Woody Allen Grows Up
GARDNER, JAMES
On Screen WOODYALLEN GROWS UP BY JAMES GARDNER If Radio Days is not Woody Allen's best film, it is surely a good one, and in the context of his career as a director it represents another step...
...With the exception of the unnecessary Chekhov pastiche, Radio Days represents a further elaboration upon the terms ?? Broadway Danny Rose, and it is better than such other predecessors as Zelig, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and Hannah and Her Sisters...
...At the beginning of Radio Days the narrator (Allen) reminisces about the time his neighbors went out for the evening, only to have their house broken into...
...or the wispy young man who breaks down in tears at the end of their date when he hears a song over the radio that puts him in mind of an old love—named Leonard...
...or the confirmed married man who takes her and the 10-year-old narrator to a raHio quiz show where she wins 50 silver dollars for guessing the names of fish...
...If you keep someone like Sherwood Anderson in mind, as opposed to Kafka or Bergman, you will get some sense of the dimensions of Allen's achievement, as well as of the soft and slightly eccentric moodiness that informs it...
...That is no doubt why there are three sisters in Interiors and Hannah and Her Sisters, four in his Radio Days, and no brothers...
...Born in 1935, Allen entered the entertainment field at age 22 as a writer for The Sid Caesar Show...
...It was this assurance that inspired Stardust Memories (19S0) which was a little better than its predecessor by virtue of slightly more interesting cinematography and wider diversity...
...Yet, as I watched Stardust, I could not help thinking there was one rather obvious charge he seemed to be skirting with the most balletic agility: Not that he was anti-intellectual—as he allowed one straw-man character to suggest— but that he was pseudo-intellectual...
...It was the sort of thing an undergraduate film student might have done if you gave him $4 million and a few well-known actors...
...Here Allen revealed what he was really like as a filmmaker, rather than as a comedian or an intellectual manqué: A smaller talent, perhaps, than his cult followers would wish us to believe, but an enduring and valuable one nonetheless...
...But like Interiors, it hated everything, itself included...
...Although Radio Days lacks cohesion, it nevertheless carries itself with poise and charm, generating a convincing sense of daily existence in a Jewish neighborhood during the War...
...This film was such a catastrophic failure that one actually felt a keen embarrassment watching Allen make his single serious stab at Great Art...
...Uniformly excellent from the point of view of script, direction and cinematography, this film had an unassuming texture and a sense of humor untainted by artsiness...
...Still, whatever their weaknesses and pretensions, these movies leave a lingering pleasant aftertaste, inducing me to believe Allen must be doing something right after all...
...Anyone left skeptical by Radio Days ought to reconsider the matter in the light of Broadway Danny Rose (1984), Allen's most successful synthesis to date of his comedic and artistic instincts...
...So intense was his eagerness to be taken seriously as an Artist, and so deep was his admiration for the East Coast intellectual community, that he did not realize the lofty ideas he flattered himself to toy with in his films constituted their single most annoying blemish...
...There is thus reason to hope he is finally outgrowing this sort ofthing...
...Allen probably intended his title to evoke overtones of "daze," for there is indeed something vertiginous in the rapid succession of the two dozen or more cross-referenced anecdotes that constitute the loosely connected fabric of the film...
...One of the burglars (we are asked to believe) picks up the telephone when it rings, is mistaken for the owner of the house, and finds himself on Name that Tune...
...Around 1975, however, he seemed to have grown dissatisfied with fashioning relentlessly lighthearted films, and started showing a yen to be taken more seriously...
...He readily guesses the three tunes that are played, thereby winning more for his victims than he has just robbed from them...
...It saddens us to see her fall for one loser after another—like the rowdy he-man who goes out with her on the night of the famous War of the Worlds broadcast and deserts her in a panic when he thinks the Martians are coming after him...
...A soft, drowsy douceur de vivre redolent of The Winter's Tale or The Tempest insinuates itself among the harsh circumstances of Rockaway, gently confirming that "our little life is rounded with a sleep...
...Moreover, their bittersweet mood strikes me as being far closer to his true spirit than the acidulous angst of Interiors...
...After a few years as a stand-up comic, he continued in the purely comédie vein through the '60s and early' 70s with such films asBananas, Take the Money and Run, and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask...
...In addition, it occupies an interesting place in Allen's career as a filmmaker...
