The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (13 page)

Much more typical of Allen, however, is to contest the assertion that his films are autobiographical, the filmmaker often patiently outlining differences between himself and his protagonists to substantiate the distinction. “I was not born under a roller coaster on Coney Island,” he told the
Daily News
in response to a reporter’s insistence that Alvy Singer
is
Woody Allen, “nor was my first wife politically active, nor was my second wife a member of the literary set, nor did Diane leave me for a rock star, or to live in California.”
¹²
Similarly, Allen has argued,
Stardust Memories
was not about him but about “a filmmaker on the verge of a nervous breakdown who saw the world in a dis-torted way,”
¹³
the film visualizing Sandy Bates’s distorted perspective rather than Allen’s own.

Beyond the obvious fact that human beings and film characters aren’t identical, there are other clear and significant differences between Allen and his aggregate screen persona. Few of his protagonists betray the shyness, reclusiveness, and preference for solitude which his biographers—and Allen himself—generally agree upon as his central personal traits. More importantly, none of them displays Allen’s capacity to immerse himself in work, the dedication to screenwriting and filmmaking which has allowed him to produce a movie a year for nearly thirty years, nor has he granted them the musical ability documented throughout
Wild Man Blues
or his authority as a director. Because the Woody Allen persona was initially conceived as a comic construct, a character developed to elicit laughter from audiences, he must remain—even in his less comic incarnations in later films such as
Crimes and Misdemeanors, Shadows and Fog,
and
Everyone Says I Love You
—in some measure a failure in the world, a fictional distillation of Allen’s feelings of human inadequacy largely omitting characteristics reflective of Allen’s very real professional and artistic success.
¹⁴
>

Tellingly, the protagonists of his with whom Allen most readily identifies aren’t “Woody Allen” protagonists at all. Eve of
Interiors
and Marion Post of
Another Woman
are two of these, workaholic women whose cerebralism and personal austerity cripples their relationships with others; the third is
The Purple Rose of Cairo’s
Cecilia, whose wide-eyed adoration of the romantic illusions woven by Hollywood reflects the same vulnerability and personal emotional deprivation Eve and Marion have constructed elaborate defense mechanisms against having to acknowledge.
¹⁵
That the characters least resembling him are those with whom Allen most identifies seems an irresolvable contradiction of his work, one paralleling that which he invoked in yet another comment on
Annie Hall
which must serve as a coda for this tangled critical issue. “I was playing myself,” Allen explained, “but not in autobiographical situations for the most part.”
¹⁶

Although the ambiguity of the relationship between Allen and his comic persona colors our experience of and significantly influences our interpretations of many of his films, it’s in
Radio Days
that Allen most deliberately exploits that ambiguity to provide his film with a dramatic substructure. Reprising a device he used to great effect in
Annie Hall
and
Manhattan,
Allen delivers the opening monologue of
Radio Days
without introducing himself, his voice-over apologizing for the dramatic imagery appearing on the screen: “Forgive me if I tend to romanticize the past. [Rockaway] wasn’t always as stormy and windswept as this, but I remember it that way because that was it at its most beautiful.”
¹⁷

Even as this monologue alerts viewers that the images they are about to see are intentionally romanticized versions of someone’s past, the absence of any introduction of the speaker tacitly invites the audience to infer that the film is autobiography, to believe that in
Radio Days
the by-now highly familiar Woody Allen voice is presenting his own childhood in relatively unmediated terms. Not surprisingly, reviewers assumed that the film
was
Allen’s personal memoir, disregarding Richard Schickels admonition that because the movies central family “lives near Allen’s old neighborhood and includes a shy, slender, red-haired boy, the unwary may conclude that Allen is being autobiographical.”
¹⁸
Radio Days,
of course,
is
patently autobiographical: the Konigsbergs
did
live with relatives, they
did
have Communist neighbors, young Allan
was
an indifferent student more interested in radio programs than school, and he
did
use his mother’s new coat for a chemistry experiment.
¹⁹
For all of its sources in Allen’s childhood experiences and circumstances, however, and for all its painstakingly precise recreation of 1940s America through Santo Loquasto’s stunning sets and Carlo Di Palma’s honey-tinged cinematography,
Radio Days
remains an aesthetic artifice, an artistic distillation of life rather than a slavish naturalistic replication of it. “I think of
Radio Days
basically as a cartoon,” Allen told Stig Bjorkman. “If you look at my mother, my Uncle Abe, my schoolteacher, my grandparents, they were supposed to be cartoon exaggerations of what my real-life people were like.”
²⁰

