The Talkies/Sentimental Journeys

...his working mate of five years is the village idiot—a winsome young beanpole named Otik Rekosnik (Janos Ban...

...In one sequence, for instance, Joe—whose idol is a radio-serial hero called the Masked Avenger—purchases a Masked Avenger ring with the money he has helped collect for the establishment of a state in Palestine...

...The other half of Radio Days consists of briefly glimpsed episodes in the lives of radio personalities whom one member or another of Joe's family particularly admires...

...When it turns out that Otik is being called to Prague because the director of Metalwood wants his house for a weekend place, an itinerant artist who has become Otik's roommate derides the director's city-slicker taste for Western accoutrements—for "imported plastic thatching from West Germany" and "an English lawn...

...They've given it up in the West...

...That the doctor—whose wry, humane point of view is essentially equivalent to that of the filmmakers—keeps having car trouble is not just a running gag but a symbol: to a man of his solid, old-fashioned virtues, automobiles will always be alien and uncooperative...

...Plainly someone of importance—or with connections—wants Otik out of Koutna...

...she prefers "ma'am...

...When the itinerant artist, just arrived in the village, addresses an old woman as "aunty," she tells him not to call her by that old-fashioned honorific, or to call her "comrade" either...

...But even Roger and Irene are human...

...supremely embarrassed, he insists that after the harvest Otik be teamed with someone else—even though that someone will probably be the cruel lbrek, who would make Otik's life hell...

...To an extent, the film associates modern decadence not only with the city but with the West...

...Take Joe's first visit to Radio City Music Hall...

...the moment in Stardust Memories when Allen's character (in a point-of-view shot) looks up on a Sunday morning in his apartment to see Charlotte Rampling smiling up at him from her newspaper...

...but by the final scene we don't find him ridiculous at all...

...Rumlena, the village's affluent "Prague weekender...

...Together they're a regular Iron-Curtain Laurel and Hardy, with Otik's dimwitted maneuvers constantly landing the exasperated Pavek in hot water or exposing him to his comrades' ridicule...

...BBut it must be added that My Sweet Little Village also pokes fun at its own viewpoint—at the doctor's paeans to the countryside, for example, and at the corny homespun music programs on Czech TV...

...Allen, of course, goes in for hommages in a big way: Stardust Memories was an hommage to Fellini, Interiors to Bergman, Love and Death to the Russian novel, Broadway Danny Rose to the New York show-biz world, Annie Hall to Diane Keaton, Manhattan to Manhattan, The Purple Rose of Cairo to the movies...

...The film's cozy, friendly feel is enhanced by the presence in the cast of several familiar faces from the Allen repertory company—some of them, to be sure, seen very fleetingly...

...It also criticizes the use of the word comrade...

...In a derivative, most un-Allen-like sequence, the film cuts from Joe's family huddled around the radio, to other families, bar patrons, and soda shoppe customers who are huddled around other radios and listening to the same reports...

...The sequence has nothing to do with radio, but it captures the child's sense of wonder very touchingly, and one does not doubt for a moment that it is based upon a real childhood memory of Allen's...

...The sequence brings to mind other romantic epiphanies in Allen movies: the Central Park carriage ride with Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan...

...But the film is redeemed by its affectionate and funny depiction of village life, and by the very fine performances of several of the actors, particularly Hrusinsky, who is strikingly reminiscent of Denholm Elliott...

...For the most part, they do so with considerable charm and wit...

...To Allen, life is mostly meaningless and miserable, but it is redeemed, at least to some extent, by occasional blissful moments of this sort, most of them made possible either by romantic relationships or by some form of art or entertainment...

...while Frank Sinatra sings "If You Are But a Dream," the camera—equipped with a wide-angle lens and shooting up at everything from a small boy's height—moves slowly through the majestic lobby, up the grand staircase, and into the dark auditorium, where, on the huge screen, James Stewart is kissing Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story...

...T ike My Sweet Little Village, 1.../ Woody Allen's Radio Days is small, sweet, and sentimental—a relatively minor film by a major director, set,(in large part) in the lowly precincts of his youth...

