Movies - The Purple Rose of Cairo

Home > Listing Index > Movies > The Purple Rose of Cairo

	Movies - The Purple Rose of Cairo

The Purple Rose of Cairo is a 1985 film written and directed by Woody Allen. The film earned him a BAFTA Award for Best Film and a César Award for Best Foreign Film; his screenplay was nominated for several major awards, including a BAFTA Award, an Oscar and a Writers Guild of America Award. It was recognized as one of the "ALL-TIME 100 best films" by Time magazine, and Allen has said several times that this is his personal favorite of all the films he has made.

The Purple Rose of Cairo is a film-within-a-film, with Jeff Daniels playing the dual role of Tom, a character in the film-within-the-film, and Gil, the actor who portrayed Tom. Gil breaks the fourth wall, emerging from the black-and-white into the colorful real world on the other side of the theatre's proscenium. Tom is drawn out of the film by Cecilia (played by Mia Farrow), a film buff who goes to the movies to escape her bleak Great Depression life and loveless marriage to Monk (played by Danny Aiello). The producer of the film finds out that Tom has left the film, and he and Gil fly cross-country to the New Jersey theatre where it happened. This sets up an unusual love triangle involving Tom, Gil, and Cecilia.

A number of the scenes featuring Tom and Cecilia are set at the Bertrand Island Amusement Park, which closed just prior to the film's production.

Allen's opinion

In a rare public appearance at the National Film Theatre just after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Allen listed The Purple Rose of Cairo as one of only a few of his films that ended up being "fairly close to what I wanted to do" when he set out to write it. Allen provided more detail about the film's origins in a comment he made a year earlier, during a press junket for Small Time Crooks
: : :Purple Rose was a film that I just locked myself in a room .... I wrote it and halfway through it didn't go anywhere and I put it aside. I didn't know what to do. I toyed around with other ideas. Only when the idea hit me, a long time later, that the real actor comes to town and she has to choose between the actor and the real actor and she chooses the real actor and he dumps her, that was the time it became a real movie. Before that it wasn't. But the whole thing was manufactured.

Cast

Farrow, Daniels, and Aiello play the leading roles. Actors playing significant roles in the film-within-the-film include Van Johnson, Zoe Caldwell, John Wood, Milo O'Shea, and Edward Herrmann. Dianne Wiest and Glenne Headly (among others) play prostitutes whom Tom innocently encounters along the way.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for The Purple Rose of Cairo ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article The Purple Rose of Cairo; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay