Allen frequently reminds us of the magical escape the movies can provide for those dissatisfied with their lives. Many of Allen’s personas (e.g., Alvy, Isaac, Mickey, and Cliff) anchor elements of their lives in the meaning and pleasure that moviegoing affords. Play It Again, Sam focuses on Allan Felix’s attempts to augment his disappointing romantic life with his fantasies of transforming himself into the successful Bogart persona. In that film’s opening scene, Allen demonstrates both the wonder of the filmgoing experience and the awful letdown that occurs when the movie ends and one must go back out into the world.
Allan Felix is able to retain some of that magic by internalizing the Bogart persona and relying upon it for advice in dealing with his many frustrations. Thus, like Tom Baxter in The Purple Rose of Cairo (the film within the film; hereafter referred to as “the inner Cairo”), Bogart is able to step off the screen and into the life of a fan. This use of fantasy becomes therapeutic in Sam, with Allan slowly weaning himself from his daydream until he is able to leave it behind in the fog of the San Francisco airport. In Cairo, Cecilia’s experience with the magic of film is less satisfying.
Perhaps Woody Allen’s most famous story is “The Kugelmass Episode,” which first appeared in The New Yorker (May 2, 1977, pp. 34–39) and later in his book Side Effects (1980). The story describes an English professor named Kugelmass who is able to transport himself into the literature of his choice with the help of a magician named Persky the Great. Kugelmass, who has always romanticized his feelings for Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, is thus able to fulfill his dreams by entering the novel and engaging in a passionate affair with the woman of his dreams. But, as Madame Bovary learns more about Kugelmass’s “real” world, she longs to enter it and seek its pleasures. Persky is able to make her dream come true by bringing her into the real world for a weekend, but when Persky has trouble sending her back, the romance fades. Once Persky has finally removed Emma, Kugelmass resolves to be satisfied with reality as it is. Eventually, however, he reneges on his vow and has Persky send him into other books. At the story’s conclusion, when Persky dies of a heart attack, Kugelmass is stranded in Remedial Spanish, where he is doomed to be chased forever by the irregular verb tener (to have). The Purple Rose of Cairo reverses and expands this entertaining idea into the realm of film, with much more serious philosophic and moral overtones.
After Stardust Memories (1980), many critics accused Allen of showing disdain for his fans and demonstrating a lack of empathy for ordinary people in love with the escapist magic of the cinema. Anyone who thinks that Woody Allen scorns the cinema fan should see Cairo, a film with a starstruck moviegoer as its sympathetic main character.
This is also Allen’s first film with a female protagonist. While it might be said that the most important characters in Interiors are women, that was more of an ensemble piece. In Cairo there is no question that Cecilia (Mia Farrow) is the central figure in the plot. In fact, it is even possible to interpret the story of Tom Baxter’s descent from the screen as no more than a fantasy in the mind of Cecilia while she watches the film-within-the-film (the “inner Cairo”) for the fifth time. It is interesting to compare Cecilia to the typical Allen personas that have appeared in his films.
Cecilia can accurately be described as the female equivalent of the “little man,” a person victimized by an unfeeling world more interested in the material manifestations of success than in the imaginative sensitivities of someone easily defined as a “loser.” Like Allan Felix or Danny Rose, Cecilia is a person whose dreams far outdistance the harsh realities of her life, and who, through an unusual situation, is given the opportunity to make some of her dreams come true.
With Danny she shares a nurturing spirit. Just as he devoted his life to looking after the interests of others, often getting very little in return, so Cecilia, in the film’s opening scenes, is depicted as someone whose primary role is to look after the needs of others. However, Cecilia’s role seems less chosen, less a function of her own urges and aspirations, than Danny’s. After all, Danny, in the final analysis, hugely enjoys his job as a personal manager, even to the dismal performers he usually represents. Further, he views his sacrifice as a worthwhile and necessary one, not only for moral reasons, but because he truly believes that one day he could be transformed from a “bum” into a “showbiz hero.” Of course, the very telling of his story is evidence that this dream has come true.
Cecilia, on the other hand, is a Depression-era waitress in New Jersey, the sole wage-earner for herself and her husband, Monk (Danny Aiello), an unemployed lout who pitches pennies all day and carouses at night. Her sole pleasure comes from the world of fantasy she enters when she goes to the movies. During her days at the restaurant, she talks endlessly with her sister, another waitress, about the details of each of the films and the gossip she has read in the picture magazines. Her constant daydreaming makes her so slow and clumsy at her job that her boss is always after her to quit socializing and get back to work.