...And then there is the fact by Bruce Bawer that Pavek's family lives next door to a graveyard—which is not only a memento mori, but a suggestion, I think, that villagers are more conscious of, and more comfortable with, their mortality than city dwellers, and consequently less likely to succumb to a distorted set of values, less likely to forget that people are more important than possessions...

...The city, we are meant to understand, is decadent, indifferent, and amoral, whereas the village is a place where people care about each other...

...By contrast, positive human values are associated not only with the village but with the cooperative farm—and indeed the film closes on a shot of the farm's main gate, with a large red star looming over it...

...Critics have carped that the two halves of Radio Days don't fit together...

...There are also Roger and Irene, a pair of high-toned first-nighters who chat wittily about their glamorous life every morning on "Breakfast with Roger and Irene...

...Aside from Farrow, Shawn, Wiest, and Aiello, there are Jeff Daniels (reprising his Biff Baxter role from Purple Rose), Diane Keaton (who, in the role of a radio chanteuse, serves up "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To"), and Tony Roberts (as a radio quiz-show host...

...Lazarus figures abound: the doctor feels miraculously better soon after his car rolls over him...

...But soon it looks as if the problem has been taken out of local hands: a higher-up in Prague requests Otik's transfer to Metalwood, a factory in the capital...

...In Radio Days there is some fighting and screaming, but the picture of childhood is mostly rosy...

...survive there...

...But then, to Allen, radio itself is nice—a force for niceness...

...Pavek's son Jarda, for instance —whose adolescent crush on his sister's teacher forms one of the movie's slighter subplots—wears a University of Utah sweatshirt in one scene...

...He expects us to think of the eleven-year-old redheaded Jewish kid Joe (Seth Green) as young Allen Stewart Konigsberg, to regard the kid's Rockaway Beach family as his own (though he grew up, as the whole world knows, in Brooklyn), and to believe that at least some of the things that happen to them—the less outrageous, more sentimentally depicted things—really happened...

...In other sequences, Orson Welles's War of the Worlds broadcast scares the hell out of a boyfriend of Joe's aunt (Dianne Wiest), and a love song played over the radio causes another boyfriend of hers (Robert Joy) to break down in tears and confess that his previous beloved was a man...

...a truck driver unwittingly dumps a load of earth onto a sleeping Otik, but Otik emerges unscathed...

...in Stardust Memories his protagonist's sister remembers their parents as "always fighting, always screaming at each other...

...Curiously, the same shirt appears on another village kid later in the film, causing one to wonder: do the locals pass this prized shirt around, or did the cooperative farm receive an entire shipment of them as a reward for fulfilling production quotas...

...But who...

...For Radio Days is not a story but a rambling personal essay...

...The film is full of small, interesting touches...

...Likewise, after Otik reports to Metalwood and shakes the director's hand vigorously, the director tells his secretary, "Bad habit, handshaking...

...Significantly, the last line of Radio Days is "Beware evildoers, wherever you are," spoken by the Masked Avenger (Wallace Shawn) just before he descends from the roof over the ballroom where he and several other radio personalities are celebrating New Year's Day, 1944...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1987 37...

...The most prominent of these in the film is Sally White (Mia Farrow), a dumb Brooklyn blonde with a squeaky voice who—thanks to the help of a mobster (Danny Aiello) who at first intends to rub her out—becomes a celebrated gossip reporter...

...His review of David Herbert Donald's Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe also appears in this issue...

...Radio not only entertains Joe's family, but also—when it brings them war news, for example, or up-to-the-minute reports on the fate of a little Pennsylvania girl who fell into a well—binds them together with the rest of the country...

...While it's true that there is no dramatic connection between them—and, for that matter, precious little dramatic connection within them—this isn't as significant a weakness as one might expect...

...indeed, the surprise about Radio Days is how nice almost everybody is—even that mobster, even the crooks who break into a Rockaway Beach house (and win its owners hundreds of dollars' worth of appliances when a radio quizmaster telephones during their burglary...

...His preAnnie Hall movies were designed to provide such moments of joy...

