The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)
Film Overview
In Depression-era New Jersey, a waitress escapes into the movies until one of the men on screen notices her and walks out to meet her.
Mia Farrow plays Cecilia, who works in a diner and lives with Monk, her gambling, unfaithful and violent husband. The Jewel movie theatre is the one place where she can forget him, her job and the unpaid bills.
Cecilia keeps returning to a romantic adventure called The Purple Rose of Cairo. During one screening, its fictional explorer Tom Baxter stops following the script, looks directly at her and steps through the screen. Jeff Daniels plays Tom and Gil Shepherd, the actor whose face he wears.
Tom falls in love with Cecilia while the characters he abandoned wait inside the stalled film. The studio sends Gil to New Jersey before other copies of Tom make the same escape. Cecilia must choose between a man written to be perfect and an actor free to disappoint her.
Gordon Willis shoots Cecilia’s life in subdued colour and the film within the film in crisp black and white. The glamorous fiction looks richer than reality, which makes Cecilia’s choice crueler.
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My Review
The beautiful lie of the movies
The Purple Rose of Cairo begins with an impossible event and treats its emotional consequences with complete seriousness. A man leaves a cinema screen. For Cecilia, being noticed is the real miracle.
Her life gives her good reasons to spend afternoons at the Jewel. She has little money, an insecure job and a husband who drinks, gambles and sees other women. Monk treats her unhappiness as a nuisance. Inside the theatre, Fred Astaire dances, people wear evening clothes and every problem has an ending.
Cecilia doesn’t confuse those films with real life. She knows what the ticket buys. For a few hours, events have order and people say what they mean. She has watched The Purple Rose of Cairo so often that its lines and movements have become familiar. Then Tom Baxter looks into the auditorium and recognises her.
Mia Farrow keeps Cecilia from becoming a figure of pity. She is nervous and bruised by experience, but still curious. Her face changes in the cinema. The room is dark, yet this is where she appears most alive.
Cecilia goes to the movies to disappear. Tom Baxter walks out because he has seen her.
Jeff Daniels has to make Tom and Gil Shepherd recognisably different before the script explains the difference. Tom stands straighter and speaks with the certainty of a 1930s hero. Gil carries himself like an actor who knows charm can be useful. They share a face, but only one has been written never to betray the woman beside him.
Tom’s first hours outside the film provide the sharpest jokes. He expects fake banknotes to pay for dinner and assumes a kiss should be followed by a fade-out. Daniels plays him without a trace of knowing irony. Tom cannot understand why the real world ignores the rules that have governed every moment of his life.
The characters left on screen create a second comedy. With Tom gone, the plot cannot continue. They wait, quarrel and eventually speak to the paying audience. Some customers demand refunds; others settle down to watch the argument. A broken film is still a show if something unusual is happening.
Tom can be perfect because somebody else has written every choice for him.
Hollywood responds to the escape as a commercial emergency. The studio worries about lawsuits, angry exhibitors and Tom Baxters leaving other prints. Gil comes to New Jersey because the runaway character is wearing his face and threatening his career.
Gil is attentive and funny, but he has an ego, a job and a plane back to California. His flaws make him attractive to Cecilia. He belongs to her world. Tom offers devotion without uncertainty; Gil offers a future that might exist.
Cecilia chooses Gil. Tom returns to the screen, the stalled picture resumes and the studio’s problem is solved. Gil then leaves without her. The choice is sensible, and reality gives her nothing for making it.
That refusal to protect Cecilia gives the ending its force. The film has borrowed the machinery of romantic comedy, but it won’t produce the expected reward. Gil may have cared for her. He still boards the plane.
Cecilia chooses reality. Reality doesn’t promise to deserve the choice.
Cecilia returns to the Jewel. On screen, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance to Irving Berlin’s Cheek to Cheek in Top Hat. Monk still exists, Gil has gone and Cecilia has lost her job. None of this changes as she watches. Slowly, her attention moves back towards the screen.
The scene distinguishes escape from consolation. A film cannot repair Cecilia’s marriage or pay her bills. It can still give her beauty during an evening that contains very little of it. Treating that pleasure as worthless would be another cruelty.