...The post-Stardust films are not as funny as his early romps, and are less enjoyable, their expensive "look" and "carefully crafted" cinematography notwithstanding...
...Bytheend of the movie, the narrator has familiarized us with his parents, his mother's three sisters, his grandparents, and half a dozen neighbors, not to mention the majority of their favorite radio personalities...
...It bodes well for the future and confirms us in saying what could not be said three years ago: Woody Allen has realized his first and most fervid ambition—he has become an artist...
...The man who had the vanity to believe he could be Ingmar Bergman had the vanity to imagine he had been misunderstood, as great artists so often are, by a bevy of philistine critics and a vulgar populace needful of mind-numbing anodynes...
...Next we are introduced to the narrator's aunt (Dianne Wiest), whose life is an endless series of dance lessons and exercise classes designed to bring her into contact with the perfect male...
...Allen's de-emphasis of the comic element found its reduction to absurdity in the straight drama Interiors (1978), an arid and unappetizing dish of intellectual posturings and ulcerous "insights...
...The change was signaled by Annie Hall (1976), the earliest—and some would say the best—of the sort of movies he would eventually devote himself to: urbane pieces that succeed in being funny despite a certain artsy pretentiousness...
...In Stardust Memories Allen tried, with the most exhaustive thoroughness, to refute every criticism ever leveled against him...
...The pleasant melancholiness of Allen's recent work may well be "Chekhovian...
...We also learn the story of a cigarette girl with a Bronx accent (played moderately well by Mia Farrow) who, after taking diction courses, finds success and happiness as a society reporter...
...The director greatly admires the Russian dramatist and finds in him a temperament similar to his own...
...In the process, he shows us how the lives of all its members as well as their friends are centered around the radio...
...What was chagrining about all this was that Allen, a talented man by any computation, appeared desperate for the approval of the very sectors he was forever ridiculing—and forever returning to with the force of a fixation...
...In Allen's hands it is too saccharine for comfort, yet significantly it is the sole vestige of a preoccupation that has tinged his films since Annie Hall...
...Like so much of his recent work, this new movie is suffused with nostalgia.· Against a background of popular songs from the '40s, Allen portrays a Jewish family in a poor section of Rockaway, Queens, during World War II...
...Toward the end of Radio Days the connection is made almost painfully explicit by a scene atop the roof of a swanky nightclub on New Year's Eve: A few of the semi-legends of radioland wonder whether future ages will be happier than their own, and whether posterity will retain any memory of them...
...Because his films had tended to receive an approbation that was, if anything, in excess of their deserts, you might think he had nothing to complain about...
...There is a determined dreaminess in the way Allen has chosen to depict these alternate worlds, a dreaminess that has characterized several of his latest films...
...Since it does not follow any closely coordinated plot, Radio Days may be described as a slice of life broken up into many interrelated parts and reassembled with no great concern for smooth sequence...
...He clearly thought that he had more on his mind than turned out to be the case, and the hackneyed script and bare, drafty sets showed an adulation of Bergman unrelieved by the slightest understanding of that director's true talents...
...The spirit of the great Ingmar Bergman presided, but a master satirist endeavoring to parody the most easily identifiable trademarks of the Swede could scarcely have yielded a more virulent mockery than Allen inadvertently pulled off...
...And we meet Captain Midnight (Wallace Shawn), plus many other legends from theannalsof Radio Heaven...
...The critical backlash Interiors occasioned did not have a salutary effect on Allen...
...Once he quelled the apologetical itch, Allen abandoned the highest aspirations of Art and returned to making comedies roughly akin to Annie Hall...
...These demonstrated a prodigious talent for a kind of zany humor that was slightly more cerebral than the basic Hollywood comedy, spiked as it was with references to Sartre, Kafka, Tolstoy and company...
...The film turns on the contrast between the straitened yet boisterous, exuberant neighborhood in which the narrator grew up, and the super-refined fairyland of the radio stars, who hobnob with royalty in the best restaurants and nightclubs, chitchatting in expensive lockjaw...
...On Screen WOODYALLEN GROWS UP BY JAMES GARDNER If Radio Days is not Woody Allen's best film, it is surely a good one, and in the context of his career as a director it represents another step toward maturity...
...This is taken almost bodily out of Three Sisters...
Vol. 70 • February 1987 • No. 2
