Radio Active

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Radioland Murders is many things: the multicorpse mystery story implied by its title; an old-fashioned romantic comedy in which a couple -- nicely played by Mary Stuart Masterson and Brian Benben -- are bickering their way toward divorce even though they're still in love; a satire of all the conventions of big-time radio, circa 1939; a group caricature of all the types -- frantic sound-effects man, silky-voiced announcer -- the medium once nurtured.

Yet none of this is really the film's subject. Its true topic is chaos. All the above and a lot more are crammed into a tight time frame -- the prime-time hours during which a new network is presenting an extravagant premiere broadcast featuring all its stars and programs. The movie wants to show us the frenzy of such an enterprise, bring everyone involved as close as possible to panic but not in itself succumb to breakdown. This is a feat that has always interested George Lucas, who wrote the original story and is the executive producer. As we know from the Star Wars and Indiana Jones trilogies, he loves multilevel, multicharacter, broadly played popular fiction edited at a pace that flirts with incomprehensibility yet rigorously maintains narrative logic. Radioland, scripted by four writers and directed by Mel Smith, takes place under one roof on one night and puts this style under still greater pressure. Perhaps too much. The adventure form's spaciousness granted us breathing room, time to take things in. This comedy, dazzling as its rhythms often are, ought to give us the same kind of breaks.