Woody Allen (1987)

Alongside their two-month Mike Leigh retrospective, BFI are screening a smaller group of films, selected by Leigh, that have ‘inspired’ him.  It’s an eclectic choice for which this viewer’s grateful – an opportunity not just to revisit Jules and Jim and Tokyo Story but also to catch up with work as differently glorious as Ermanno Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs and Woody Allen’s Radio Days.

After breaking into a New York home, two burglars (Paul Herman and Mike Starr) are interrupted by a ringing telephone.  One tells the other to answer it, and he does.  The caller is the host of a radio name-that-tune show, which is being broadcast to a live studio audience.  Three tunes later (‘Dancing in the Dark’, ‘Chinatown, My Chinatown’ and ‘The Sailor’s Hornpipe’) that audience is applauding loudly:  the burglars have won the show’s jackpot, even though it’s the couple whose house they’re robbing that, next day, take delivery of the winnings.  That’s the start of Radio Days and a taste of things to come.  Except for being radio-themed, it doesn’t relate to anything that follows but Allen rightly takes the view that it’s far too good to omit.  The film is a series of sketches – some, of course, stronger than others but nearly all pretty good – strung together by the depiction of a Jewish household in Rockaway (part of the New York borough of Queens) in the late 1930s and early 1940s, popular songs of the day, and humorously nostalgic recollection of golden-age-of-radio shows and their personnel.  The songs are actual standards of the time.  The shows are mostly invented but based on real ones.  The golden age coincides with the early years of Joe (Seth Green), the film’s protagonist and Woody Allen’s alter ego.

The burglary episode, like everything else in Radio Days, is narrated in voiceover by Allen as the middle-aged Joe.  Next, he presents his family and their immediate neighbours.  The close-knit, exuberantly bickering household has you smiling from the word go.   Joe introduces his parents (Julie Kavner and Michael Tucker) as ‘two people who could find an argument in any subject’.  (Their opening lines have them disputing whether the Atlantic is better than the Pacific or vice versa.)  They share the Rockaway house with Joe’s grandparents (Leah Carrey and William Magerman), as well as his mother’s two sisters, the sensitive spinster Bea (Dianne Wiest) and the more combatively dissatisfied Ceil (Renée Lippin).  Ceil is married to Abe (Josh Mostel), who regularly returns home with a load of fish acquired from friends who work in Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay.  Ceil and Abe’s daughter Ruthie (Joy Newman) isn’t a radio lover quite like the others.  There’s a Carmen Miranda song she enjoys singing along with (Joe’s father and Abe provide the backing); on the whole, though, Ruthie’s entertainment comes from ‘listening to the next door neighbors on the party line’.  All the actors named above are splendid – as are plenty of others too numerous to mention.  It’s satisfying to have Woody Allen present in the film as a continuous voice but represented on the screen by a kid as comically deft and naturally eccentric as Seth Green.

Other than Joe’s family, the main continuing character is Sally White (Mia Farrow):  the narrative follows her bizarre progress from cigar salesgirl in a club patronised by radio stars to joining their number – as a celebrity gossip commentator of the airwaves.  The Sally subplot is pleasant enough though you know it’s there not because the film needs it but in order to give Mia Farrow – who appeared in every Allen feature from A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982) to Husbands and Wives (1992) inclusive – a sizeable role.  Farrow is charming and amusing but limited.  Allen’s previous and more gifted partner, Diane Keaton, in a brief appearance as a chanteuse at a New Year ball, does a lovely job of singing ‘You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To’.  There are pleasingly obvious auditory jokes.  Joe’s favourite radio series is ‘The Masked Avenger’, who ‘I fantasized was a cross between Superman and Cary Grant’:  as a studio recording shot reveals, he’s actually Wallace Shawn.  There’s keen competition for what most annoys Ceil and Abe about each other but her incontinent enthusiasm for a radio ventriloquist (‘How do you know he’s not moving his lips?’) comes high on the list.

The confidence – which soon comes – that the film is going to carry on making you laugh makes it very reassuring to watch.  Yet Radio Days is sad as well as funny, the two things beautifully fused in Dianne Wiest’s portrait of perennially unlucky-in-love Aunt Bea.  Allen doesn’t take the obvious route of darkening the mood once World War II is underway, even though radio news bulletins cast a shadow.  Instead, he fictionalises a post-war tragedy involving a little girl, which, says Wikipedia, was ‘a landmark event in American television history [my emphasis]’[1], as a means of illustrating how radio brought different audiences together to partake of calamity as well as entertainment.  There is, besides, a gradually increasing sense of regret in this remembrance of things past.  The older Joe signs off with a melancholy recognition that they are past, an admission that the voices he heard on the radio and has never forgotten ‘seem to grow dimmer and dimmer’ with every year that goes by.

Woody Allen’s view of the period is almost purely nostalgic yet you believe in the world that Radio Days recreates more fully than in those latter-day New York stories of his that use vintage popular songs to try and express Allen’s inveterate love of the place.  Early on, Joe/Woody’s voiceover apologises for romanticising Rockaway.  Radio Days is essentially self-indulgent but when a film’s words, music and performers give as much pleasure as this one does, who cares?  You feel less inclined to accept an apology than to give thanks.

16 November 2021

[1] ‘Kathryn Anne Fiscus (August 21, 1945 – April 8, 1949) was a three-year-old girl who died after falling into a well in San Marino, California. The attempted rescue, broadcast live on KTLA, was a landmark event in American television history’.