Through a Glass Darkly

The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985): Allen evokes hard times, 1935, when the movie house was a repository of far-off dreams for the hopeless urban shuffler: a brown Jersey factory town, waitress-housewife with a deadbeat husband, mean diner patrons in the morning and beatings in the night. On her fifth pilgrimage of the week to watch Gil Shepherd in The Purple Rose of Cairo, Shepherd’s character notices her in the audience and breaks off the picture to enter the real world and take her away. Baxter soon hears word of this on the West Coast and comes to take his creation back and return him to fiction, in a strange scenario that bittersweetly sums up the seduction and folly of Hollywood “fandom.” 

The concept has precedents going back to Sunset Boulevard and especially the Twilight Zone episode “The 16-Millimetre Shrine,” where after seeing a has-been actress unsuccessfully try to make a comeback in Hollywood, the actress’s agent enters her living room to find that she has finally vanished into the celluloid of one of her old home movies, blowing a kiss to her audience before receding into fiction forever. Allen analyzes this type of escapist fantasy, which Rod Serling rendered chillingly, from an angle that is more romantic and light but refuses any mawkish conclusions nevertheless. 

Allen’s mise-en-scene, which was pretentious in the other films I’ve seen (Manhattan, A Rainy Day in New York), is of a refreshingly modest intelligence here — one remembers the image of Cecilia’s husband sheepishly standing behind his bedroom door after being caught cheating, or the use of the town’s vacant theme park, closed-down and overgrown from the Depression, as a backdrop for the film’s romance. In its best moments, Allen achieves a ghostly beauty in this fable about the flittering illusions of parasocial relationships with art and artists. 

Score: 3.5/5

Intruder in the Dust (1949): A handsome, respectable product of Hollywood filmmaking, which is a branding you probably do not want for a film about a Mississipi mob lynching and the American South’s heart of darkness. A land-owning black man (the intriguingly gnomic Juano Hernandez), whose indifference to racial hierarchy baffles and enrages his white neighbours, is sentenced to hang for the murder of a sawmill worker. The townspeople ‘tailgate’ the execution like a kind of carnival attraction, parking their cars outside of the jailhouse in droves for a Summer's day out. The catch is that the man is being framed, the murdered’s brother did it to steal lumber from his sawmill, and it takes a handful of sympathetic townspeople fishing the corpse out of a remote quicksand pit where the Cain hid him to reveal this ugly truth and stop the madness.

The film carries various markers of studio ‘prestige’ and artistic Importance: the socially conscious subject matter, the authentic location-filming in Mississipi, the “shocking” utterances of the N-word (permitted for the first time in a Hollywood film since pre-Code days), and the absence of a musical soundtrack (a highly welcome absence, jangly orchestral music being the absolute bane of Old Hollywood cinema that every cinephile merely comes to tolerate through experience). Clarence Brown isn’t able to coordinate all of this expenditure into something really interesting, it’s rather empty and boring, but it has a very fine pictorial sense (Brown started in silent films, always a tell) that makes you wonder the next day if it’s better than you’re giving it credit for. 

Score: 2.5/5