REVIEWS Nostalgia is without focus in Radio Days RADIO DAYS. Directed by Woody Allen. Star- ring Mia Farrow and Michael Tucker. At local theatres. Trips down memory lane can be entertaining, and given that the tour guide is Woody Allen, they can also be profound in a funny way. So it’s disappointing to discover that the master of 20th- century neurosis doesn’t deliver on the latter. Radio Days, Allen’s latest film offers a series of vignettes revolving mainly around the film- maker’s family back in the early Forties. Other- wise, it details the rise of a cigarette girl to | questionable renown as a gossip columnist while World War II enters the lives of Americans. An actor who looks quite plausible as the author at about eight years of age, a fine support- ing cast and rich photography make Radio Days a visual delight. And there are some choice lines of dialogue, when Allen depicts the daily banter exchanged by his very Jewish, American working class family. It’s in Allen’s depiction of his family — often quarrelsome, but ultimately likeable — and the contrast of their world to that of the radio person- alities they worship — that Radio Days realizes its greatest strength. Allen hits the mark squarely when he observes that working people are often curiously ashamed of their lives, and compare themselves unfavorably to people they consider vastly superior — people who have poise and some humanity, but who bear the scars earned from clawing one’s way to the top. Radio Days also gives us some tantalizing glimpses of live radio as it was before the days of tape and television, and examines almost wistfully the effect the relatively new medium had on the lives of its listeners. ‘rims Fans of Allen may be disappointed to learn that, while he employs many of his regulars in Radio Days — Tony Roberts, Jeff Daniels, Danny Aiello, Mia Farrow and Diane Keaton all have parts — Allen himself is absent from the screen. He does, however, narrate the film. Unfortunately, Allen’s observations during his narrative parts are for the most part superficial. Where we expect revelations or at least-a fresh humorous approach to a familiar topic, we get instead observations on the obvious. Additionally, many of the vignettes are far too brief. We expect something more when a middle- aged neighbor charges out of his house, clad only in his underwear and waving a meat cleaver. At the very least, we'd like to know what happens next, but Allen doesn’t deliver. As a result, Radio Days offers no insight into how and why one of North America’s more cele- brated film makers and comedians evolved from the working-class child in Rockaway, New Jersey. As to how Allen came to be plagued — or blessed, if one considers his commercial successes — with the famous nervousness is a mystery. All we have for explanation is Allen’s disputatious, but ultimately caring family. One humorous scene shouldn’t escape men- tion. That’s when Allen’s Uncle Abe goes next door to confront the Communist neighbors for playing the radio, eating and working on Pas- sover. He comes back to the house well-fed, and decrying the exploitation of the workers by the bosses. Radio Days is one person’s nostalgic, but basi- | cally uncritical, look at his past. It fails to deliver the usual Allen insights into human foibles, but it’s engaging as a tableau of working class Amer- ica in the Forties. — Dan Keeton 10 e PACIFIC TRIBUNE, MARCH 11, 1987 LIGHTS OF THE INSIDE PAS- SAGE. By Donald Graham. Harbour Publishing, 1987. $24.95 hardcover. Available at People’s Co-op Bookstore. As someone who spent some of his teenage summers in the shadow of the light station at Point Atkinson (where, incidentally, the lights first went into service in 1875) lighthouses have always held an enduring interest for me. They have come to symbolize West Coast British Columbia where our longitudes are carved out of wind and tide-swept rock, from Discovery Point at the southern tip of Vancouver Island to Green Island on Chatham Sound, the first station to feel the Alaskan winter as it sweeps down Portland Inlet. For the thousands of fishboats, coas- tal vessels and ferries plying the waters, the lights and the foghorns are crucial to navigation, an optical and aural life- line. But as Donald Graham points out, in his fascinating and colorful book, Lights of the Inside Passage, the federal govenments did not always see them as crucial nor does the current Depart- ment of Transport see them that way today. From the three lighthouses inherited from the colonial administra- tion in 1871, the federal Department of Marine and Fisheries only began to build up the network of lighthouses along the inside passage slowly and begrudgingly. It moved in response to requests from business interests and the CPR, which were anxious to increase trade and cut down shipping time, and later, in response to a series of terrible