Thursday, January 01, 2009

Radio Days (1987)

Once There Was Radio

The waves break in an angry gray sea at the end of the street. The melody of Kurt Weill’s “September Song” plays in the background. “The scene is Rockaway. The time is my childhood,” says the narrator.

Young Joe (Seth Green) lives with his mother Tess (Julie Kavner) and father Martin (Michael Tucker) on this Rockaway street ending at the Atlantic Ocean. Their house teams with her family. Uncles and Aunts bump into each other and bicker, while in the background the radio plays.

In the mornings, Tess listens to “Breakfast with Irene and Roger.” She clears the dishes from the table, while Irene (Julie Kurnitz) and Roger (David Warrilow) discuss Manhattan’s social scene.

Joe’s favorite program is the Masked Avenger. He fantasizes that the Avenger—whose battle cry is “Beware evildoers, wherever you are”—is a “cross between Superman and Cary Grant.” But, this is radio: The Avenger is played by short, balding, Wallace Shawn.

Cousin Ruthie (Joy Newman) lip sinks as Carmen Miranda sings “South American Way.” Martin and Uncle Abe (Josh Mostel) watch, then join in the chorus.

Listening to Thomas Abercrombie’s marital advice program, Joe imagines his parents seeking advice. When Abercrombie (Martin Sherman) says they deserve each other, Martin protests, “Look, we didn’t come here to be insulted,” while Tess adds, “I love him—what did I do to deserve him.”

So it goes in Woody Allen’s Radio Days (1987). Because Woody plays the leading role in many of his films, they are often—erroneously—thought to be autobiographical. Although he does not appear in Radio Days, he is the narrator. “It is based on an exaggerated view of my childhood,” he says (in “Woody Allen on Woody Allen: In Conversation with Stig Björkman,” Grove Press, 1993), “I did live in a family with many people present in the house. […] I did live in a house right by the water. […] My relationship to the school teachers was like that. My relationship to radio was like that. The same with the Hebrew school. […] I did have an aunt who was forever getting into the wrong relationships and unable to get married. She never did get married. And we did have those neighbors who were communists. […] My cousin lived with me. We did have a telephone line where we listened in on the neighbors. All these things occurred.”

So Radio Days is semi-autobiographical, and it would be a charming movie if that were all it was. But it is much more: Woody peppers the movie with songs from his childhood and spikes it with fabulous characters and events. There is Sally the cigarette girl (Mia Farrow). She progresses—by way of being Roger’s mistress and being present at a gang hit—to being a radio interviewer. And there is Joe’s trip with Aunt Bea (Diane Wiest) and her latest beau to Radio City Music Hall. Passing into its hallowed halls—suffused with deep reds by director of photography Carlo Di Palma—the narrator says, “It was like entering Heaven.”

All too short at 88 minutes, Radio Days ends with Aunt Bea wakening Joe so he can join the rest of the family to see in 1944, while the legends of radio celebrate the New Year on the roof of a Times Square nightclub.


—John Bloomfield (16 December, 2004)

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