A few years ago I went to a local theatrical production in a small venue that catered to small troupes doing original material. The play (I forget the title) was a satire on radio mystery dramas in the spirit of the Firesign Theater’s Nick Danger. 

About halfway through the play it suddenly occurred to me: what the fuck are these people doing drawing on old time radio for their dramatic inspiration? This is 2003? How many people in this room have even  heard an old radio show? In fact, has this young cast itself even heard many radio shows?

 

Still, I think I know the impetus behind the show, which was probably the same impetus behind the movie George Lucas produced,  Radioland Murders, from 1994. The hectic world of on the air broadcasting creates a dynamic, vivid environment that pays homage to an earlier, fun time and which allows actors to ham it up. Lucas was probably also inspired by the 1940s films set in the world of radio, such as the Red Skelton “Whistler” series. When you are a kid, those movies seem like perfect films, blending horror and comedy and suspense, like  Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. It’s the same original honorific impulse behind  Star Wars.

 

In the end, though,  Radioland Murders, credited to writers Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz and Jeff Reno and Ron Osborn, from a story by Lucas, and directed by Mel Smith, a comic actor and writer who has directed six movies so far, is no  Star Wars. I’m tempted to say that it is Lucas’s  Hudson Hawk, but he already has one in  Howard the Duck.

 

The whole spirit of  Radioland Murders is based on frenzy and fast talk, except that here the talk isn’t funny. Its premise is a distant relative of that joke in Spielberg’s  1941 when the sailors on the sub complain about the cumbersome size of non-transistor radios. The trick here is that the secret killer behind the spree is an inventor of television. The only time I laughed during any moment in the film’s 112 minutes was when the police detective (Michael Lerner) found he had to pull his officers away from the hypnotizing effect of the tube, which is only showing the famous Native American splash screen.

The film has an all – star cast, filled mostly with people who are still around and still widely viewed as “funny,” from Brian Benben as the harried head writer of the radio network, WBN, making its debut one night in1939, and Jeffrey Tambor as a director who is also the first victim. In between are Mary Stuart Masterson as Benben’s wife (who makes a surprisingly effective ’30s type star in the Jennifer Jason Leigh manner; she and Benben are supposed to be Curt Henderson’s parents from  American Graffiti, set 23 years later), Ned Beatty as the network owner, George Burns as a comic (it’s his last film), Brion James, Michael McKean as a faux Spike Jones, Stephen Tobolowsky, Christopher Lloyd  as the sound effects guy, Larry Miller, Corbin Bernsen as an announcer, Rosemary Clooney, Bobcat Goldthwait as one of the network’s many unpaid writers, Dylan Baker as a cop, Candy Clark and Bo Hopkins reunited again after  American Graffiti, Robert Klein, Harvey Korman, Joey Lawrence, and Peter MacNicol. It’s not that there are too many of them, but that when they are there what they have to do isn’t funny. The blend of death and humor isn’t easy here as it is in the film’s inspirations, especially in scenes such as the one where Larry Miller is crushed bloodily between giant gears. And this is a show that so doesn’t understand radio that one of the talents performing on its opening night is a dance act.

The disc for  Radioland Murders  is as bare bones as a disc gets that doesn’t just start with the movie and have no menu, like a David Lynch disc. You can’t chose your chapter breaks (for the record there are 18 chapters) but it does have the trailer and the “option” of English track and / or subtitles. One peculiarity of the film, or at least this transfer, is that it does not bear a title. There is no title at the beginning, and none in the end credits. Curious.

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