Cinema: Now Playing At the Jewel the Purple Rose of Cairo

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.