Purple Rain (1984, Dir. Albert Magnoli):
Now that we’re just beginning to process the untimely passing of the Artist formerly known as Prince Rodgers Nelson, we can brace ourselves for memorializing aplenty in the months ahead. YouTube, once completely barren of Prince’s music videos (protective of his intellectual property to the end, the Purple One always kept his catalog under heavy wraps) has been all but overrun over the past week with every music and concert clip imaginable. A mammoth tribute concert is no doubt in the offing, along with reissues of all the classic albums, and reams of unpublished material will finally see the light of iTunes. But as a fitting send-off for the prodigiously talented Artist, you could do much worse than a viewing of Purple Rain.
It would be a mistake to say that Purple Rain was the film that made Prince a superstar — “Little Red Corvette,” “1999” and a host of other pop/funk classics prior to the movie’s release had already assured him of that status. But it was Purple Rain that cemented him in the public psyche, and for good reason. Take the soundtrack for a start — Prince and director Albert Magnoli whittled down a list of 100 songs to select the 9 tracks that made the album, based purely on dramatic concerns, and how well the songs would fit in the context of the movie. In the process, they didn’t create an archetypal Prince album as much as an apotheosis, injecting his signature funk with psychedelic showmanship and arena anthem intensity. Prince would funk harder in the future, but he would never again rock quite so convincingly, and so directly, into the mainstream. For listeners in middle America settled comfortably in conformist mid-80s pop, the soundtrack album was everything they didn’t know they needed, and make no mistake, middle America played a key role in Purple Rain‘s success. The movie was originally intended to be a throwaway flick at drive-ins, but when audiences in the heartland went apeshit over early screenings, it was immediately booked across the country, and eventually made back over ten times its budget.
As for the movie itself, it’s everything a rock musical should be — wild, campy, awkward, incendiary and finally transcendent. Deploying the tropes of ’50s cinema (a rebel without a cause, an innocent ingenue ready to leave her mark on show business) within a candy-colored, multicultural milieu, it might not win points for originality, but it excites through sheer chutzpah. The film’s opening salvo is still one of the great overtures of any rock musical: The Kid (Prince) and his band the Revolution rock the stage of Minneapolis’s First Avenue nightclub with “Let’s Go Crazy,” while his rival, the scene-stealing Morris Day, swoops onto the scene like a bird of prey in spats and heavy overcoat, and comely Apollonia (Apollonia Kotero) stumbles into town, near-broke and raring to become a star. Magnoli’s film career never amounted to much (he’s best known for mashing Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell together in Tango and Cash), but the initial rush of images in Purple Rain is cut with whip-crack timing. The MTV aesthetics of big hair, big music, and ostentatious editing are in full bloom here, no apologies offered or needed. After that opening, it’s all about Boy Meets Girl and Almost Loses Girl. The volatile Kid, plagued with a tumultuous home life and doubts about whether he’ll ever hit the big time, romances Apollonia, while Morris and his right-hand homie Jerome (Jerome Benton) scheme to bring her into their fold as well as unseat the Kid as the King of First Avenue. Cue plenty of pouting, concert setpieces, misogyny, and melodrama.
Purple Rain isn’t smooth sailing; whenever we leave the confines of magical First Avenue, things threaten to grind to a halt. Prince and Apollonia make for an impossibly beautiful couple, but they’re much more convincing flirting at each other from a distance than getting hot and heavy. Prince’s coy magnetism has always rested more on the promise of sexual delight than the actual consummation of it, and when he and Apollonia lock lips, they’re amusingly clumsy, like kids playing doctor for the first time. On the other end of the spectrum, there’s few moments in movies that can match the scene in which Prince sings “The Beautiful Ones,” building his performance to a scorching pitch of longing and self-pity, all his angst directed at Apollonia, who can only sit stunned in the crowd, as if she’s a Blade Runner replicant on the verge of an emotional meltdown.
Fortunately there’s enough music, and enough flair from Magnoli, to paper over most of the plot and acting weaknesses. The film’s secret weapon is Morris Day — swaggering and riding the edge of self-parody, both a pimp and the butt of the joke, his performance would end up influencing whole generations of motor-mouthed comedians from Chris Rock to Kevin Hart. Day’s repartee with Benton, like a downtown version of Abbott and Costello (complete with their own version of the “who’s on first” joke) turns out to be so memorable that Prince ended up copying Day’s performance when he teamed up with Benton for his next film, Under the Cherry Moon. Despite Prince’s one-of-a-kind persona, the film is intent on presenting him as your standard tortured macho artist, in danger of following in his father’s abusive footsteps. While he doesn’t have much of a character to play, at least he’s surrounded with a host of supporting actors who might not have Oscar-worthy chops but visually make quite an impression: rotund, bespectacled Billy Parks as the confrontational manager of First Avenue; Prince’s real-life bandmates Wendy and Lisa as rebellious members of the Kid’s band, both as spiky as their hair; Jill Jones as a gum-popping, platinum blonde waitress with a thing for the Kid; and Clarence Williams III as the Kid’s alcoholic father, bringing home the film’s most dramatically credible moment as he reflects on dreams lost. More than anything else, it’s the movie’s human palette that stands out — a mix of white, black and café au lait faces, all lit in reds, oranges, blues and (yes) purples, Purple Rain represents Prince’s Utopian vision of Beautiful Ones from all races getting down together, a notion no less audacious now in these racially apprehensive times than it was back in 1985.
Hey, check it all out
Baby I know what it’s all about
Before the night is through
U will see my point of view
Even if I have 2 scream and shout
— Prince, “Baby, I’m a Star”
Despite all the clichés, Purple Rain works because of that music — when “When Doves Cry” thumps its way onto the soundtrack, and song and image meld together to tell the story, the effect is striking. And there’s nothing quite like Prince as a camera subject. Refusing to pigeonhole himself, androgynous in frilly clothes and poofy hair, this is a man who always let his freak flag fly, and he floats between the masculine and feminine within the bat of an eyelash. (Talk about being both King and Queen.) He can shred like Hendrix, preen like the best divas, scream out a soul tune like the Godfather James Brown, or raise his voice to a hiccup-y falsetto as a come-on. When he’s onstage, stripped to the waist, or wailing on his cream-colored guitar, or simply dominating the moment, Purple Rain soars, and the film wisely saves its biggest moment of release for the concert finale, as the Kid finally comes up with a song that will cement his fame. Much to the film’s (and our) good fortune, that song turns out to be a bona fide classic, “Purple Rain,” and Magnoli doesn’t need to do anything other than place Prince in the center of the frame as the Kid forges revelation, resolution and triumph. The movie’s two encore songs, “I Would Die 4 U” and “Baby, I’m a Star,” are another turning point, as Prince the actor (as well as Prince the musician) finds himself. No more angst, only pop’s greatest showman fully unleashed, teasing the crowd with a smirk, dancing up a whirling dervish of a storm, breaking through the fourth wall to take the audience in with a conquering gaze, and embracing the stardom that was always meant for him.
“May u live 2 see the dawn,” reads the epitaph at the end of Purple Rain‘s credits, and the movie was the dawn of Prince as an unstoppable force, a genre unto himself. Few have been able to outdo his creativity and productivity over the decades, yet Prince the man would remain unknowable. (“I’m not your lover/ I’m not your friend/ I’m something that you’ll never comprehend,” he sings in “I Would Die 4 U”.) Forever cloaking his life, throwing on different musical personalities like hats, he was one royal who refused to surrender his mystique, to the very end. With all its warts, Purple Rain is an electrifying document of that mystique. Even though the film’s vision of our rock-pop future never came to pass, it’s still a glorious place to visit, and for the movie’s running time at least, we can imagine Minneapolis as the center of the universe, with its beneficent ruler clothed in purple. ■
