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THE PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO
Rating: 
USA. 1985.
Director/Screenplay – Woody Allen, Producer – Robert Greenhut, Photography (colour + some scenes b&w) – Gordon Willis, Music – Dick Hyman, Production Design – Stuart Wurtzel. Production Company – Orion Pictures.
Cast:
Mia Farrow (Cecilia), Jeff Daniels (Tom Baxter/Gil Shepard), Danny Aiello (Monk)
Plot: Cecilia, a mousy Depression-era housewife trapped in a marriage with a layabout husband Monk, takes refuge in the movies, returning to see the romantic comedy ‘The Purple Rose of Cairo’ again and again. But then one day Tom Baxter, the film’s archaeologist hero, amazed to keep seeing her there, steps out of the screen to join Cecilia. Out in the real world Tom’s nobility and screen perfection prove quite out of place – he not knowing what a pregnant woman or sex is, and waiting for the fadeout after kissing Cecilia. Meanwhile the theatre management is left in a panic, and Gil Shepard, the actor playing the hero, arrives to try and halt all the negative publicity to his career.
The Purple Rose of Cairo is a Woody Allen film. It received considerable critical acclaim when it came out in 1985 – it even won Best Picture at that year’s BAFTA Awards and was nominated for a Best Screenplay Academy Award – although has faded somewhat in the Woody Allen pantheon since then. Nevertheless The Purple Rose of Cairo does have Woody Allen in the playful, whimsical and overtly fantastical state of mind that one wishes he would visit more often.
The film retreads similar territory that Allen delved into in Play It Again Sam (1972). Indeed The Purple Rose of Cairo is really an expansion of the joke at the heart of Play It Again Sam, which had Humphrey Bogart appearing to give often quite inappropriate tough guy romantic advice to the neurotic Allen. The Purple Rose of Cairo makes a similar play between the stylized unreality of 1930s black-and-white drawing room dramas and bittersweet reality – in this case is represented by The Depression, which comes shot in muted downbeat autumnal browns and greys.
Perhaps overall The Purple Rose of Cairo is a little more subdued than other Woody Allen films but it is nevertheless very funny. Allen keeps wittily compounding the central idea. There are some particularly amusing moments deflating the balloon of cinematic illusion perpetuated by 1930s films – like Jeff Daniels’ character out in the real world not knowing what a pregnant woman, a soup kitchen or a brothel is. Or when he kisses Mia Farrow and turns puzzled expecting a fadeout. Elsewhere Allen punctures the 1930s screen code of moral decency – Jeff Daniels heroically challenges Danny Aiello to a fight and gets beaten up because he expects his opponent to ‘play fair’.
Both Mia Farrow and Jeff Daniels give fine performances. Mia Farrow is an actress that has a vast untapped comic talent. And Allen, who was living de facto with her when he made this (before their bitter high-profile split-up) steps back from the actor’s chair and gives her the show all to herself. Jeff Daniels has the bland good looks and uppity cheer of a perfect 30s matinee idol and gives fine straight-faced support in his first major screen role.
The ending of the film is one that comes with a decidedly downbeat crunch. Here Allen leaves Mia Farrow abandoned by both Tom and Gil. It seems kind of a downer until one realizes that it is Allen saying he is not unaware that the medium he is conducting his send-up of cinematic cliches in is cinema too. Almost cruelly he nudges us out of not just the romantic illusions he is deflating in the film within the film, but also this movie’s romantic illusion to us. It’s his reminder to us that no matter what expectations we might have of characters on a screen that happy endings don’t always work out in real life.
The Purple Rose of Cairo was the first film to venture into the theme of meta-fictions wherein the cinema screen is treated as having an ontological existence of its own with characters stepping in and out of the screen. Later films taking up this theme include Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) and its imitators, the underrated Last Action Hero (1993), the quite remarkable Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994), and the films of Maurizio Nicchetti, who has been called the ‘Italian Woody Allen’, in particular Nichetti’s The Icicle Thief (1989), which was strongly influenced by Purple Rose. Pleasantville (1998) does similar things with television.
Woody Allen’s other genre films are:– Play It Again Sam (1972), Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask (1972), Sleeper (1973), Love and Death (1975), A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982), Zelig (1983), New York Stories (1989), Alice (1990), Shadows and Fog (1992), Mighty Aphrodite (1995), Everyone Says I Love You (1996), Deconstructing Harry (1997), Match Point (2005) and Scoop (2006).
Copyright Richard Scheib 2002
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