Cecilia’s jobs as waitress and wife are not, by any stretch of the imagination, capable of fulfilling her dreams. If anything, they are impediments to the one activity that offers her any hope of escape or stimulation, namely moviegoing. The film makes clear that whatever romance was connected with Monk’s initial courting was short-lived and woefully beneath her cinematic standards of romance. Their marriage is really one of convenience—his convenience. Cecilia is a resource Monk can exploit for financial support and for her services as maid and cook. Alternating between his two strategies of groveling and intimidation, he is able to keep her “in shape” so that he can pursue his real interests in life: drinking, gambling, whoring, and eating.
One night, Cecilia comes home from her solitary evening at the movies to discover her husband engaged in drunken revelry with another woman. Her initial reaction is to pack her bags and leave, but with nowhere to go, in the end she returns home. Her glimpse of a prostitute (Dianne Wiest) entering a bar and an overheard remark about making some money frighten her about the possible consequences of leaving her husband for good. The next day, back at her job, when her sister tries to get her to leave Monk by fixing her up with an eligible exterminator, Cecilia is so flustered that she drops a plate and is fired on the spot.
Cecilia was given the waitress job not on her own merits, but through the influence of her sister (played by Farrow’s actual sister, Stephanie). Her boss also works to keep her “in shape” so that he can accomplish his aim, the running of a profitable business. That his interest in her is determined by how much she can contribute to that aim is demonstrated by his willingness to fire her—and her more efficient sister as well, as soon as he decides that she is more trouble than she is worth. Not that Cecilia’s firing isn’t justified. She returns her boss’s indifference in equal measure. Indeed, her primary goal at work is to become so absorbed in her gossiping and daydreaming that she is effectively able to forget where she is.
In describing Cecilia, Douglas Brode remarks
In true Woody Allen fashion, her plight is schematized through her relationship to food. It’s not for nothing Allen makes her a waitress rather than assigning her some other equally drab job (sales clerk, secretary). Early on, we see her mumbling mindlessly about her movie-fed fantasies even as she none too effectively serves food to a very real, and, very hungry, clientele. At the greasy spoon diner, Cecilia daydreams about those people glimpsed eating at the Copacabana. Understandably, then, her relationship with her husband is defined by images not of affection or even marital responsibility but of food: “Any more meat loaf left?” is all Monk (Danny Aiello) wants to know. The highest compliment he can extend refers to a successful meal: “That stuff you made yesterday was delicious.” When Cecilia considers leaving him, he’s less worried about losing her sexually (he’s already sleeping with someone else) or even her financial support (she works, he doesn’t) than about his stomach: “I want my supper” is all he can say to a wife desperately walking out the door [1985, pp. 247–248].
Later, in her relationships with both Tom and Gil, she always seems to be the one providing the food. We watch her drinking champagne with Tom, and we hear Gil offer to take her to lunch, but we never see her actually eating.
After losing her job, needing to escape more than ever, Cecilia returns to the one film playing in town, the inner Cairo. She spends the afternoon sitting through it again and again, until a startling thing happens: one of the film’s characters, the idealistic explorer and adventurer Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels), pauses and addresses her directly from the screen. To everyone’s amazement, including that of the other characters in the film, Tom is able to come off the screen and run into the night with Cecilia. This rip in the fabric of reality creates a multitude of complications.
Unlike Allan Felix’s conversations with the Bogart persona in Sam, Tom Baxter’s departure from the screen is not portrayed as a private event affecting the life of only one person; nor is Tom solely a fantasy figure who appears and disappears when needed by the main protagonist. On the contrary, Tom becomes a character in his own right in the supposedly “real world.” However, being viewed as “fictional” by others who regard themselves as “real” (although, of course, they are equally fictional) leads to his victimization and eventual destruction, a destruction for which Cecilia shares responsibility.
For Cecilia, although unquestionably the primary protaganist, is not the only Allenesque “little man” in the film. Tom is perhaps the ultimate little-man character. With a childlike innocence and naiveté which surpasses even that of Chaplin’s little tramp, Tom is a spunky explorer with a streak of impulsiveness who lives by a firm code of traditional moral values, the same values for which Allen’s other personas often yearn when faced with a modern world corrupted by hedonism.
