sounds with bits and pieces of discordant melodies in a unique soundtrack designed by Jack Nitzsche, creating an imbalanced and distorted view that continually keeps viewers off-kilter, a jagged style that later became associated with Roeg, plunging viewers into a world of the unknown.  One might say there are two halves to this film, with the first more closely following Cammell’s script, predominately featuring the rollicking adventures of Chas, an enforcer in the protection racket run by Harry Flowers (Johnny Shannon), forcibly shaking business owners down, instilling fear with open threats, while a parallel story is taking place in the courts describing how business mergers are profitable legal transactions, where the weaker are joined by stronger interests, which is better for both parties, claiming “Business is business and progress is progress.”  The sadistic nature of his work makes Chas a happy camper, a perfectionist right down to the smallest detail, relishing what he does for a living, a swaggering brute with a taste for rough sex and fancy clothes, specializing in extortion, allowing him to exhibit a supreme arrogance and haughty disregard of others, fast forward to Christian Bale in American Psycho (2000), which ruffles the feathers of Flowers a bit, as he has to constantly remind him who he’s working for, as he’s not in business for himself.  Anyone going into this film expecting to see Mick Jagger will be extremely disappointed in the first 45-minutes, as he’s nowhere to be found, bogged down by this brutally violent depiction of the criminal underworld, where Flowers has a habit of taking over struggling businesses, using muscle to apply pressure, where mocking and humiliating intimidation are his stock and trade, with Chas an exemplary, over-the-top example of one of his lieutenants exerting mafia-style tactics.  Flowers targets the small town betting operations of one of Chas’s childhood friends, Joey Maddox (Anthony Valentine), ordering Chas off the case, due to his close personal connection, but he decides to pay him a visit anyway, with Joey and his friends mocking Chas, convinced he is queer, with BDSM references littered throughout.  After receiving his fair share of abuse, however, he allows his temper to get the best of him and murders Maddox in a crime of passion, causing him to run not only from the police, but from Harry Flowers.  His quest for anonymity before escaping abroad and forging a new identity leads him to seek shelter in a temporary landing spot, the dilapidated basement residence of the Notting Hill home of Turner.  This second half of the film is infinitely more bewildering, turning into a cinematic puzzle piece that can be mind-blowingly cryptic and enigmatic, leading him into a crumbling labyrinth of candles, ornate mirrors, velvet drapes, and a squalid Bohemian vibe that he abhors, describing it over the phone with his proper Cockney accent, “It’s a right pisshole.  Longhairs, beatniks, free-love, foreigners...you name it!”  The pace of the film slows considerably, with no real storyline, becoming more of an underground or experimental film, where it’s mostly the blues guitar of Ry Cooder heard in the background, with no songs from the Rolling Stones, where Jagger’s role is actually to act, though the character he resembles is largely himself.  Nonetheless, he offers acute observations on this intruder that become the focal point near the end, with the two women swirling around him like sharks playing sexual mind games, questioning him on his motives, just who he is, and why he wants to be there, where their alluring beauty and frank sexuality is striking, while Jagger’s hovering presence oversees everything, like an omniscient force, but remains mystifying, creating a daring pathway into an inner sanctum of unexplored psychedelia.