So while there exists a strongly implied sense of autobiography, the memoir which is
Radio Days
is distinctly fictionalized. Although his name is used only once—and then nearly inaudibly—in
Radio Days
before its appearance in the closing credits, the red-haired boy (Seth Green) who plays the film’s narrator as a child was referred to not as Allan but as “Little Joe” throughout the shooting of the film.
²¹
As Thierry Navacelle’s diary of the film’s shooting,
Woody Allen on Location,
illustrates in great detail, the process of script devel opment and the production of the film differed little from the process of endless revision and reconceptualization involved in the making of Allen’s more patently fictional movies.
²²
The retention of no line or scene was ever justified on the grounds that it actually happened in Allen’s childhood experience and had to be retained for that reason. It follows that the radio programs the film’s characters listen to teasingly approximate actual titles and performers:
The Masked Avenger
with his admonition “Beware all evildoers, wherever you are!” recalls
The Shadow
and his trademark question, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?”;
Guess that Tune
is modeled on 1940s radio’s
Name that Tune;
Mr. Abercrombie’s marriage counseling hour recalls a similar show hosted by Mr. Anthony; Irene and Roger’s breakfast show resembles Pegreen and Ed Fitzgerald’s;
Whiz Kids
changes only two letters of
Quiz Kids
.

The fictionality of
Radio Days
is worth insisting upon because, like Allen’s other films,
Radio Days
uses dramatic manipulation of its materials to present an argument about its subject—in this case, radio’s relationship to Allen’s filmmaking career, and its relation to real life as well. What needs to be illuminated here is the way in which the movie exploits the ambiguity of the relationship between filmmaker and protagonist to close that argument and give it dramatic immediacy. Throughout the film, Little Joe’s parents complain incessantly about their sons lackluster performance at school, which they ascribe to the distraction of radio programs. When Joe responds to an angry lecture from his Hebrew School rabbi (Kenneth Mars), “You speak the truth, my faithful Indian companion,” the rabbi and his parents take turns slapping him around for being so influenced by radio shows. (That Little Joe in this scene enlists an icon from radio—the Lone Ranger—to buttress his rebellion against religious authority reflects a preference that Allen’s protago-nists consistently evince when obliged to choose between their ethnicity/religion and the popular culture so influential in their childhoods.) One day at the zoo, mother, father, and son meet a
Whiz Kids
contestant, who pointedly patronizes Little Joe. Impressed by this child’s haughty brilliance, Joe’s father (Michael Tucker) turns to his wife (Julie Kavner) and complains, “Why can’t
he
[Joe] be a genius? Because he’s too busy listening to the radio all the time!”

Probably the last appellation that Woody Allen is wont to apply to himself is “genius,” but it’s difficult not to notice that
Radio Days,
with its—for Allen—remarkably lush production values
²³
and deliberate juxtaposition of the lovingly visualized realms of family and radio is, at the very least, dramatically manifesting the complete wrongheadedness of Little Joe’s father’s accusation. If genius is anywhere on display in this film, it’s of a distinctly cinematic sort, the movie with extraordinary thoroughness evoking the physical reality of mid-1940s America on both sides of the radio receiver. Allen’s craft as filmmaker creates the reality of the world within the radio which Little Joe’s family and all other listeners never see other than through their imaginations; the movie suggests that the imaginative capacity making visualization possible owes a great deal to radio, to the Biff Baxters and Masked Avengers who Little Joe/Allan Konigsberg and other listeners had to picture in their minds to give them substance. During a broadcast, Biff Baxter encourages his young listeners to watch the ocean for Nazi submarines, which he describes for them in great detail; alone on Rockaway Beach one day, Little Joe thinks he’s spotted one replicating precisely what Baxter depicted, but he keeps his sighting a secret “because I doubted my own experience” and knew that “no one would believe me … except Biff Baxter.”
²⁴