We first see Tom as a character in the inner Cairo, a carefully constructed homage to the wildly escapist Hollywood films of the thirties in which sophisticated men and women, for whom money never seems to be a problem, move through a world of witty conversation, champagne dinners, nightclubbing, and exotic locales. The plots of such films (epitomized by the Astaire-Rogers musicals) often turned on minor romantic difficulties, which always resolved themselves happily by the final reel.
The inner film begins with the credits presented on engraved white calling cards as lively and exotic music plays (in contrast to the credits of the outer Cairo, which conform to Allen’s custom of white titles on a black background). We see a playwright, Henry (Edward Herrman), dressed in black tie and tails, smoking a cigarette while seated at a white piano in a stylized movie apartment. His opening speech typifies the superficial concerns that drove the plots of so many such films. Complaining that he is bored with “cocktail parties and opening nights,” Henry rejects Jason’s suggestion that they book their “usual suite” at the Ritz in Paris in favor of an exotic trip to Egypt. While this beginning superficially has the light, airy touch of the Astaire-Rogers musical, the playwright’s attitude also manages to convey an element of mock-existential ennui similar to that of an Alvy or an Isaac.
Cutting to the interior of a Pyramid obviously filmed on a Hollywood soundstage, we see our heroes dressed causally, and impeccably, as they inspect the ruins. Just as the faithful sidekick Jason (John Wood) expresses comic concern about the possibility of feeling the Mummy’s hand around his throat, out pops Tom from a small opening in the chamber wall. He completely defines his character in his opening lines:
TOM: Oh! I’m awfully sorry! Tom Baxter, explorer, adventurer. I’m doing a little archeological work.
RITA: A real-life explorer!
TOM: I’ve come in search of the Purple Rose of Cairo. It’s an old legend that has fascinated me for years. A pharaoh had a rose painted purple for his queen, and now the story says purple roses grow wild at her tomb.
RITA: How romantic!
TOM: And you?
HENRY: We’re going back to New York tomorrow. It’s been a refreshing two weeks.
JASON: Say, we could bring him back to meet the countess! She loves anything in a pith helmet!
HENRY: Right!
TOM: I will say it’s tempting.
HENRY: Then it’s all settled. You can explain to us what we have been looking at for the past two weeks, and we can go take you nightclubbing!
TOM: It’s so impulsive, but I’ll come! Why not? What’s life without a little risk-taking! Who knows, a fortuneteller predicted I’d fall in love in New York.
The incongruity and artificiality of this interchange demonstrates the peculiar tone of films in which every line must advance the plot. Thus Tom Baxter is quickly categorized as an aging Tom Swift, an all–American boy accustomed to the good life and ready for anything. His fascination with the legend of the Purple Rose of Cairo symbolizes both his and Cecilia’s most desired dream: to transform a work of art, such as the pharaoh’s painted rose (or, for our purposes, tinted celluloid), into something miraculously real, like living purple roses or a liberated fictional character.
When Tom magically develops the ability not only to come alive and look back at the audience watching him, but also to choose his own actions outside the context of the inner film’s script, he fulfills his character’s inherent romanticism by again acting impulsively. He leaves the security of the screen to learn more about the mysterious “real” woman who has come to see him so many times. Like a modern-day Pinocchio, Tom is brought to life by the loneliness and suffering of another.
Again and again, we and Cecilia have heard Tom express his surprise at the fact that only twenty-four hours before he was alone in an Egyptian tomb (metaphorically dead), and now (still dressed in his pith helmet and safari suit), he is surrounded by new friends and “on the verge of a madcap Manhattan weekend.” This time, however, after pausing in the middle of his lines, Tom directly addresses Cecilia, then chooses to leave the tomb represented by the fixed structure of the film in order to pursue the liberty and romance suddenly available to him.
Yelling, “I’m free, I’m free!” he begs her to hide him and tells her that because he’s managed to get out of the film before the Copacabana scene, he no longer has to marry Kitty Haynes (Karen Akers). In fact, now that he’s met Cecilia, he can rid himself of the charade of romancing and marrying a woman who he says isn’t even his type. (“She’s too boney!”)
Missing a crucial character, the rest of the inner film’s cast is at a loss. Because none of them were written with Tom’s idealism or his impulsive streak, they are trapped within the film, unable to escape. They bicker among themselves like critics over the film’s real meaning and their relative importance as characters. Each argues that his own role carries the weight of the movie’s meaning and that the others’ roles are subordinate.
