The Purple Rose of Cairo

After seeing and enjoying Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris so much, I pulled off my shelf the film of his it most reminded me of, The Purple Rose of Cairo, which I hadn't seen in ages. It still charms the pants off me.

Allen had shifted to a different period (dare I call it his "Rose" period), where he had made pictures that weren't necessarily about contemporary neurotic New Yorkers, and were more fantasy-oriented, such as A Midsummer-Night's Sex Comedy, Zelig, and Broadway Danny Rose, which wasn't a fantasy but had the structure of a tall tale. The Purple Roses of Cairo, if memory serves me correctly, was the first comedy directed by Allen that he didn't appear in.

Set in the depths of the Great Depression in New Jersey, the film is the story of movie-mad Cecilia, played by Allen's then muse, Mia Farrow, in perhaps her best performance in the many films she made with him. She's a waitress, and a bad one, because all she can do is talk or daydream about the movies. She's married to a lout (Danny Aiello), but escapes her dreary life by attending the new movie every week at the Jewel, where she knows the manager and ticket-seller on a first-name basis.

Things go bad for Farrow when she finds that Aiello is cheating and she gets fired from her job. In total despair, she sits through three showings of a new film, called The Purple Rose of Cairo, which seems to be about New York swells who befriend an archaeologist in an Egyptian tomb. She's already seen the film twice before, so she notices when the archaeologist, Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels), changes his lines and directly addresses her: "You must really love this picture."

Daniels comes off the screen and into real-life, a trick first accomplished by Buster Keaton in Sherlock, Junior. But Allen has totally thought out the implications of the fantasy. Baxter knows anything that was written into his character, but doesn't have real money and doesn't know what happens after kissing, because in the movies there's a fade-out.

Meanwhile, the characters left in the movie have to vamp. This is where most of the laughs come from, with great actors like Deborah Rush, Van Johnson, Edward Hermann and Zoe Caldwell getting in a lot of zingers. When the producer of the film is notified, he summons Gil Shepherd, the actor who played Baxter (also played by Daniels), to fix this mess, lest he thereafter be considered "difficult."

Daniels is terrific in both roles. Michael Keaton had started the film, but Allen let him go because he thought he was too contemporary. His turn as Baxter is lovely, a bright-eyed Galahad who immediately falls in love with Farrow and will defend her honor because "courage is written into my character." I adored a scene in which a hooker, Dianne Wiest, picks him up and takes him to her brothel, where he so charms them with his gallantry that they offer him a freebie, which of course he turns down, because he is in love with Farrow.

Allen keeps the zest going throughout the picture. There aren't a lot of out-and-out gags in the film, although when the character of the maitre 'd is told that everything goes, he decides he'll do what he always wanted to do--tap dance. When Baxter brings Cecilia into his world, there is some funny stuff when the woman that Baxter is supposed to marry (Karen Akers) sees him with another woman. The best line is probably when Farrow says, "I've met a great guy. He's fictional, but you can't have everything."

This is Allen's valentine to the movies, and boy does that shine through. He's historically accurate, as well, as the motion picture industry did not suffer during the depression, presumably because people needed something to cheer them up. The film's bittersweet ending, which has a tear-streaked Farrow succumbing to the sublime "Cheek to Cheek" scene in Top Hat, says it all, and was repeated, in a different context, in Allen's next picture, Hannah and Her Sisters, when Allen realizes life is worth living while watching the Marx Brothers. Allen has it right--the movies are that important.