Radio Days

I was born just after this era diminished. There were still radio shows that I would occasionally listen to, but when my dad brought home the Admiral (television, that is), we became a TV family. This film is one of those that allows the listener to enter a soft world that we wish really existed. During the radio experience, we had two world wars and a depression. So Americans had to live in their heads, their imaginations. The characters who spoke from that little box (seldom resembling the people they played) used their voices to pull us out of the mundane and the dangerous, and let us encounter every manner of experience. For all of his foibles, Woody Allen is the master of nostalgia. Here her presents some vignettes that have a core in our feelings and our loves. If asked to describe a radio hero, each would have described their own, like leaves and snowflakes, all different.

Woody Allen fondly recalls that age before TV when radio was the nucleus around which family life revolved (and evolved). It's an affectionate (and, for Allen, atypically nostalgic) period piece, sketching with disarming humor the memories, anecdotes, and fantasies of an East Coast childhood in the 1930s and 1940s, narrated by the director himself and set against a collection of once-popular radio songs and programs. Television could never trigger such glowing memories, because TV numbs the imagination while the invisibility of the radio voice tends to enhance it. Allen includes plenty of jokes to that effect: the heroic Masked Avenger turns out, off microphone, to be the portly Wallace Shawn; the nonsense song Mairsie Doates recalls a neighbor brandishing a meat cleaver on a downtown rampage. The comedy is never more than feather-light, demanding nothing from its audience except uncomplicated laughter, but this is one filmmaker who has always been more effective on a smaller scale.

This movie shouts one word: WARMTH. The colors, the plot, the characters, they are all wonderfully warm. I've watched this movie with senior citizens who were around in the forties. I once watched it with a Jewish guy who grew up on Long Island (albeit in the early 30's, not the 40's). All comments were the same: THIS was life in New York during wartime. Vietnam was my war, so this era was a mystery to me. However, any time a genius like Woody Allen can create a film that not only makes me and my rowdy friends laugh, but gets guffaws from my dear old Mom as well, it deserves a little fanfare. I didn't even mention the solid gold music. See this film at once!