The theater manager (Irving Metzman) tries to ease the characters’ confusion and concerns, but when an usherette suggests to him that he consider turning off the projector, Henry (a playwright like Allen and clearly the film’s deepest thinker) begs him not to do so:
HENRY: No, no! Don’t turn the projector off! No, no, it gets black and we disappear…. But you don’t understand what it’s like to disappear, to be nothing, to be annihilated!
Here Henry demonstrates that he is plagued by the same sorts of existential ghosts that haunt “real” contemporary artists such as Alvy and Isaac. Like them, he is filled with Heideggerean dread at the prospect of death (non-being). However, unlike “real” people, he has had the added misfortune of actually experiencing nothingness and returning to tell the tale. His terror at the prospect of the projector being turned off, a fate which we know befalls him after the last show every night, only confirms our human fears that even a momentary stoppage of being is a horror beyond our collective imagination.
As we find out more about the fate of those trapped onscreen, we learn their existence is like that of the mythical Sisyphus (or the characters in Sartre’s No Exit), doomed to repeat the same tasks again and again with no hope of completion or escape. Given this condition, it is not surprising that the denizens of such a land envy the mortals in the audience. They envy us for our lack of foreknowledge concerning our fates, and especially for our ontological freedom to choose our own acts. We, unlike them, can have some impact on the roles we play in a picture shown only once.
Eventually, the theater manager complains to the film’s producer, Raoul Hirsh (Alexander Cohen), whose name is a play on that of Raoul Walsh, a well-known filmmaker of the era. Fearful of the economic and legal consequences of characters walking off the screen and getting into who knows what kind of trouble, the studio sends a group of representatives, including Gil Shepherd (Jeff Daniels), the actor who plays Tom, to get everything back under control.
Meanwhile, Cecilia hides Tom at the local amusement park, which is closed for the season, and goes home, where she conceals from Monk everything that has occurred. Later that evening, the naive Tom, believing himself to have fallen in love with Cecilia, takes her out for an expensive evening of dinner and dancing at a local club. However, when the time comes to pay the bill, Tom discovers that his pockets are filled only with stage money, and they have to make a run for it.
From this point, the film, like the Kugelmass story, shows the results of tinkering with the line separating reality from fantasy. Tom is baffled by all the things he doesn’t know about: the Depression, the Great War, and the mysteries of childbirth, death, and God. He is astonished to discover that cars don’t just move on their own (they need keys to start), and that there are women who are willing to engage in sex for money with men they don’t love. Despite these revelations, Tom keeps his idealistic spirit and clings to his moral principles.
Cecilia is hysterical with pleasure when she meets Gil Shepherd, the actor who played Tom Baxter in the inner film. We first see Gil boasting to a reporter about his abilities and his great plans for his future, especially his desire to play Lindbergh in an upcoming film. When his agent (Michael Tucker) tells Gil about the problem with Tom Baxter, they worry that this could mean the end of Gil’s career just when it was starting to take off. Overcoming his fear of flying, Gil rushes to New Jersey, where he searches frantically for Tom so that he can get him back onto the screen.
When Cecilia mistakes Gil for Tom in a shop, he begs her to take him to his double, promising that he is not angry with him. But when Gil confronts Tom, he is very angry indeed, berating him for the damage done to his career, threatening to get lawyers, the police, and even the FBI after him. Eventually, however, Gil appears to be attracted by Cecilia’s “magic glow,” and he claims to have also fallen in love with her.
In a reversal of the usual Pygmalion relationship between the Allen persona and a woman, this time the woman is in the role of mentor. We see Cecilia taking Tom on a tour of the town as she explains various puzzling aspects of the real world: a line at a soup kitchen, a pregnant woman with a child, and a church. In the church, Tom examines a crucifix as Cecilia tries to explain the meaning of religion:
TOM: It’s beautiful. I’m not sure exactly what it is.
CECILIA: This is a church. You do believe in God, don’t you?
TOM: Meaning?
CECILIA: That there’s a reason for everything, for our world, for the universe!
TOM: Oh, I think I know what you mean: the two men who wrote The Purple Rose of Cairo, Irving Sachs and R. H. Levine, they’re writers who collaborate on films.
CECILIA: No, no, I’m talking about something much bigger that that! No, think for a minute. A reason for everything. Otherwise, it would be like a movie with no point, and no happy ending!
Yacowar points out that
Allen’s absence from this film coheres with the theme of an absent maker in the fictional cosmos. The inner film credits producer Raoul Hirsh but no director; there is no director in a world where God is dead.… To Cecilia, a world without God would be “a world without point and no happy ending”—i.e., the world in which Allen leaves her, with only the idol worship of the silver screen to console her. Without God behind the creatures, the only good shepherd is the culpable Gil Shepherd [1991, p. 249].
