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| Writer/director Woody Allen |
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| 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.
