Dream Machine RADIO DAYS Directed and Written by Woody Allen

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

At the beginning of Radio Days a burglar picks up the phone in the midst of robbing the Marty Needleman residence and answers the questions put to him by the cheery host of Guess That Tune. With a little help from his partner, he wins a truckful of major appliances for his victims. We may imagine their despair over returning to a ransacked home. But we are privy to their nonplussed elation the next morning when the windfall lands on their doorstep. It might be said that they experienced the "miracle of radio" (as it was known in the innocent '30s and '40s) at its most miraculous.

Later on, there is a darker wonder: a remote broadcast making the entire nation privy to the anguish of the Phelps family, whose daughter is trapped in a well. The reporter on the spot, no less than his listeners, expects the incident to end happily. Everything always did on the radio, which was an even more efficient dream machine than the movies. But no. The child dies. The dismay in the announcer's voice is caused not only by an "unexpected human tragedy" but by the way reality has let down the medium.

Between these two incidents, Woody Allen offers brief, casually brilliant parodies of radio performers and formats: an inspirational sports storyteller modeled on Bill Stern; a smarmy counselor like Mr. Anthony; and, of course, a superhero for boys, the "Masked Avenger." The slender thread holding this part of the movie together recounts the rise from cigarette girl to airwaves gossip star of Sally White (played with her customary comic poignance by Mia Farrow).

The other part is about the listening audience. Here Allen finds cross section enough in a single source, an extended lower-middle-class Jewish family in Rockaway, Queens. Among these dreamers by the glowing dial, the most touching and memorable is again a woman, Aunt Bea (played with becoming lack of sentiment by Dianne Wiest). Since this nameless clan lives near Allen's old neighborhood and includes a shy, slender, red-haired boy, the unwary may conclude that Allen is being autobiographical.

But Radio Days has larger ambitions. Rather than a personal history or an exercise in nostalgia, it is a meditation on the evanescence of seemingly permanent institutions. To a child like Joe (Seth Green), it is inconceivable that something as powerful as radio could ever disappear. Might as well tell him that one day his family will cease to be a similarly compelling reality. But here it is, 1987, and Joe is a voice-over narrator of a movie with no coherent narrative, only such anecdotes as groping memory can rescue from the receding past. In the most delicate way imaginable, the snippets drawn from the seemingly great world of broadcasting and those from the little world of listening shed the most affecting and provocative light on each other. Somehow, one thinks of Chekhov, and is once again astonished by the complexity and clarity of Woody Allen's vision.