RADIOLAND MURDERS
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1994 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Mary Stuart Masterson, Brian Benben, Ned Beatty, Michael Lerner, Jeffrey Tambor, Anita Morris, Stephen Tobolowsky. Screenplay: Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz and Jeff Reno & Ron Osborn. Director: Mel Smith.
A couple of years ago, director Barry Levinson made a movie based on a twenty-year-old idea. This pet project was loud, heavy-handed and self-indulgent, and clearly showed why it hadn't been made twenty years earlier: it wasn't a very good idea. However, Levinson had acquired the cachet to make any movie he wanted to make, so he made TOYS. George Lucas has even more cachet, and he also decided to produce a twenty-year-old idea. The result, unfortunately, is similar to TOYS. RADIOLAND MURDERS is an attempt at farce that is simply chaotic and grating, and its frantic pace can't disguise the fact that it just isn't funny.
RADIOLAND MURDERS is set in 1939 at WBN, a Chicago radio station that is planning to launch a fourth national network. On this evening, the station owner (Ned Beatty) is entertaining potential affiliates and a live studio audience with a sampling of the shows the network will offer. However, there is a lot more going on backstage than onstage. Writer Roger Henderson (Brian Benben) is desperately trying to convince his wife Penny (Mary Stuart Masterson), the station's do-everything assistant, that he hasn't been unfaithful; the writing staff is desperately working against the clock to make the changes ordered by the chief sponsor (Brion James). And someone is killing off members of the station staff, with Roger becoming the chief suspect.
For nearly its entire first hour, RADIOLAND MURDERS succeeded primarily in giving me a terrible headache. The story rockets from character to character, lingering just long enough to let us see that each one is defined almost exclusively by a single annoying character trait. The incompetent director (Jeffrey Tambor) has a bad toupee; the station manager (Larry Miller) has a German accent; the head writer (Harvey Korman) is a mush-mouthed drunk; another writer (Bobcat Goldthwait) is...well, Bobcat Goldthwait. Subtle nuance in characterization may be too much to expect from a broad comedy like RADIOLAND MURDERS, but it's still a problem when virtually the entire cast is so irritatingly one-note that you begin hoping various characters will be the next to die. They are also stuck with dialogue that must have had whiskers on it in 1939, like the ever-uproarious "You may think you know what I know, but I don't think you know what you think you know" bit. The slapstick is better, but it too is simply too stale to sustain the energy.
The second half is a significant improvement, focusing on Roger's attempts to stay one step ahead of the police and solve the murders before he himself is arrested for them. Brian Benben (of HBO's "Dream On") is a charming comic actor, and his gifts with physical comedy make a perilous descent down the side of the station building and dressing in a Carmen Miranda get-up far funnier than they have any right to be. But director Mel Smith (THE TALL GUY) makes the horrendous decision to keep cutting away to the performers on stage. Every time he does so, RADIOLAND MURDERS just stops dead, and it's not worth the jerky ride simply to see cameos by Billy Barty, Rosemary Clooney and George Burns. Benben is the best thing RADIOLAND MURDERS has going for it, but Smith doesn't seem to realize it.
Ultimately, that decision is indicative of what is most wrong with RADIOLAND MURDERS: no one seems clear exactly what it is supposed to be. An homage to the days of live radio? A backstage farce a la NOISES OFF? A murder mystery? A romantic comedy? Lucas and his team of screenwriters seem to want it all, and as a result they end up without much of anything. RADIOLAND MURDERS is one of those unfortunate films which equates loud and fast with entertaining, when in reality it's simply noisy and busy.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 radios: 3.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University Office of the General Counsel
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