Bowen 1 the Purple Rose of Cairo: 1930S Hollywood and the Metafilm

Bowen 1 The Purple Rose of Cairo: 1930s Hollywood and the Metafilm In 1985, Orion films released Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, a romantic tragicomedy that, despite initial negative reception, soon earned praise as a classic, referred to by some reviewers as Allen’s pivotal work. 1 Before it hit the box offices, a Variety review responded to the film’s world premiere at the US Film Festival in January 1985, describing it as “an initially appealing but frustratingly thin conceit [which] should generate only modest b.o.” However, box office successes brought reviews with specific appreciation for this unusually short comic feature; most notably, reviewers marveled at its cinematic structure, calling the narrative “perfectly contained within a spatial framework very like a jewel box.” 2 Praised for its concision and organization, Allen’s “gem” of a film remains noteworthy for its use of a film-within-a- film narrative structure to cast new meaning on what it means to be an audience member to Hollywood productions. As one critic for Film Criticism writes, “ The Purple Rose of Cairo is a metafilm because it challenges its own premise.” 3 The Purple Rose of Cairo opens with a scene of Cecilia on her way to work, pausing to admire the Jewel Cinema and take note of the new feature film. The narrative’s momentum comes from a contrast between Cecilia’s Depression-era reality, complete with an abusive freeloading husband and difficulty keeping her job, and the fantasy and escape that films give her. At the crux of this narrative structure, and at the heart of 1985 reviewers’ praise, is Allen’s comment on Hollywood as providing an alternative reality as an escape for viewers. While some wrote off the film as a “light, almost frivolous treatment of a serious theme…that life just doesn’t turn out the way it 1 George Kimball, "The Purple Rose of Cairo," ( Films & Filming no. 370, 1985), 42. 2 Kimball, 43. 3 Michael Dunne, “Stardust Memories , The Purple Rose of Cairo , and the Tradition of Metafiction,” ( Film Criticism 12, no. 1, 1987), 19. Bowen 2 does (or did) in Hollywood films,” 4 others took note of the film’s tightly composed characters and narrative scope as posing philosophical questions only possible in celluloid: Allen raises doubts about the effectiveness of his medium in order to achieve a new sort of aesthetic order… It suspends the positive and negative, the real and the imaginary, in a purely cinematic form of ambiguity. 5 Woody Allen develops the medium, its structure, and its ambiguous relationship to its viewers through the doubling, or juxtaposition, of reality/fantasy, husband/lover, marriage/love, life/annihilation, and the viewer/viewed. 6 Each of these dichotomies is explored in a complex structure that references the medium of film itself. For example, using the ‘Jewel’ box of the New Jersey town’s cinema, Allen forces his audience to view Cecilia, who views The Purple Rose of Cairo, the characters of which view her in return, and even each other when they realize they have the free will to leave the confines of their script. Like Cecilia at the end, we are crushed to realize that her fantasy does not play out, that her 1930s reality remains, and as the film closes we cope alongside Cecilia through the means we are most familiar with; this time we ease back into reality with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the Jewel’s newest 1930s Hollywood opiate. To understand the structure and motivation behind the metafilm—that type of film which questions its own premise—one reviewer hypothesized that as a director, screenwriter, and actor, Woody Allen had been grappling for years with “Allen’s sub- 4 'Cart,' “The Purple Rose of Cairo: Clever but thin Woody Allen Tragicomedy: Quite Modest B.O. Prospects,” ( Variety 318, no. 1 , 1985), 18. 5 Dunne, 19-27. 6 Arnold Preussner, "Woody Allen's the Purple Rose of Cairo and the Genres of Comedy," ( Literature Film Quarterly 16, no. 1, 1988), 39. Bowen 3 conscious subject- ‘Who am I? Why do I keep doing these things?” 7 To answer this question and addressing the paradox that film is a realistic, gullibility-inducing medium for fantasy, Allen uses comic parody, this time of moviegoing and moviemaking itself during Hollywood’s Golden era. “Allen’s parody [of 1930s film] is so perfectly executed that our experience of the black-and-white Purple Rose can draw on our previous experience of the genre.” 8 One reviewer takes the critique further, arguing that Allen himself remains somewhat hostile to the process of filmmaking itself: Allen’s true position, his true peculiarity, is still somewhere else. It is that of a commercial film-maker with an unprecedented degree of self- sufficiency and control, who in his usual triple-threat function might be said to be all over his films, and yet who remains somehow outside of and hostile to film itself. Certainly all his recent work looks like an effort to contain and reduce the medium.” 