THE MOVIE:

Someone once told me that if you take the amount of good people a movie has and subtract how little you've heard about said movie, you'll end up with the total of diminishing returns that equals that film's quality. So, a lot of well-known actors in a not very well known movie generally means you've got a dog on your hands.

The 1930s-period comedy Radioland Murders is not necessarily the most obscure movie in the world, but it's also not one that pops up on a lot of people's lists of the top films of all time. Released in 1994, it has an impressive talent roster, bringing together some of the best character actors of the time (and some are still on top today) for a whacky, screwball mystery set on the opening day of a brand new radio station (a fourth radio network, perhaps a satirical play on the Fox TV Network, which was only a couple of years old at the time). Everybody is ready for the first big broadcast, but what they aren't ready for is the fact that someone is about to start killing many of their key players. In the grand tradition of classic comedies of Howard Hawks and Preston Sturges, people are going to talk fast and plot complications are going to pile up like beer cans on a frat house weekend. Unlike the films of those well-respected gentleman, Radioland Murders isn't very funny.

Billed as coming "from the mind of George Lucas," it took four other writers to get this peanut out of that shell. Which of them is to blame for frying it up in flop sweat is impossible to tell. Given that Lucas had been trying to make the film since 1978, it could just be the idea had over-ripened. The folks he enlisted to help don't exactly have the most dazzling resumes. Writers Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz were responsible for Howard the Duck, and the clean-up team of Jeff Reno and Ron Osborn had mainly done TV. With so many screenwriters involved, the ongoing jokes about writers being forced to do too many rewrites couldn't be self-referential...could it?

Radioland Murders was director Mel Smith's follow-up to his cult hit The Tall Guy, and he would later helm Bean. I have to say, I lay a lot of this film's failure at his feet. For a zany murder mystery, Radioland Murders lacks zip. When the behind-the-scenes talent is this mediocre, it means it's up to the people in front of the camera to keep the film moving, and to their credit, everyone involved dives in with gusto.

Mary Stuart Masterson is charming as Penny, the confused executive whose place at the station rises considerably after a couple of corpses drop. Her soon-to-be ex-husband Roger is one of the station's writers, and he unravels the murderous plot even as he gets tangled up in at as a patsy. Brian Benben was at the height of his "Dream On" fame when Radioland Murders was made, and he mugs his way through the role with unnatural enthusiasm. Backing these two up are Jeffrey Tambor as the befuddled director, Ned Beatty as the station owner, Corbin Bernsen as the announcer, Michael Lerner as the police detective, and Bobcat Goldthwaite, Robert Klein, and Harvey Corman form the core group of irascible writers. Cameos by George Burns and Rosemary Clooney are attempts to lend an air of authenticity to the flick, but the real scene stealers are Christopher Lloyd as the man who makes all the crazy sound effects and Michael McKean as the Spike Jones-inspired band leader. McKean seems to be having a particularly good time grinning it up trough various musical numbers and their resulting costume changes. No one phones it in, the entire cast gives it their all.

The problem remains that the material isn't with them. The writing is all very surface, relying on our collective pop culture memories of the era rather than anything authentic. The costumes and the sets are well-done, but they are so shiny and new, they never sink in as being real. You can feel the filmmakers trying to save it in the editing, cutting back and forth between the murder plot and the onstage radio performances that are meant to provide an amusingly coincidental comment on the main action, but it's a forced smile. All one can do is grit one's teeth through the pain.

If not for the actors, there would be nothing to Radioland Murders. By the second half, as the plot gathers speed, they did bring me around some. I wanted to see what happened to Penny and Roger, and if the page Billy (Scott Michael Campbell, Flight of the Phoenix) would ever get his big break, but just barely. By the time the film makes its strained joke about radio dying, I was glad it was all over. I had seen a lot of famous people do a lot of mediocre things, and I probably would have been better off keeping myself out of the equation.

THE DVD

Video:
There was a previous version of Radioland Murders released on DVD in 1998. I don't own that disc, but from what I can tell, this new version is an upgrade. While both discs have a widescreen 2.35:1 aspect ratio, this is the first time for an anamorphic transfer. The picture was gorgeous, I must say. Like I noted above, the costumes and set decorations had a high-gloss to them, and that comes through almost too well.

Sound:
The sound mix on Radioland Murders also gets an upgrade from 2.0 to 5.1. There is a lot of big band music in the movie, as well as parallel action and sound effects. The mix was done really well, keeping each part distinct.

Extras:
Nothing but a trailer. There isn't even a menu for chapter selection, if you can believe it. It almost makes you long for the day when "scene selection" was listed on the backs of DVD boxes as if it were some cool special feature.

FINAL THOUGHTS:
Skip It. While the performances by the actors are incredible, they've all been in plenty of better things that you'd much rather see them in. Radioland Murders is a hollow exercise in style parading as substance, and quite possibly a case of too many cooks being in the kitchen. If you want a madcap comedy about the 1930s, get one that was actually made in the 1930s rather than this shallow approximation.

Jamie S. Rich is a novelist and comic book writer. He is best known for his collaborations with Joelle Jones, including the hardboiled crime comic book You Have Killed Me, the challenging romance 12 Reasons Why I Love Her, and the 2007 prose novel Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?, for which Jones did the cover. All three were published by Oni Press. His most recent projects include the futuristic romance A Boy and a Girl with Natalie Nourigat; Archer Coe and the Thousand Natural Shocks, a loopy crime tale drawn by Dan Christensen; and the horror miniseries Madame Frankenstein, a collaboration with Megan Levens. Follow Rich's blog at Confessions123.com.