Talk Radio is a film by Oliver Stone, based on the true story of Alan Berg, an American radio phone-in host who was murdered by neo-nazis in 1984. As such it’s the perfect Stone vehicle. Featuring a tortured, maligned but righteous anti-hero, fighting fascism while trying to come to terms with his own male chauvinism and find a girlfriend. The source material was, as you might expect, a stage-play by Eric Bogosian, who also plays the lead role. Olly is of course a great director and a Great American. “Goddammit, he went to Vietnam, instead o’ smokin’ dope at Ox-FORD!” Or worse, protesting against the war. He’s one of the few American directors living - the other two who spring to mind being Spielberg and Woody Allen - who get to write their own ticket and do whatever the heck they want. His best films for me are Salvador and JFK. Talk Radio is a pretty interesting film. Stone is obsessed by pressing social issues: corruption on Wall Street, U.S. imperialism, the rise of neo-fascist groups, and above all the notion that the United States lost its innocence in the 1960s as a result of Kennedy’s assassination and the Vietnam War. This is of course what the Americans call “bullshit” and John Milius wouldn’t buy it for a second. But it’s a popular notion among wet liberals who like to view political assassination and out of control militarism as the exception rather than the rule. It’s the same sort of wishy-washy revisionism we get from David Puttnam, who tells us in The Killing Fields that the Americans bombed Cambodia by mistake and how they won the war for us in Memphis Belle. It’s all ludicrous, but it’s the ludicrosity of the limousine liberal and there are a lot of those in Hollywood; and vicious, betraying gangsters that these liberal studio bosses are, they solve their charred consciences by funding liberal social issue films like this one. Talk Radio is beautifully photographed by Robert “Bob” Richardson; the script by Bogosian and Stone is intermitten