wrecks off the west coast of Vancouver Island. Graham, the author of an earlier book on lighthouses, Keepers of the Light, focuses this time on the lights of the inside passage between the main- land and Vancouver Island and those of the northern coast, tracing their his- tory and the exploits of their keepers over the years. Some lighthouses, like that on Chrome Island at: the entrance to Baynes Sound or East Point, built on the site of the wreck of the John Rosen- feld, sunk off Saturna Island in 1886 with a load of Nanaimo coal, were erected in response to demands from coal companies for safer, faster pas- sage. Others, particularly those in the north, took shape during the Klondike gold rush as shipping pushed north from Prince Rupert. But it was the men and women who kept the lights that give the story its color and life and Graham is at his best writing about them. For all that was achieved in establishing the light- houses, the federal department paid scant attention to the lives of those who kept them, forcing keepers to work day and night, in mind-numbing isolation for little pay. As Austin McKela, the Finnish uto- pian socialist who kept the lighthouse at Pulteney Point on Malcolm Island, discovered, providing a stove was his own responsibility. Whatever the win- ter conditions, “the department does not furnish stoves,’ Ottawa stated curtly in reply to his request. At Porlier Pass lighthouse, one of its early keepers, aman known as Sticks Allison because he was on crutches for a time, “would , hobble down to the shore and stand Lights of the Inside Passage Beaiaits lighthouse history ‘a beacon in the Tory fog’ Waves pound the light station at Triple Island, just west of Prince Rupert. The relentless battering cut short the first attempt at construction in 1919, killing three construction workers. just above the incoming waves, beating a five-gallon pail with a stick in response to a steamer’s whistle, day or night.” He had requested a hand- cranked foghorn but the department took more than a year to approve the request. In the meantime, typical of most lighthouse keepers, he had to pro- vide for the safety of ships using his ‘own devices. The story of Sophie Moran, at the sea-battered Triple Island lighthouse, epitomized the bureaucrats’ approach to keepers for more than halfa century. Forced by the enormous workload to work with her husband, Tom, as an unpaid assistant, she was tending the lighthouse engines one day when her clothing was caught in the gears, pul- ling her into the machinery. By the time Tom heard her screams, she had been badly mangled and was forced to endure the pain of her injuries for a week while they waited for a boat to take her out. Yet when Tom filed a Workmen’s Compensation form the following month, he was reminded that since she was working as an assistant, he was the employer, not the federal government. Therefore, if there was to be any com- pensation, it was his responsibility. Vignettes from the lives of the keep- ers run throughout Lights of the Inside Passage, each one corroborated by Graham’s exacting research. He tells each with humor and warmth in lan- guage that is rich with the flavor and rough texture of the B.C. coast — which is perhaps only appropriate since Graham has been a lighthouse keeper himself for the last 11 years. But as he warns in his final chaptef, Endangered Species, the tendency of the federal department to put regula tions and costs before lives is more pro- - nounced than ever under the current Tory government. Like its policy of stripping trains of their vital safety link, the caboose, the program of replacing | lighthouse keepers with electronic” equipment is presented as “progress’ made possible through technology. / a result, by March, 1986, the Depart ment of Transport was ordering the downgrading of six lighthouses to” unmanned lights. ? But technology can and does fail, Graham notes, and he cites the figures - compiled by lighthouse superintendent Capt. William Exley to underscore the point. In the five years between 1977 and 1982, supposedly automated equip~ ment already installed in lighthouses failed 2,091 times. And automated lights can’t carry out rescues, Graham adds, pointing to the lighthouse net work as “a cornerstone of search and i rescue” —a role which the Tory government has sought to disavow if its efforts to turn “tone of the most extensive and effective networks 0 manned lighthouses in the world” int a string of untended lights. As to what the future holds for thé lighthouses, and whether the campaign to keep the lights — a campaign sth being mounted by various maritimé groups including the UFAWU — will be successful, Graham doesn’t specU“ late. But Lights of the Inside Passag® itself shines like a well-lit beacon in th¢ Tory fog. And it tells a story that every British Columbian will want to read. — Sean Griffin