Books, Arts & Manners: Maybe We Did Need Television

Woody Allen is a filmmaker with the damnedest knack for hopping up the heartbeat of audiences and extracting superlatives from reviewers. Here comes his Radio Days, without a story, without characters, without so much as a sharp point of view, yet laden with raves and only mild dissent. In the New York Times, Vincent Canby, who has already helped ruin Allen by proclaiming him the American Ingmar Bergman, invokes Proust à propos of Radio Days; in The Village Voice, though less enthusiastic and hedging his comparison, David Edel-stein invokes Chekhov. What’s left for Woody to look forward to? Shakespeare, I guess.

The film has some negative virtues: It is much less pretentious than Hannah and Her Sisters, much less pseudo-Pirandellian than The Purple Rose of Cairo. It is really a congeries of blackout sketches barely bothering to make like a connected narrative, scoring now and then and falling flat the rest of the time. The voice-over narration is delivered by Woody himself, which helps establish the link to his forsaken specialty, stand-up comedy. For inside all the artificially fattened personae Allen has assumed or had thrust upon him, there is always a thin little comic, not exactly dying to get out, but often dying for refusing to.

JS

About the Author

John Simon

Featured Tags

Woody Allen is a filmmaker with the damnedest knack for hopping up the heartbeat of audiences and extracting superlatives from reviewers. Here comes his Radio Days, without a story, without characters, without so much as a sharp point of view, yet laden with raves and only mild dissent. In the New York Times, Vincent Canby, who has already helped ruin Allen by proclaiming him the American Ingmar Bergman, invokes Proust à propos of Radio Days; in The Village Voice, though less enthusiastic and hedging his comparison, David Edel-stein invokes Chekhov. What’s left for Woody to look forward to? Shakespeare, I guess.

The film has some negative virtues: It is much less pretentious than Hannah and Her Sisters, much less pseudo-Pirandellian than The Purple Rose of Cairo. It is really a congeries of blackout sketches barely bothering to make like a connected narrative, scoring now and then and falling flat the rest of the time. The voice-over narration is delivered by Woody himself, which helps establish the link to his forsaken specialty, stand-up comedy. For inside all the artificially fattened personae Allen has assumed or had thrust upon him, there is always a thin little comic, not exactly dying to get out, but often dying for refusing to.