The movie is a roll call of casts from earlier films, from Mia Farrow and Diane Keaton to Tony Roberts, Danny Aiello, Dianne Wiest, Jeff Daniels and Wallace Shawn.
There is something about it being past and gone and irretrievable that makes it more precious than it ever was at the time.Īs part of this nostalgic feeling, Allen seems to have made a deliberate attempt to use as many of his former actors as possible.
What they evoke isn't the long-ago time itself, but the memory of it. In a way, both films have nostalgia itself as one of their subjects. In form and even in mood, it is closest to Federico Fellini's " Amarcord," which also was a memory of growing up - of family, religion, sex, local folk legends, scandalous developments and intense romantic yearnings, underlined with wall-to-wall band music. There are so many characters in "Radio Days" and they are in so many separate vignettes, that it's hard to give a coherent description of the plot - or plots. He has always used popular music in his movies, but never more than this time, where the muscular, romantic confidence of the big-band sound reinforces every memory with the romance of the era. There are autobiographical memories of relatives and school, neighbors and friends, and then there are the glittering radio legends that seeped into these ordinary lives.Īllen is not concerned with creating a story with a beginning and an end, and his movie is more like a revue in which drama is followed by comedy and everything is tied together by music, by dozens of lush arrangements of the hit songs of the 1940s. And, like radio, it jumps easily from one level of reality to another. (The one legend Allen leaves out is the scandal of the kiddie-show host who growled "That oughta hold the little bastards" into an open mike.) "Radio Days" cuts back and forth between the adolescent hero's working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn and the glamorous radio world of Manhattan. Or the way the macho heroes of radio adventure serials turned out, in real life, to be short little bald guys.
Or the embarrassing plight of the suave radio host who liked to play around and got locked on the roof of a nightclub with the cigarette girl. It is also the story of 1940s radio itself, and it re-creates many of the legends that the kid hears.įor example, the story of the burglars who answered the phone in a house they were burgling and won the jackpot on "Name That Tune," and the prizes were delivered the next day to their bewildered victims. The hero of "Radio Days" is an ordinary person like that: an adolescent Jewish kid who grows up in Brooklyn in a house full of relatives and listens passionately to the radio.
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