Fifth in the series: Morning Becomes Reagan: A revisiting of 1980s pop (and political) culture
Also fits the series:
"We'll always have Woody": A look at Woody Allen films
Subsections below:
Details showing pluses and almost-minuses
Farrow’s character is the focus of most of the Allen-esque “romance comedy”
here
Radio Days suitable as part
of an “omnibus” approach to Allen scholarship
[Edits 4/17/14.]
This film is minor enough that I won’t dwell much on
it—Woody Allen calls it a “cartoon” (End
note 1), and its episodic structure (with no real, gripping story arc) and bountifully
colorful production details mark it as rather whimsically entertaining on the
level of Zelig (1983). I also didn’t
have a lot of time to view it, but it didn’t grab me well enough to view it,
say, three times, which is a minimum for a good film review of mine.
A film with a strong narrative
line and thematic significance will strongly invite several close viewings;
this film comes off as rather shallowly entertaining, and as such, in my current
circumstances, it is almost off-putting. You marvel at how well the sets,
costume, music—overall period detail—are done so conscientiously (or at least
evocatively). But the anecdotes that fill out this film are, largely, baubles,
and what overarching plot thread exists (maybe most notably with Mia Farrow’s Sally White) is amusing at best.
Ostensibly it’s
autobiographical, but Woody Allen makes clear in Eric Lax’s interview compendium
that it is only partly so. That is, several anecdotes start with real-life
facts, but are adapted to a fictional standard for the film (End note 2). For instance, there is a
situation where the boy Joe, who is a correlate for Allen (played by Seth Green, here a little squirt compared to the more adult-like Scottie he played
in the 1997-2002 Austin Powers films),
encounters (to his surprise) his father driving a taxi, but this is only partly
based on Allen’s life. Allen says it was generally a mystery to him as a boy
what his father did. Whenever he asked, he always “would get a different answer
because he [his father] often switched jobs.” But as far as I can tell, Allen
as a boy never encountered his father driving a taxi, as little Joe does in the
film (Lax, p. 37).
Details showing pluses and almost-minuses
The photography is good; it is
by Carlo Di Palma, who had first worked for Allen on Hannah and Her Sisters (see my review here), giving a sort of
comfortably domestic/urban patina to that film, and he would be the
cinematographer who shot more Allen films than any other (only Gordon Willis comes close). Here, Di Palma’s photography, combined with the elaborate
set designs by Allen’s longtime production designer Santo Loquasto, makes
perhaps the best and most consistently delivering aspect of the film.
The main characters are vivid in
the way of cartoon figures, as Allen’s general description of this film
implies. Julie Kavner cuts a sharp profile as the mother. Dianne Wiest is the wistfully hopeful Aunt Bea, who is always looking for a suitable
husband (I think her voice is a little thin here, at least at times, while
Kavner’s consistently comes right through).
Michael Tucker plays the
father of Joe; Tucker did TV work in those days, I think (and he certainly did later). Josh Mostel is
a newcomer to Allen’s fold as Uncle Abe. Abe is a rotund, jovial-looking
character who is always bringing fish into the household that he’s gotten from shore
fishermen, and once—during the Jewish High Holidays—he gets converted to
communism by communist neighbors who are playing music during the Joe/Abe
family’s abstaining religious observances. We’ve seen stories in this general
realm before, but this one is played for pretty broad comedy.
Seth Green is interesting to
watch in his scenes: unobtrusively but well enough if you watch him, he puts
his heart into his acting, maybe a little more than Allen would ordinarily have
directed a child to. In some scenes he’s on the receiving end of walloping
corporal punishment (in an almost Three Stooges way), and he puts up with it
patiently. In a New Year’s scene, he comes into view and gives his infant
sister a kiss—this detail almost can be missed, with all that’s going on amid
the extended family in the shot. Green’s take on a “Woody as a boy” character
seems more well-rounded in this film than “Woody as a boy” (or, “the main
character as a boy”) in the likes of Love
and Death (1975), Annie Hall
(1977), and Stardust Memories (1980).
Also, in a way, this film is a
“homecoming” piece, in terms of actors, for Allen as was Hannah: Tony Roberts is here as a radio-show MC; Wallace Shawn, who put in a vivid appearance in Manhattan
Farrow’s character is the focus of most of the Allen-esque “romance comedy”
here
Among the few instances
evidencing Allen’s capacity for sly, sharp, sexually (or couples-) related
humor are those connected to the character Sally White, played by Farrow. White
starts out as a cigarette girl in a swank nightclub. Here, a couple that
performs as an upscale pair issuing golden words on radio has marital trouble:
the male, seeming to me a bit like David Niven (though the couple seems to be
Hispanic), has been having an affair with Sally. Herewith, a common Allen trope
pops up: Sally says if he really loved her, he would leave his wife; but the
man offers the excuse that his and his wife’s radio-show ratings are too high
to do that.
A good deal later, on her own,
Sally tries to get roles on radio, and has trouble because of her ditsy voice (which
seems to go along with her frizzy-curls hair, which looks as substantial as
soap suds). She undergoes voice lessons, and finally is on radio as some
high-class, elegant-toned doyenne. She then appears to everyone, in real
life, as if “to the doyenne manner born.”
It is in a late scene, at a New
Year’s party (where Diane Keaton makes her brief cameo in this film as a
singer), Sally is on a date with the man who, with Wallace Shawn’s bald head,
voices the Masked Avenger. Having had a few too many drinks, Sally slips abruptly
back and forth between her original ditsy, almost-screechy voice, and her more
affected, poised doyenne’s voice, all of it inspiring in Shawn’s character a
deeply puzzling look. Sally then takes her date up to the building’s roof,
where she had had a tryst with the upscale man we saw her with early in the
film. Thus rounds out a plot before-and-after situation, not as bawdy as you
might think.
These details suggest this film
is a rather wan, derivative effort of Allen’s. It is entertaining if you don’t
want a lot of mental stimulation; but it is hard to work up enough enthusiasm
for it to study it several times for a long “paper.”
Radio Days suitable as part
of an “omnibus” approach to Allen scholarship
I’ve thought it’s useful for
students or appreciative critics of Allen to consider his films in a sort of
“omnibus” fashion, rather than (1) to look for a very select few “great
artistic masterworks” or (2) to merely comb through his films for a big clutch
of good one-liners or good story-bit encapsulations, as if no one film stands
as a masterwork. So, to look at him from (for one omnibus combination) a
nostalgia or creative-history perspective, you can combine Radio Days with the more “high-concept” Zelig (1983) and maybe with Bullets
Over Broadway (1994).
Other omnibus pairings could be:
for New York/romance stories: Annie
Hall (1977) with Manhattan
for “perils of an artist” stories: Stardust
Memories (1980) with Deconstructing
Harry (1997);
for meditations on issues of deep moral choice: Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) with Match Point (2005);
and, for playful anachronism (or “time slip” or fantasy/realism intermixture)
stories: The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)
with Midnight in Paris (2011).
Other pairings could be
suggested as I review more films.
##
End note 1.
In DVD packaging: quote from
Stig Bjorkman, Woody Allen on Woody Allen
(1993): “I think of Radio Days
basically as a cartoon.”
End note 2.
Eric Lax, Conversations with Woody Allen (New York
“I’m relying on information in
my life, but that’s why I say it’s not autobiographical. It’s much more
exaggerated to make the story better.”
