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The Purple Rose of Cairo
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The Purple Rose of Cairo is an award-winning 1985 film written and directed by Woody Allen. It tells the story of a film character who leaves the film and enters the real world.
Contents
- 1 Synopsis
- 2 Filming locations
- 3 Cast
- 4 Allen's opinion
- 5 Box office
- 6 Awards
- 7 External links
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Synopsis
The Purple Rose of Cairo is the name of a film-within-the-film, with Jeff Daniels playing the dual roles of Tom, a character in the film-within-the-film, and Gil, the actor who portrays Tom. Tom literally breaks the fourth wall, emerging from the black-and-white into the colorful real world on the other side of the cinema's screen. He is drawn out 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 (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 theater where it happened. This sets up an unusual love triangle involving Tom, Gil and Cecilia.
Filming locations
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.
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.
Allen's opinion
In a rare public appearance at the National Film Theatre in 2001, 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.[1] 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:
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| Purple Rose was a film that I just locked myself in a room [to write].... 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 [screen] 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.[2]
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Spoilers end here.
Box office
The Purple Rose of Cairo opened in North America on March 1, 1985 in 3 theatres, where it grossed an exceptional $114,095 ($38,031 per screen) in its opening weekend. Box office settled down upon further expansions, and its total gross of $10,631,333 was in line with most Woody Allen films of the period[3].
Awards
The film won the
BAFTA Award for Best Film and the
César Award for Best Foreign Film. Allen's screenplay was nominated for several major awards, including an
Oscar, a
BAFTA Award and a
Writers Guild of America Award. It was recognized as one of the "ALL-TIME 100 best films" by
Time magazine.
[citation needed]
