It's 1939. Chicago radio station WGN is starting a new national radio network bringing in an audience to watch the premier broadcast performance. General secretary Penny Henderson (Mary Stuart Masterson) is managing the chaos and trying to break up with husband head-writer Roger Henderson (Brian Benben) after catching him with va-va-va-voom girl Claudette Katsenback (Anita Morris). Station owner General Walt Whalen (Ned Beatty) tries to satisfy sponsor Bernie King (Brion James) who wants massive changes to the script. Trumpet player dies from supposed heart attack. Then the general's incompetent son director Walt Whalen, Jr. (Jeffrey Tambor) is found dead. The police led by Lieutenant Cross (Michael Lerner) is called in. Cross reveals that the trumpet player was poisoned and Roger quickly becomes a prime suspect.

The fast-talking, light-speed pace and vast cast is too desperate. It's trying to be wacky but it's never funny. The story is trying too hard to be chaotic and it succeeds by being too chaotic. The situation feels manufactured. I don't know if murders could easily be made into a slapstick comedy. This one fails in the attempt. The look of the movie is good. The production value is the main positive and the actors are trying their best.

A few years before "The Phantom Menace", George Lucas was involved in the goofy "Radioland Murders", about a series of killings at a radio station in 1939 Chicago. In a way, the whole movie seems like an excuse for a bunch of gags (namely the scene where the bellboy accidentally walks into the dressing room),but I couldn't help but admire it. Even people who never lived through the '30s are likely to feel nostalgia for that era (uh, can one be nostalgic for the Depression?). Overall, this movie may have no cinematic and/or artistic value whatsoever, but it's just fun to watch. Brian Benben and Mary Stuart Masterson play the lead roles (and George Lucas said that they're the parents of Richard Dreyfuss's character in "American Graffiti"). George Burns, in his final film role, appears as a radio personality. Also starring Ned Beatty, Michael Lerner, Michael McKean, Jeffrey Tambor, Stephen Tobolowsky, Christopher Lloyd, Larry Miller, Anita Morris, and Rosemary Clooney. A fairly neat movie.

Oh, and as the movie makes clear: nothing's ever going to overtake radio as the dominant medium.

If you like the old radio shows, films set in the '30s and mysteries, this should be the film for you. The three things mentioned are favorite things of mine, but alas, I didn't enjoy this movie. The thin plot centers around a Phantom of the Radio (a disembodied voice) who says something sinister over a microphone, and then someone is murdered. Apparently all the people who are murdered worked together at another radio station that was involved in a scandal. One of the writers, Roger Henderson (Brian Benben becomes a suspect. He's the husband - possibly soon to be ex-husband of Penny Henderson (Mary Stuart Masterson) who manages to somehow keep the station going with no scripts and people dying all around her.

"Radioland Murders" has a crackerjack cast - besides the above, the cast includes Christopher Lloyd, Michael McKean, Ned Beatty, Harvey Korman, George Burns, Scott Michael Campbell, Brion James, Anne DiSalvo - the list goes on.

The radio shows (Lloyd's character is the sound effect man),the commercials and the music are absolutely wonderful. Unfortunately the director kept cutting from those elements to something else - either yelling or slapstick or both. The slapstick was incessant. Some slapstick is funny; constant slapstick becomes annoying. Certainly there are ways to show a chaotic, disorganized radio station without papers flying all over the place every two minutes and everyone getting knocked over and screaming. As far as the murders, they happen so quickly and so soon into the film that it was hard to know whom exactly had bought it.

The acting is mostly good except for Benben, who for reasons of his own decided to pretend he was a wisecracking guy from the '40s instead of just doing the role. This is the same thing that ruined the "Nero Wolfe" show on A&E - you don't put an era on like a shoe, you ARE in the era, or you come off as being an external actor.

Big disappointment. A shame because it had some great elements going for it.