That Biff Baxter enabled him to visualize in reality what doesn’t exist and to understand the difference is the sincere compliment Allen pays to radio in
Radio Days
, one which an early version of the script had grown-up Joe’s narration explicate. “[Y]ou couldn’t just sit and watch passively like TV,” he explains, “you had to participate as you listened and supply the images in your mind…. The involvement was very intense.”
²⁵
What Allen is able to do in
Radio Days
is to celebrate the imagination radio fostered in its listeners by depicting the worlds on both sides of the receiver, dramatizing not only Little Joe’s family’s ordinary life in Rockaway but also the lives of the radio person-alities, including the social mobility of Sally White (Mia Farrow) moving from King Cole Room cigarette girl to hostess of her own Broadway interview show, “The Gay White Way.” Early on in the film, the radio is associated with fiction and the fantasy gratifications embodied in the Masked Avenger, sentimental sports legends, and soap operas; gradually, however, radio transforms itself into a medium of real world bad news, becoming the family’s source of information about the course of the war and leading them as well through the “sudden, unexpected human tragedy” of Polly Phelps. Allen’s movie visualizes the scene at the Phelps farm in Stroudsberg, Pennsylvania, where little Polly Phelps, “despite all the efforts and prayers” of rescue workers and radio listeners all over the country, dies in the well she’s fallen into as the nation listens in horror.
²⁶
Certainly, part of the pleasure for Allen in making
Radio Days
lay in visualizing scenes on a movie screen which, as a boy, he’d been able to picture only in his imagination—not only the scene of the tragedy itself, but a number of the homes, taverns, and businesses around the country where people awaited word of Polly’s fate.
²⁷
Radio had its romance and fantasy programs, Allen seems to be suggesting through the Polly Phelps episode, which fails to resolve itself in the rescue and consequent answering of prayers the broadcaster is so clearly anticipating, but—as Judah’s hard-bitten brother insists in
Crimes and Misdemeanors
—”Out there, in the real world, it’s a whole different story.”
²⁸

Radio Days,
therefore, is not merely autobiographical, but can be perceived as the dramatization of the genesis of its maker’s artistic life, the film, as Richard Combs’s review recognized, fleshing out “its real subject—the showbiz biography of Woody Allen.”
²⁹
Rather than being merely a mildly diverting grab bag of reminiscences and radio anecdotes,
Radio Days
in its every scene visualizes the importance of radio to Allen’s filmmaking, which is celebrated in the movie nearly as much as old-time radio is. The scene which most visibly establishes the connection between radio and filmmaking is one that seems only tenuously related to the film’s procession of radio-related anecdotes: Aunt Bea (Dianne Wiest) and one of her many boyfriends (Joe Sabat, a member of Alien’s film crew) take Little Joe to Radio City Music Hall, the 1979 restoration of which had returned to it the glamour Allan Konigsberg must have experienced there at Joe’s age. “It was like entering heaven,” Little Joe explains in voice-over: “I’d never seen anything so beautiful in my life.” Nothing happens in the scene besides the presentation of a beautifully lit tracking shot by Carlo Di Palma visualizing the three characters walking, somewhat awestruck, through an amber-tinged world on their way to the theater’s balcony—nothing, that is, except for the playing of Frank Sinatras “If You Are But a Dream” on the soundtrack, the scene evoking Joes “most vivid memory associated with an old radio song.” “If you’re a fantasy,” Sinatra sings, “then I’m content to be in love with loving you and pray my dream comes true…. I’m so afraid that you may vanish in the air. So darling, if our romance should break up, I hope I’ll never wake up, if you are but a dream.”