Classic Movie Review: The Purple Rose of Cairo

It came time for me to have a second look at a couple of films from Woody Allen’s undervalued 1980s period. It turns out I myself had undervalued The Purple Rose of Cairo, a sweet little love letter to the magic of cinema. It moves along at a quick pace and clocks in at a crisp 75 minutes.

I remembered it as a forgettable little yarn about an unhappily married woman who meets with the ultimate fantasy of a cinephile – a character from one of her favorite films steps off the screen and falls in love with her. The truth is there is a so much more going on than I was capable of recognizing when I first watched it some twelve years ago.

Mia Farrow plays Cecilia, housewife to the unemployed, gambling and abusive Monk (a quintessential Danny Aiello performance) and part time diner waitress in Depression era New Jersey. Cecilia, like so many others in that time, turned to the movie house for escapist entertainment to forget the terrible troubles of the world for 90 minutes or so. And in those days you could spend all day in the cinema on only one ticket.

After one particularly rough encounter with Monk, she spends all afternoon watching The Purple Rose of Cairo (the film within a film shares its title) until one of the characters, Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels) notices her and comes down off the screen to meet her and spend some time in the real world. In one motion, Allen blends the world of reality with the fantasy we all secretly want to be our reality.

Daniels actually plays a dual role as both Baxter and the actor Gil Shepherd, who plays Baxter in The Purple Rose of Cairo. Confused yet? At the time Daniels was cast he was not a well-known movie star, but he had the looks and the charisma to pull off playing the cocky actor and the humor and light touch to play the naïve Baxter. Seen today, he comes across as an odd casting choice because his career never really took off to bring him the kind of movie star success that this film suggests.

Allen’s writing, which earned him his fifth Original Screenplay Oscar nomination, is in fine form. It’s got some biting Hollywood satire including this brilliant exchange between Cecilia and Gil:

Gil (speaking about Baxter): He’s my character. I created him.
Cecilia: Didn’t the man who wrote the movie do that?
Gil: Yes, technically. But I made him live. I fleshed him out.

There’s also the sheer absurdity of the Hollywood moguls debating how to handle the fact that one of their film’s characters has walked off the screen. They accept the story as true without verification and discuss the matter in terms of potential lawsuits should he do anything wrong.

But the film goes much deeper than the clever quips as it tries to get at the heart of why we return time and again to the movies for enjoyment. For one thing there’s the security and the comfort – with rare exceptions we generally know what to expect given the genre and a brief plot summary. Hence another wonderful line delivered by a woman at the cinema where the other characters have been milling about on screen waiting for Baxter’s return: “I want what happened in the movie last week to happen this week; otherwise, what's life all about anyway?” This line, with its existential quandary, perhaps best sums up the movie. If we can’t be certain of what’s coming in a movie of all places, what does that say about my existence?

The film has some fascinating comments to make about the nature of fiction writing and character development. Surely there was something at work in Allen’s mind with regard to the common assertion by writers of fiction that their characters come alive within the work, that at a certain point they cease to be the product of the writer’s mind (at least consciously) and begin acting on their own. Allen just drives the point home literally.

SPOILER ALERT: Allen is most interested in the lure of Hollywood and its effect on people. First Cecilia falls in love with Ted Baxter: “I just met a wonderful new man. He's fictional but you can't have everything.” She is drawn in by his charm, his childlike naiveté and fascination with the real world. Later she meets Gil Shepherd, the actor. He’s everything Baxter is, only more, because he’s real. He’s the unattainable. Sure, we can have Cary Grant or Tom Cruise whenever we want by popping in a DVD. But you’re only getting a small part of them – the characters they create. With Gil, Cecilia can have it all. She falls for his charms as he promises to whisk her away to Hollywood luxury. And she wants it, as most of us would deep down.

But alas, it’s not to be. Gil used her to get Baxter back on the screen before skipping town, leaving Cecilia stuck with her crummy life and the vicarious pleasures of the movie house. It may seem a sad ending, but at the end of the day we all have to realize that the movies aren’t real. Real life is here in front of us, no matter how much time we spend in the dark, looking at flickering images on the silver screen.