...the hour of happiness at a Marx Brothers movie in Hannah and Her Sisters...

...And Menzel mercilessly parodies American movies (one of which Pavek's family eagerly gathers around the TV set to watch), depicting themas absurdly violent and depraved, crammed with murders and explosions, populated by characters whose only thoughts are of money and sex and drugs...

...It's a shamelessly romantic sequence...

...0 e••^• ..6809 SENTIMENTAL JOURNEYS My Sweet Little Village is a sweet little movie, a Capra-esque tribute to village life and virtues courtesy of the Czechoslovakian director Jiri Menzel (Closely Watched Trains) and screenwriter Zdenek Sverak...

...Earlier in the film, when we get our first glimpse of the Masked Avenger—short and bald and nerdy, not at all the super-hero type that his young fans imagine himto be—we laugh...

...To be sure, My Sweet Little Village is rather slight, its denouement is extremely predictable, and its plot is based on a dubious premise (would a director of a major Prague business concern really have to go to such lengths to secure a country house...

...The hero of the film—which is said to be based partly on life in the village where Menzel himself grew up—is the corpulent, middle-aged Pavek (Marian Labuda), who drives a truck for the Mir (Peace) Cooperative Farm in the village of Koutna...

...He has come to symbolize radio itself, which (regarded in retrospect from the Age of Television) seems small and harmless, and which is truly a "masked avenger" because its faceless entertainers and announcers wreak vengeance upon the evils of everyday life—its banality, its disappointments, its alienation (just as the movies did for Mia Farrow in The Purple Rose of Cairo...

...Whatever the case may be, the villagers are worried about Otik's moving to Prague, because they know that he could not Bruce Bawer, TAS's movie reviewer, spent March in residence at the Djerassi Foundation in Woodside, California...

...In Annie Hall Allen portrayed his hero's folks as uncouth, ignorant, and argumentative...

...Just as these villagers survive their encounters with cars and trucks—those dreaded modern phenomena—so the village of Koutna and its values ultimately triumph over the big city...

...Remember his eccentric list of things, near the end of Manhattan, that make life worthwhile: Louis Armstrong's recording of "Potato Head Blues," Flaubert's A Sentimental Education, the Marx Brothers, "Tracy's smile...

...Though it is more plotless by far, Radio Days resembles Annie Hall insofar as it is an anthology of episodes, loosely tied to a theme, which Allen (who serves here as narrator, but never appears on camera) encourages us to view as autobiographical...

...Or perhaps Otik's friend Vaclav—an engineer, transplanted urbanite, and boyfriend of Turek's lovely young wife—who has been using Otik's house for romantic assignations and may be attempting to gain title to it...

...The film ridicules a strident song, "Prague's Calling You," which boasts inanely of the capital's noise and bustle, and contrasts it with the lyrical poems in praise of the countryside that the village doctor (Rudolf Hrusinsky) recites while driving alone in his car...

...Woody Allen...

...Turek backs over a fellow worker with his truck, but the man hardly has a scratch on him...

...when the rabbi angrily upbraids him for this, the radio-obsessed boy replies, "You speak the truth, my faithful Indian companion...

...The last straw comes when Pavek—following Otik's directions—backs their truck into a post outside the fancy home of Mr...

...A bout half of Radio Days consists of unconnected episodes—mostly radio-related—in the life of Joe's Rockaway Beach family...

...Pavek...

...Was it then that Allen first decided he wanted to be rich and date shiksas...

...For the movie is sentimental, and unabashedly so...

...Annie Hall and its successors, on the contrary, have been intended largely as meditations upon the evanescence and transcendence of these moments...

...the anecdotes of which it consists are designed not to advance a plot but to communicate what the word radio means to...

...It is also an hommage...

...So it should come as no surprise that Allen, who grew up in the 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1987 radio era, should make a nostalgic film called Radio Days set in New York in the early 1940s...

...though they give an impression of marital bliss, they are both manically unfaithful to each other (forming a nice contrast, by the way, with the surface discontent and deep affection and loyalty of Joe's parents...

...For days Pavek is the butt of local jokes...