Willis makes the argument visible. Cecilia’s colour world is drained and cramped. The monochrome film is full of polished floors, evening clothes and soft light. Tom’s step through the screen works because both worlds have been established so clearly. Cecilia’s later move in the other direction feels equally natural.
This was Willis’s final film with Allen. The effects are modest and never distract from Cecilia. The technical trick gets a man through the screen; Farrow makes us understand why he chose her.
At the end, Cecilia knows Astaire is an image and that the music will stop. She smiles anyway. The smile doesn’t solve her life. It tells us she can face another part of it.
Cast and Characters
Mia Farrow
A Depression-era waitress who finds relief from her job, poverty and violent marriage at the Jewel movie theatre.
Jeff Daniels
Daniels plays the fictional explorer who leaves the screen and the Hollywood actor whose face he wears.
Danny Aiello
Cecilia’s gambling, unfaithful husband. His cruelty gives her visits to the cinema a pressing purpose.
Dianne Wiest
Cecilia’s sister and co-worker at the diner, one of the few people close enough to see what her life with Monk is like.
Van Johnson
A performer inside the fictional film, stranded with the rest of the cast when Tom abandons the story.
Zoe Caldwell
One of the screen characters left waiting, and complaining, until Tom decides whether to return.
Fred Astaire, Irving Berlin and the music that draws Cecilia back
Irving Berlin’s Cheek to Cheek opens the film and returns when Cecilia watches Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Top Hat. The song belongs to the polished screen world she depends upon.
Cheek to Cheek
Heard over the opening credits and in the closing sequence from Top Hat, the song is tied to Cecilia’s love of the cinema. After Gil leaves, Astaire and Rogers draw her attention back to the screen.
The songs of Tom Baxter’s world
Music comes easily inside the fictional film. Its characters live in a place where a nightclub, a singer and a polished performance are always nearby.
Jeff Daniels sings I Love My Baby, My Baby Loves Me and Alabamy Bound. Karen Akers performs Dick Hyman’s One Day at a Time as nightclub singer Kitty Haynes.
I Love My Baby, My Baby Loves Me
Jeff Daniels performs the song as Tom Baxter, fitting the cheerful certainty of the film he has left.
Alabamy Bound
Daniels performs another period song that helps establish the fictional picture as a 1930s Hollywood romance.
One Day at a Time
Karen Akers performs Hyman’s song in the nightclub Cecilia visits after entering the screen.
Cheek to Cheek
The film ends with Cecilia in the dark, watching Astaire and Rogers dance as the music gives her a few minutes of relief.
Locations
New York and New Jersey stand in for Cecilia’s Depression-era town and the cinema where fiction breaks its boundary.
Piermont and South Salem supplied much of the period setting. The production also used the Kent Theater in Brooklyn, Bertrand Island in New Jersey and Silvercup Studios in Long Island City.
Piermont
The Hudson River village supplied streets and buildings for Cecilia’s small-town world.
South Salem
Its period architecture extended the 1930s setting beyond the main Piermont locations.
Kent Theater
The cinema on Coney Island Avenue provided interiors for Cecilia’s repeated visits to the Jewel.
Bertrand Island
The former amusement-park site at Mount Arlington was used during the New Jersey shoot.
Silvercup Studios
Studio interiors allowed the crew to control the film’s colour reality and black-and-white fiction.
The Cinema as Refuge
The theatre is Cecilia’s shelter, the border between the two worlds and the place she returns to after both men leave her.
Awards and Recognition
Best Original Screenplay Nomination
Woody Allen was nominated for Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen.
Best Film
The Purple Rose of Cairo won Best Film, credited to Robert Greenhut and Woody Allen.
Best Original Screenplay
Allen won the BAFTA Award for Original Screenplay.
Best Screenplay
Allen won Best Screenplay. The film, Mia Farrow and Jeff Daniels also received nominations.
FIPRESCI Prize
The film shared the International Critics’ Prize at the 1985 festival.
Gordon Willis’s Final Allen Film
The film ended a collaboration that began with Annie Hall and included Manhattan, Stardust Memories and Zelig.
Special Visual Effects Nomination
R/Greenberg Associates was nominated for the effects that let Tom and Cecilia cross the screen.
Fantasy with Consequences
The film remains one of Allen’s clearest accounts of what audiences ask from movies and what movies cannot provide.