My Top 25 Favorite Films: #21

As I look over the movies that I have begun to count down as my all-time favorites, I can see a pattern forming. There's a longing for the past. Happier times. A simpler world.

"Radio Days" is no different. Woody Allen's paean to growing up during the 1940s, juxtaposed with the golden age of radio, is probably not his most well-known film. But, for me, it is the one that I have gravitated to over and over and over. It perfectly depicts our homefront during WWII, a time when your major source of nightly entertainment was that strange mahogany box of tubes centrally placed in the middle of your living room.

The Woodman's characterizations of well-known radio personalities of the day are dead on. But, it is the family scenes that reach my heart and touch my soul. They are totally reminiscent of a time in my family, where all the relatives regularly got together every Sunday for dinner, coffee, or whatever. Long before personalities begat frictions which begat long separations. It's refreshing for me to see 10 or 12 family members gathered around a dining room table, all reaching for the same bowl of mashed potatoes. Everybody had a story. Everybody had an issue. And, when there was kidding and teasing, it was all good natured. For me, this family ambience didn't last long. But, it returns every time I watch "Radio Days."

Woody also colors a neighborhood of characters in much the same way that my grandmother did. She would sit on the front porch and watch the passing parade of neighbors, both good and bad. And she'd have a nickname for each of them. There was the one lady who used to race by two or three times a day to the grocery. Always with a cigarette in her mouth, pointed to the sky. My grandmother called her "Roosevelt." There was the man who would be teetering home from the saloon every day at four o'clock. My grandmother called him "Dean Martin." And, simply enough, there was "the old Jew lady."

Just as Woody paints the world of Brooklyn during WWII, my grandmother did the same with me on cold winter afternoons. As she sat poised in her rocking chair, I would curl up on the couch and hear about blackouts and "open air movie theaters" and her long-lost brother, who she always referred to as "the crazy Communist."

For some reason,all the actors in "Radio Days" reminded me of somebody in my family. Somewhere in my lineage, there was somebody just like Julie Kavner and Mia Farrow and Dianne Weist. When the latter takes young Woody to Radio City Music Hall for the first time, I cry all over again.

If ever there was such a thing as a cinematic family album, "Radio Days" would be it. And I never ever get tired of turning those pages one more time.

Dinner last night: flatiron steak at Visions in San Diego.