Monk discovers them and tries to get Cecilia to come home. When he starts pushing her around, Tom declares his love for her and challenges Monk to a fight. Initially, Tom is able to defeat Monk, but when Monk appears to be beaten and Tom offers to help him up like a gentleman, Monk takes advantage of Tom’s naiveté and knees him in the groin. With his new advantage, Monk is now able to easily defeat Tom, and continues to beat him until Cecilia intervenes and talks him into leaving. Tom is limited by his insistence on fighting fair, playing by the rules; Monk, with no interest in morality, is just concerned with winning. Tom, however, is not hurt. As a fictional character, no physical beating can hurt him. Only Cecilia, when she rejects him at the film’s end, has the power to hurt Tom in any way that matters.
Meanwhile, his double, Gil, has shown himself to be more like Monk—a person not to be trusted. Arrogant and selfish, he displays only a superficial resemblance to Tom, a character he initially claims to have “created.” When it is pointed out to him that the film’s scriptwriters actually created Tom, he backtracks, asserting that he is the one who “breathed life” into the character, who “fleshed him out.” Yet, as Yacowar points out, Gil “denies responsibility when Tom claims independence” (1991, p. 249). With many such hints (e.g., Gil wants to play Lindbergh, a man who was an apologist for the Nazis in the 1930s), Allen warns Cecilia, and us, not to mistake Gil for Tom. But, gullible as she is—after all, she has been fooled repeatedly by Monk’s tired little deceits—she falls for Gil’s line.
In a music store, Gil buys her a ukulele, and they bang out songs accompanied by of an old lady on the piano. It is like a scene from one of Cecilia’s movie musicals—so much so that she, and we, should realize that it is too perfect not to have been staged by Gil for a reason. Gil and Cecilia then reenact a scene from one of his films where a man says goodbye to his girl. Cecilia has seen the film so many times that she has memorized the lines, yet she keeps herself blissfully unaware of the possibility that Gil’s behavior towards her may be a sham. In fact, as things turn out, their reenactment of the farewell scene is actually a more honest portrayal of Gil’s real intentions than the words of love with which he deceives her. Cecilia is not even suspicious when Gil tells her that his apparent passion on the screen for an actress meant nothing (“It was just a movie kiss”) at the very moment when he pretends to kiss her for real. In this film, it is the fictional character, Tom, who behaves authentically, while his supposedly “real” counterpart, Gil, is always just acting.
This point is confirmed by Tom’s scene in the whorehouse. Approached by Emma (Dianne Wiest), the prostitute who frightened Cecilia earlier, he accepts her invitation to go with her to “where I work.” In the brothel, Tom innocently ignores the whores’ suggestive comments and insists on interpreting all of their actions in terms of his notions of morally acceptable behavior. By his genuineness and the depth of his concern with fundamental philosophic issues, he is able to crack their artificial facade of inauthentic chatter with a prospective client:
TOM: I was thinking about some very deep things, about God and His relationship with Irving Sachs and R. H. Levine. I was thinking about life in general, the origin of everything we see about us, the finality of death, how almost magical it seems in the real world as opposed to the world of celluloid and flickering shadows.
PROSTITUTE: Where did you find this clown?
TOM: For example, the miracle of birth. Now, I suppose some of you lovely ladies are married?
PROSTITUTE: Not any more!
TOM: No? Then the absolutely astonishing miracle of childbirth! With all of its attendant feelings of humanity and pathos! I stand in awe of existence!
PROSTITUTE: Do you want to tie me up?
Eventually most of the whores are so moved by him that they offer him a free “roll in the hay.” But when Tom finally understands the true nature of their offer, he is astonished. He refuses their claim politely as he poetically describes the force of his love for Cecilia and his absolute unwillingness to betray her, even as she is betraying him at that very moment. Emma is so amazed and impressed by Tom’s devotion that she asks rhetorically if there are any more like him out there. Given her dismal experiences with men of all kinds, she is better able than Cecilia to recognize Tom as a jewel (the name, by the way, of the movie theater from whose screen he descended).
