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ARTISAN REVIEW
classical style of American sound films. The great movie genres of the
thirties - the gangster movie, the horror film, the screwball comedy, the
dance musical, the road movie, the social-consciousness drama, the ani–
mated cartoon - have shown enduring vitality. They still influence the
way our movies are made, while the films themselves evoke nostalgia or
affectionate imitation.
Woody Allen's clever movie
The Purple Rose of Cairo,
a pastiche of
Depression cliches, lovingly portrays the Janus-faced culture of the era.
Mia Farrow appears as a waitress in a jerkwater town who lives out her
fantasies by going to the movies, while Danny Aiello plays her unem–
ployed husband, a blue-collar lout who belongs to the drab and boring
life she's trying to forget. Jeff Daniels plays a character who literally steps
off the screen to add a little magic and romance to her pinched world.
If you look at the movie within the movie, the film she keeps going
back to see, you encounter Woody Allen's version of the fantasy itself.
We get glimpses of wealthy, frivolous idlers making silly banter on
movie-sets designed to look like cavernous living rooms, glitzy night–
clubs, or Egyptian tombs. Such cheesy but exotic settings parody the fa–
mous Depression idea of the careless rich living a life of pure swank and
style. But the movie also shows us the other side of the story: the small
town so idle and empty it looks like a picture postcard; the husband out
of work, supported by a waif-like wife as he hangs out with the boys;
the movie theater as the sce!le of communal daydreaming where ordinary
people feed on escapist images of wealth, adventure, and romance.
Woody Allen was a master at manipulating movie cliches, simplifying
them, satirizing them, infusing them (as Chaplin did) with his own kind
of little-man pathos. Dennis Potter did the same thing for .the English
common man, Depression-style, in his wildly original series
Pennies From
Heaven .
Bob Hoskins plays a sheet-music salesman with a bossy, repressed
wife and ashy, dreamy love for the music and lyrics that light up his
gray, constricted world. They are his romantic outlet as he lip-synchs his
feelings to the incongruous sound of the oId recordings. He looks
longingly to America as the place the best songs come from, but also as
the fantasy land where those songs come true.
Psychological studies of the Depression have shown how economic
problems were complicated by emotional problems, since the stress of
hard times, no matter how impersonal their origin, undercut their vic–
tims' feelings of confidence, self-worth, even their sense of reality. The
psychological pain was exacerbated by the American ethic of self-help
and individualism, remnants of a frontier mentality - the same dream of
success, dignity, and opportunity that had inspired immigrants, freed slaves
