Shooting Down Pictures

Screened January 2 2009 on MGM DVD in Weehawken NJ

TSPDT rank #880  IMDb Wiki

A series of loosely connected anecdotes reminiscing over the heyday of radio programs and their effect on a Queens household modeled after that of Woody Allen’s childhood, Radio Days resembles a standup routine more than any of the work of this legendary comedian-turned-actor/director.  Allen’s buoyant voiceover accompanies a wall-to-wall soundtrack of period jazz, a fluid, hard-driving talk-and-tunes narrative approach that anticipates the first hour of Scorsese’s GoodFellas [TSPDT #99] by a few years.  A third of the anecdotes lead nowhere other than to provide amusing flourishes to this vivid period portrait, but the general narrative disjunction makes sense in a film whose underlying philosophy is to resist the passage of time, though history registers gently with the onset of World War II and its effect on both the family and the radio industry. Its hometown nostalgia owes a debt to Fellini’s Amarcord [TSPDT #82] and Allen’s cartoonish cast is also Felliniesque, with not one but two Giulietta Masini holy fool types who are the only characters possessing a narrative arc (Mia Farrow as an aspiring radio star and Dianne Wiest as a spinster aunt looking for Mr. Right).

It’s typical of the leveling tendency of Allen’s social worldview to make the radio stars seem banal in their appearances and concerns, while the humble working class Jewish family and neighborhood denizens carry the aura of genuine experience, especially in a series of coarse but witty family arguments.  The stars only matter because of the feelings and fantasies they evoke among family members, leading to some gently lyrical moments such as a girl in a makeshift Carmen Miranda getup doing a bedroom cha-cha while family members look on.  Allen’s attempt to bridge the gap between the glamorous radio world the outer boroughs comes through Farrow’s cigarette girl looking for a break into the studio, a saga whose exaggerated incidents (involving gangster hits and Pearl Harbor) are largely unconvincing despite Farrow’s best attempts to channel Judy Holliday.  A number of the punchlines are quaintly anachronistic (i.e. one of Wiest’s suitors aborting date rape when he hears Orson Welles’ panic-inducing War of the Worlds broadcast on the radio) and for that reason a number of them land limply (i.e. one of Wiest’s dates turning out to be gay).

But even these anecdotes roll by in a rush of such nostalgic goodwill that it’s hard not to embrace its immense charms.  Those charms are due in part to fluid camerawork and triumphant art direction, each set filled with loving detail and shot in brown tones as cozy as a hot cup of coffee.  Ironically – and fittingly – the lush visual design could vanish, leaving the rich soundtrack of Allen’s voiceover, the airtight comic banter and music to thrive as a ninety minute radio program of its own.

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As the new year beckons, it’s also time to say goodbye to my favorite video store of all time, Kim’s on St. Mark’s and 3rd Avenue, which is relocating its retail operations and shutting down its rentals entirely.

While I don’t think I’ve spent more than a few hundred dollars in rentals at Kim’s over the years, it’s been almost exclusively in accessing titles that I couldn’t find anywhere else: not at the New York Public Library, not on Netflix, not online. I suppose the latter two constituents had something to do with the financial insolubility of Kim’s Video, not to mention the brick-and-mortar video rental industry as a whole. Perhaps it’s an inevitable outcome of video watching in the virtual age, but still it’s sad to see a longstanding revered institution go down.

The fate of the collection of rental titles, numbering 55,000, has been a looming question for some time.  For the past few months, proprietor Yongman Kim has been publicly seeking a benefactor to acquire the entire rental collection. One stipulation was that the collection be available to the general public, thus ruling out academic institutions that would probably have the endowment to purchase the collection but would be unwilling to operate a public borrowing or rental operation. Apparently institutions like the New York Public Library and online companies like Netflix didn’t figure into the solution.

As the fate of the collection became more uncertain over the past few weeks, I’ve focused the Shooting Down Pictures project on watching films that I could only find at Kim’s, so that I could review them in the event that they should no longer be available for rental. Such titles include: Judex, Before the Revolution, Il Sorpasso, Murder by Contract, Variety, Sandra, Carnival in Flanders, and We All Loved Each Other So Much.  I’ve also rented other titles that I digitized for upcoming entries. Like a squirrel I’ve been harvesting cinematic nuts for the bleak winter known as a post-Kim’s video world.

Last week I noticed at the checkout counter a blown-up poster-size version of a proposal kit from the city of Salemi, Sicily, offering to house the entire collection in its civic archives.

At first I thought this was some kind of joke, meant to foment enough outrage that a local benefactor would step up with a serious offer to keep the collection in New York City. But it seems that this proposal is for real, and is very much in the process of happening…

But what about Yongman Kim’s stipulation that the collection be available to the general public?  I guess when he said that he didn’t specify what nationality the public had to be, so New Yorkers are screwed. Oh wait, the Sicilians did take this into consideration. Read the fine print in the second paragraph under “keeping up with Kim’s Video members”.

Guess I can plan a trip to Sicily sometime to play into what apparently amounts to a small island city’s cinephilic tourist stunt.  And I love how it’s now to be known as “Kim’s Video Collection of New York in Salemi, Sicily.”

What to make of all this, I don’t know. It’s still too surreal to be believed. Just know that New York, as a global stronghold of cinema culture, has lost an invaluable resource (unless Sicily is now to be considered the sixth borough of the city).  As far as whoever is responsible for this development, I hold them in the same regard as the person who left his mark on Asia Argento’s forehead in a poster for The Last Mistress that was last seen gracing the stairwell of the video rentals section: