Now Playing At the Jewel the Purple Rose of Cairo

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

This movie ought to come adorned with cautionary labels. "Fragile!" "Handle with Care!" "Use No Hooks!" But how do you slap a sticker on a soap bubble? The temptation, then, is simply to let it drift, shimmering and iridescent as it dances on rare currents of wit and nostalgia, and to hope, of course, that it comes to a safe resting place in millions of memories.

The Purple Rose of Cairo is not merely one of the best movies about movies ever made. It is still more unusual, because it comes at its subject the hard way, from the front of the house, instead of from behind the scenes. Its subject is not how movies work but how they work on the audience. Or more accurately, how they once did.

Go back to 1935. The business of movies then was to offer, for a quarter or a dime, a sort of divine otherness, a momentary alternative to the quotidian. This escape took many forms, but a particularly swellegant one could be found in the week's attraction at the Jewel, The Purple Rose of Cairo. In it, Tom Baxter (of the Chicago Baxters), "adventurer and explorer," is discovered by a group of rich idlers in an Egyptian tomb and whisked home with them for "a madcap Manhattan weekend," all supper clubs and penthouses, cocktail shakers and white telephones. Movies like Purple Rose, delicately parodied here, proposed not just the possibility of perfect love at first sight but of permanent romantic transcendence at second glance.

As she watches the film for the fifth time in the Jewel, Cecilia (Mia Farrow) is well lost in pleasure. A New Jersey hash-house waitress, all thumbs and fanzine fantasies, she can remember whom Lew Ayres used to date but not who just ordered eggs over easy. So she has lost her job. Would that she could lose her husband Monk (Danny Aiello) so easily. He is a bruiser who spends his unemployed days pitching pennies with his pals, his nights alternately neglecting or abusing Cecilia. Her life is like a movie, all right, but the wrong kind, the first reel of an old Joan Crawford weeper. But in Cecilia's movie-house refuge, a couple of synapses in her mind clap hands, and her sweet, silly dreams take life. Tom Baxter suddenly starts talking to her from the screen, then hops down off it to escort her out the back door into reality.

Director Woody Allen, Farrow and Jeff Daniels, who plays Tom, handle this moment as if it were the most natural thing in the world. And, indeed, the easy manner of the movie throughout its brief, densely packed running time of 82 minutes is what makes its impossibilities seem credible. Gordon Willis' masterly cinematography is in the same key. He lights the world that Cecilia helps Tom to explore just a little more warmly than it would naturally be, reminding us that the subject of this movie is, and the hidden subject of most old movies was, transfiguration.

It turns out to be a great subject for comedy too. See Tom try to pay for a + restaurant meal with stage money. See his puzzlement when he leaps behind the wheel of a car and it refuses to take off. ("This is real life," practical Cecilia murmurs. "They don't start without a key.") See him plant a perfect movie kiss on her lips and then frown suddenly: "Where's the fade-out? . . . You make love without fade-outs?" But if transfiguration delights those blessed by it, it confounds those it fails to touch. One of the reasons Cecilia loves movies is that the people in them are so "well spoken." But with the mainspring of their plot removed, the characters Tom leaves behind on the screen start squabbling among themselves, all suavity lost.

In far-off Hollywood, there is panic. Is a producer liable for a character who escapes from a film and is wandering around New Jersey in a pith helmet? And what of Gil Shepherd, the actor who created him (also played by Daniels, who is, to borrow one of Tom's favorite words, "fetching" in both roles). In two shakes of a trimotor's tail the West Coast crowd is on the scene, trying to hush things up. This of course puts Gil in place to rival Tom for Cecilia's affections. If fictive Tom reflects innocence in its purest form, Gil embodies it in the hilariously impure form of actor's ego. His conversation consists mostly of quotations from his favorite notices and cheerful agreement with Cecilia's compliments. Daniels thus has two voices in the film's romantic trio, but he hardly drowns out Farrow's lovely performance. She provides the film's moral pivot. Its poignancy, truth and stature as a miniature masterpiece arise out of the hard choice she must finally make between perfect fantasy and imperfect reality.

Obsession with the movies and immersion in fantasy are themes close to Woody Allen's heart. "My golden years of moviegoing were the '40s," he told TIME Reporter-Researcher Elaine Dutka. "I used to come away from those films with my mind racing, great longings and hopes stirred. You wanted to escape to a world so beautiful, exotic, full of surprise."

Purple Rose did not come to Allen as a nostalgic reverie. "About 14 months ago it hit me--in one flash--that a guy, an actor, could come off the screen and involve himself in the real world. Then I started having doubts. It wasn't until I realized that, my God, if he came off the screen, there would be repercussions on the actual actor in Hollywood. And the subject met the criteria for a film worth working on: it could be amusing, touching, interesting to watch, and there was also the proper potential for visuals."

Allen went about making the movie the way he has been working for many years. He shot it near his home in New York City ("You won't find me making a Western or a picture in Mexico"). He also assembled the crew he is accustomed to and some of the same actors. "When you work with the same people, a shorthand develops," he says. "And it's easier for me to criticize people I know than a stranger who feels insecure. I don't have many friends, but I bombard the ones I have with all my ideas."

The one stranger among Allen's regulars was Jeff Daniels, hired through Casting Director Juliet Taylor. But he was a success. "Jeff never spoke to me," Allen reports with satisfaction. "He never once asked me, 'What's this character about?' " What Allen saw in Daniels was a performer with the rare gift of going goofy without losing his romantic appeal. "This is the guy everyone has been looking for: the guy who can do light comedy. There were these players years ago, like Cary Grant, William Powell, Robert Montgomery. This kid is our version of that in the best sense."

Allen is already at work on his next movie, a "serious comedy" called Hannah and Her Sisters, starring himself and Farrow, his companion of four years. Having made 13 films in the past 15 years, he likes being busy. His directorial model is not the legendary raging egomaniac but the quiet craftsman who prides himself on his productivity. "I don't want to get into that commercial film cycle that says that every time a film comes out it has to be hailed as an event," he says. "All the foreign filmmakers I loved, including Bergman, just turned out their pictures." He received an Oscar nomination for directing last year's Broadway Danny Rose ("At first I thought it was a typo"), but he won't be waiting on tiptoe for March 25. "I have the best situation I could have," he maintains. "I make whatever films I want with complete creative freedom." A pause, and then he adds, "You know what I'd really like? It would be nice, just once in my life, to have a big commercial hit, a picture everyone comes to see. Just to see what it feels like."