While the 60’s American counterculture was largely influenced by the postwar Beat Generation, British Bohemian culture drew from older and wider literary influences.  Interspersed into the film are two Jorge Luis Borges readings, the Argentine short-story writer, essayist, and poet, and staunch critic of authoritarian rule, where his spirit hovers over the entire production, and his image emerges at a precipitous moment near the conclusion of the film.  Both Chas and Turner are shown reading Personal Anthology, the collection of stories published around the time it was filmed, while Turner mentions Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius during his initial encounter with Chas before reciting some material from it, and later reads a passage from The South out loud, “They would not have allowed such things to happen to me in the sanitarium, he thought” The South Lyrics | Beelyrics.net.  Adding to the myth surrounding this film, Donald Cammell put a gun to his head and shot himself years later in 1996, asking his wife to bring a mirror so he could watch himself die, where his last words reportedly were, “Can you see the picture of Borges?”  Mirrors help create the maze-like illusion in Jagger’s lair, where the layout is deliberately obscure, and the number of rooms uncertain, while Chas and Turner both alter their appearance as they go down the Rabbit hole, growing more curious, each recognizing an alter-ego in the other until eventually you can’t tell them apart, becoming spiritually fused together.  The actor James Fox first gained notoriety in Joseph Losey’s THE SERVANT (1963), another identity-crisis drama about mind games and sexual role reversals, while an androgynous gender fluidity became part of Mick Jagger and David Bowie’s rock star stage personas in the late 60’s.  Secretly fed psychedelic mushrooms by Pherber, a window into his soul is expressed through a shattered reality, as identities are dismantled and merged, becoming an assault on the senses with fractured visuals and a near impenetrable thematic motif, no longer able to discern reality from fantasy, challenging his macho posturing and repressed queer desires, offering nothing in the way of explanation or expository information, with a little esoterica thrown in as well, forcing viewers to find a way in, yet this is exactly what the directors had in mind.  “There is no truth, everything is permitted,” Turner explains to Chas, quoting Vladimir Bartol’s 1938 novel, Alamut, (Vladimir Bartol's “Alamut”), a historical novel that tells an Old Man and the Mountain story of Hassan-i Sabbah and the Hashshashin (Assassins) in Persia, who committed murders in hopes of gaining entrance to his hashish-laced Garden of Delights, full of rare flowers, strange perfumes, and exotic young women, a recurring image in the film and an allegorical story that so fascinated Beat writer William S. Burroughs that he included the reference in his 1959 post-modern novel, Naked Lunch (A Brief Note on Hassan I Sabbah, William S. Burroughs, and ...).  With Jagger riffing on an acoustic guitar, moving from a Robert Johnson blues lament, Robert Johnson - Come on in my Kitchen - YouTube (2:50), to John Lee Hooker, JOHN LEE HOOKER - BAD LIKE JESSE JAMES - YouTube (5:21), Roeg creates a visual kaleidoscope as he begins to get inside his guest’s head, his identity and aggressiveness undermined by drugs, with mirrors everywhere, as Pherber dresses him up in a wig before playing Merry Clayton’s Poor White Hound Dog, Performance (1970) -- (Movie Clip) Poor White Hound Dog YouTube (1:45).  The film juxtaposes two different models of British masculinity, the over aggressive street hoodlum of Chas and Jagger’s ambisexual rock star Turner, who moans that he’s been abandoned by his “inner demon,” leading directly into the centerpiece of the film, Jagger’s sarcastically mocking version of Memo from Turner, Performance (1970) -- (Movie Clip) Memo From Turner ... YouTube (3:42), a fantasy that ultimately ties everything together.  It’s a seismic shift that allows the two worlds to collide, leading to a finale where he’s driven off in a white Rolls Royce loaned by John Lennon, with the film remaining ambiguous to the core.  The peculiar strangeness of the Harry Flowers gang was a radical departure from any other cinematic version of gangsters, with homoerotic implications expressed through a fantasy-like delirium.  It might not surprise anyone that heroin was rampant on the set of the film, along with a cornucopia of drugs, while promiscuous sex was commonplace, with Cammell, whose career was never the same afterwards, allegedly encouraging drug use and sexual experimentation to create the proper mood.  Fox was so shaken by the role that he didn’t act again for an entire decade, instead becoming a born again Christian, while Anita Pallenberg stopped modeling and got further hooked on drugs.  The two halves were filmed so separately that she was completely surprised when she saw the gangster sections in the final cut.  Jagger’s girlfriend at the time was Marianne Faithfull, who remarked in her autobiography, the set was “a psychosexual laboratory…a seething cauldron of diabolical ingredients: drugs, incestuous sexual relationships, role reversals, art and life all whipped together into a bitch’s brew.”  Disturbed by the bad vibes, she quickly departed for Ireland.