The Purple Rose Of Cairo escaped to Blu-ray in a Limited Edition of 3000 units from Twilight Time.
(It is impossible to write about Woody Allen without having the accusations against him weighing over everything, as they probably should. I’m going to talk about The Purple Rose of Cairo and Woody Allen in terms of a standalone movie and its creator, and I would appreciate it if anyone commenting/sharing this article would do the same. Thank you.)
When you see a movie, you are sharing in a dream. A dream of love, a dream of adventure, a dream of escape, it makes no matter. Film is the art of the immediate emotion, a medium in which we can be completely, utterly transported to another world for the duration of the story. There are several films which take on that notion directly, which examine the lengths and limitations of the power of the movies.
No film has captured this aspect of the cinematic experience quite as immediately as Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo. Now on Blu-ray for a limited time thanks to Twilight Time, Cairo marks one of Allen’s great achievements, a fable with that possesses both a feather-light touch and a sledgehammer of an emotional blow. It’s a film that speaks quietly but hits hard.
The Purple Rose of Cairo is the story of Cecilia (Mia Farrow), a put-upon woman living in a put-upon time. The Great Depression has swung through her New Jersey town, leaving everything and everyone rundown and weary. Cecilia’s barely hanging onto her job as a waitress, and every day she comes home to her husband Monk (Danny Aiello) a piece of shit layabout who is both openly unfaithful and unapologetically abusive.
Sound depressing? Yup, it is, and Cecilia’s only source of escape is her daily visits to the movie theater, where she delights in the exploits of the beautiful people living out impossibly glamorous lives and partaking in soaring romance. During a particularly terrible stretch, Cecilia loses herself into repeated viewings of the titular Purple Rose of Cairo, finding herself drawn to one of the supporting characters on screen, Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels).
Turns out, Tom is plenty drawn to her too. So much so that he escapes out of the screen and into the real world.
When the moment happens, it’s like a bucket of cold water being splashed on the viewer. Cairo has, to that point, been a crushingly realistic examination of a woman’s plight during the Depression, with not even the slightest hint at magical goings on. So when Daniels literally leaps out of the movie, going from black-and-white to full color, both us at home and the viewers within the movie have the same reaction of stunned surprise.
Allen resolutely refuses to push the fantasy element to the forefront. We’re in magical realism territory here, folks, with every character more or less excepting the bizarre turn of events as just another fact of life. The period setting assists with this leap (everything in the film already exists in an unreality of remembered Americana, so what’s a little bit of magic on the side?) as does the endless gallery of character actors that Allen turns to to help facilitate the story. The film is filled with real people, believable people, and so we go along with the shift.
It helps that the movie is wildly funny, with a near-nonstop assortment of one liners and witty asides. It’s one of the most quotable films of all Allen’s oeuvre, with giant punchlines landing one after the other.
The freed Tom Baxter and Cecilia enjoy a whirlwind romance, hampered by Monk and by Gil Shepherd, the actor who played Tom and is now facing career turmoil with his creation on the loose. Allen keeps finding new avenues to explore with his premise, packing in as many What If? scenarios as he possibly can. Given that the film runs well under ninety minutes, it is remarkable just how many twists and turns Allen is able to pack in.
This grab-bag of imagination is a lot of fun, but the light touch also allows Allen to keep the real focus on the characters who have stumbled into his scenario. This is the sort of humanity that Allen used to do best, centered around messy, broken people stumbling and bumbling their way through their lives and trying to make the best choices towards happiness.
Daniels does some of his best work in his dual role as Baxter and Shepherd, easily toggling back and forth between the cartoonishly perfect Tom and the desperate, insecure Gil. Daniels looks right at home in the Old Hollywood scene (Michael Keaton was fired from the role after ten days of shooting for being “too modern”) and he’s able to find the actual, multi-dimensional person in both archetypal figures that Allen handed him.
All of the characters are defined in broad strokes, which makes the casting so key. Monk might have been a laughably evil sack of shit, but Aiello imbues him with depth through sheer force of will. You never like the guy, but Aiello allows you into the pathetic heart of the dope. Of the many supporting players, Dianne Wiest suggests an entire other movie with her brief appearance, while Irving Metzman’s harried theater manager is the perfect baffled everyman to make the outlandish stuff believable.
Standing tall over all these other performers is Mia Farrow, in the single best role she has ever had. I normally find Farrow…look, let’s cut to the chase: She’s terrible. Mia Farrow has single-handedly torpedoed a number of other Allen films (and non-Allen films, like her nails-on-chalkboard turn in Be Kind Rewind) and the best thing I can say about some of her other roles is that she wasn’t enough to ruin the movie.
There have only been two times when it seemed like her directors truly knew how to use her right: Rosemary’s Baby and this. Both roles take the natural weakness that Farrow always suggests and turned it into a weapon against the audience. In Baby and Cairo, she’s like this little puppy blithely strolling through an alligator patch, inducing teeth-shattering levels of tension as you wait for the anvil to come a-squashing. (Or, I guess, to continue the metaphor, you’re waiting for the alligator teeth to come a-biting. The puppy dies, in any case. Sit on that for a while.) Here, Cecilia is such a weakling, you can’t help but feel for her as she trips through such a pitiless time. Farrow suggests such an open, aching heart, you find yourself desperate to see this woman’s kindness and longing paid off. You might have come to the wrong movie, though.
As much as Allen understands the power and draw of movies, he’s also enough of a cynic to countenance the flip side of that power. Purple Rose of Cairo closes on a truly bittersweet note, a shocking slap to the face of the audience who might have been cruising along the film’s swooning surface. The dark turn is surprising, but it is also in keeping with the soul of the film. We fall in love with movies, but that love can’t change fiction into fact and dream into reality.
Farrow brings that heartbreak home, her shattered hopes striking the audience right in the gut. But as she comforts herself to the vision of Fred and Ginger gliding across the silver screen, great ghosts of eternal youth and splendor, the small smile that crosses her face betrays that maybe, just maybe, the cynic hasn’t won the day.
Life can be hard, but the dream lives on. The dream lives on.
Available from Screen Archives Entertainment.