9 Reviewers claimed Allen contained and reduced the medium in direct and seamless ways, for example in using stark black and white title sequences in a color picture, developing few characters and reducing the rest to faces defined by roles, even using the same casts across his films (Mia Farrow appeared in three films of his before Purple Rose) , and consistently abbreviating running times. A local reviewer, knowing Woody Allen as a columnist and prose-writer, agreed, stating: “Mr. Allen's virtuosity as a prose author has found its nearly perfect screen equivalent.” 10 Still other reviewers likened Purple Rose ’s metastructure to the classic comedies of Keaton and others. “The unruly gag structures of the earlier films have merely been 7 Kimball, 43. 8 Dunne, 24. 9 Richard Combs, "The Purple Rose of Cairo," ( Monthly Film Bulletin LII, no. 618, 1985), 203. 10 Vincent Canby, "Screen: Woody Allen's New Comedy, ' Purple Rose of Cairo'." ( The New York Times, 1 Mar 1985). Bowen 4 tidied into one-joke movies, or feature-length series of puns on one central absurdity.” 11 The pun of escapism is one of actually escaping one’s world through the movies. 12 Here we see Baxtor’s physical escape from the silver screen, Cecilia’s escape into his ‘reality’ in due time, and finally each one’s inability to occupy the other’s reality infinitely. It is important to note that however strongly reviewers advocate Purple Rose as the authoritative metafilm, Allen’s choice of the 1930s setting is an appropriate one for a modern film that questions the film’s role in society and its relationship to its viewership. The Purple Rose of Cairo, the film on the screen at the Jewel Theatre in Allen’s film by the same name, is a production from the ‘golden’ era of Hollywood of the 1930s, and it smacks of the luxury, musical style, and fixation on wealthy socialites, and even elements of racism that comprised the formula for so many films of that era and starkly contrasted with every-day life. Though the 1930s audience would not have been the only to empathize with Purple Rose. Even in 1985 Piedmont, New Jersey, where Allen’s film is set, local residents chuckle: “’The big joke in Rockland County,’ said George Walter, who has owned the Piermont Liquor Store for 38 years, ‘is that they're sprucing up Piermont to make it look like a Depression town.’” 13 As we see in Purple Rose , Hollywood continues filled the demand for a viewer experience external to reality, and escapism became the raison d’etre for filmmaking during the 1930s and all times, as suggested by Allen’s 1985 film. One reviewer highlights the timelessness of the metafilm, writing “Woody Allen is one of the great originals in his own right, the rightful heir to those old comic geniuses, and his talent would have fitted him any time in movie history.” 14 Even reviewers who 11 Ibid., 203. 12 Ibid., 204. 13 Jeffrey Schmalz, "Star-Struck Village Gets Facelift by Woody Allen," ( The New York Times, December 6, 1983). 14 John Kobal, “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” ( Films and Filming no . 368, 1985), 30. Bowen 5 were not so flattering of Allen see the parallel: “Critics here in America are hailing is as the best film of the year, and some have gone slightly pottier. Keaton never got such reviews for any of his films and maybe the New York critics who know all about that are trying to make up for past oversights.” 15 In conclusion, its status as the modern metafilm earned The Purple Rose of Cairo critical acclaim and enviable labels; from the “perfect specimen” 16 to “one of the best movies about movies ever made.” 17 Allen’s film was almost universally accepted as a successful examination of character/audience and reality/fantasy ambiguities that are inherent in the medium of film. In the viewing experience, “desire triumphs over reason when we indulge such hopes” as those of the main characters, despite our (and in this case their) knowledge that the filmic world is fantasy. 18 Not only is Purple Rose “a remarkable tribute to the magic of the movies as well as a sardonic comment on the awed gullibility of us, the audience,” but it also takes “interesting stabs and the relationship of the film artist to his creations… it represents a true experience of movie-going.” 19 Aptly put by one moviegoer in the film, ‘I want what happened in the movie last week to happen again this week, otherwise what’s life all about?’” The predictability of 1930s cinema is a value unachievable in other aspects of Depression-era life.

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