Radio Days

I mentioned a few weeks back that Woody Allen's Radio Days was coming up on the TCM schedule, and that I was looking forward to watching it and doing a review on it here. Since then, I did watch it, so now you get the obligatory review.

Radio Days is the sort of movie that won't really get the more normal sort of synopsis I give here, one that give away a fair amount of the plot up until the climax. That's because Radio Days is a movie that doesn't really have that sort of straightforward plot, instead being a movie that's more a series of vignettes. Woody Allen narrates as adult Joe, who grew up in the late 1930s and 1940s (the adolescent Joe being played by Seth Green). Joe is looking back on his adolescence, and how the radio programs of the day shaped it, these being the days before TV became a thing.

Joe lives in Rockaway Beach, Queens, in a middle-class disproportionately Jewish neighborhood, or at least what passed for middle class in the late 1930s when the middle-class wasn't as well to do as it would become. Indeed, Joe lives with his extended family. In addition to his parents (Julie Kavner and Michael Tucker), there are his grandparents, a married aunt and uncle where the uncle keeps bringing home fish, and maiden aunt Bea (Dianne Wiest), who keeps dreaming of finding a suitable man.

Everybody has their favorite programs on the radio, although the most prominent two are young Joe's love of the superhero The Masked Avenger, and his mother's listening to morning show of husband-and-wife team Roger and Irene, a show that's roughly like a radio version of the old Regis and Kathie Lee on those episodes when Regis Philbin's real-life wife was sitting in for an absent Kathie Lee. Of course, one of the movie's subplots is that Roger and Irene's marriage isn't quite the idyllic life that it's portrayed as being on the radio show, as Roger is seeing a young cigarette girl Sally (Mia Farrow) who would like to break in to the radio businesses. (Irene has a lover too.)

Along the way, World War II intervenes, but not too severely as this is America and the east coast was never seriously going to be invaded despite people thinking they say U-boats on various occasions. A fair portion of the movie is a coming-of-age story for young Joe, but there are subplots involving the various men Aunt Bea is trying to meet; the lives of some of the radio stars; and the mystery of what Joe's father really does for a living as he always seems to have one get-rich-quick scheme after another.

As I said, there's not much of a plot here, as it's more about vignettes. But the vignettes almost all work, even if now and then they seem a bit too neat and tidy. Then again, life memories edited to fit into the running time of a Hollywood movie have a way of doing that. The vignettes also technically cover too much time, going from at least the "War of the Worlds" broadcast in October 1938 to New Year's Eve 1943; this again is something you don't really notice as you're watching the movie, however.

Overall, this Radio Days is more of a love story to Woody Allen's childhood, or perhaps the childhood of someone who would the age of an older brother, but the rosy memories are still entertaining even for someone like me who was born decades after Allen. I really enjoyed Radio Days, and think you will, too.