This scene, juxtaposing of honestly felt intellectual probing with the surroundings of a house of illicit pleasures, symbolizes the disdain with which the modern world views sincere metaphysical exploration. Such concerns are today viewed as so self-indulgent and profitless that the most appropriate place for them is a whorehouse. Also, this scene prefigures those to come in Shadows and Fog (1992), a film in which the prostitutes and their clients are among the few characters concerned with metaphysical issues in a surreal village populated by bigots, corrupt officials, and crazed vigilantes.
By this point, the studio people are growing more and more worried about reports of other Tom Baxters in other theaters who are forgetting their lines or threatening to walk off the screen. The characters in the print at the Jewel are getting increasingly cranky. The countess (Zoe Caldwell) throws insults at everyone, including the real people in the audience; a working-class character urges his fellow characters to rebel as he is labeled a “red.” Another character named Larry Wilde (Van Johnson) has the same charge thrown at him when he threatens to follow Tom and walk off the screen. One studio lackey laments, “The real ones want their lives fiction and the fictional ones want their lives real.”
Indeed, the qualities of screen life (the shallowness, the glamour, and the certainty of a script which determines all of one’s actions without the need for responsible decision-making) have always been very attractive to the average filmgoer, especially during the Depression when economic choices were so limited. Yet it is wrong to interpret this film, as some critics have done, as a rejection of the existence of genuine ontological freedom in the face of deterministic forces such as genetic or environmental factors.
As we have discussed in our exploration of Sartrean existential themes, no matter how constricted our choices may appear, or how surprised we may be by the unexpected consequences of our acts, what we choose to do, and why, still matters tremendously. In all of his films, including this one, Allen maintains his firm belief in the importance of moral behavior and intent, even if that behavior does not have the desired effects. It does matter whether Cecilia chooses to stay with her husband, flee to Hollywood with Gil, or risk everything by deciding, against all logic, to love a fictional character with the courage to recreate himself authentically.
The studio bosses come to the conclusion that the only thing to do is cut their losses, withdraw all prints of the film from circulation, and burn them along with the negative. Given what we have seen of Tom’s sensitive nature and his genuine moral goodness, this scheme strikes us as being no better than murder. The bosses regard the film’s characters with the same level of indifference that the Nazis showed to the Jews, another group of individuals who were considered less than “real.”
It is a fitting irony that the movie’s scriptwriters, the creators of the characters whose destruction seems imminent, should have obviously Jewish names. Even the manager of the Jewel, the theater where all the trouble started, is shocked and saddened by this decision. “What a shame, it was such a good picture!” he moans as he lies exhausted on a sofa with his hand on his brow and his eyes tightly shut. Before they can begin their incineration, however, they must get Tom back up on the screen.
The opportunity to do this arises when Tom takes Cecilia into the film (which has been left running endlessly in the empty theater) so that they can go out for a night on the town at places where Tom’s stage money will be good. The other characters are at first shocked at the appearance of a real person in the film. However, pleased at the chance to leave the apartment in which they have been stranded since Tom left, they all go out to the Copacabana, where Tom is supposed to meet and fall in love with Kitty Haynes. The headwaiter at the club is taken aback when they ask for seven seats instead of their usual six. Drinking champagne at the table, Cecilia is disillusioned to discover it’s only ginger ale; someone tells her, “That’s the movie business for you.”
Tom announces that he’s taking Cecilia for a night on the town. When the characters complain that this isn’t in the script, Tom tells them that they are all free and “it’s every man for himself!” Upon hearing this, the headwaiter realizes that he doesn’t have to seat people anymore and can now devote himself to doing what he really loves. Telling the band to “hit it, boys!” he begins to tap dance exuberantly across the floor to the enthusiastic clapping of the audience.
Allen uses a classic thirties cinema technique—the superimposition of nightclub signs, flowing champagne glasses, and street scenes of New York—to show us that Tom and Cecilia are having a wonderful time. Finally, back at the deserted apartment, Cecilia tells Tom how much she has always wanted to be on “this side of the screen,” as she admires the beauty of the set with its white telephone and city skyline. Tom tells her he wanted a chance to talk to her alone. Just then, Gil wanders into the theater. Telling her that he is jealous, Gil begs Cecilia to leave Tom, and her husband, to come with him to Hollywood. Tom and Cecilia come back down from the screen to argue with Gil as the other characters in the film reassemble and argue among themselves over what Cecilia should do.
Urged by Larry Wilde to use her most human of abilities—the ability to choose—Cecilia is torn between her feelings for the perfect Tom, who will always love her and be faithful, and the flesh-and-blood Gil, who promises her a real-life Hollywood adventure. Only the film’s blond female lead, Rita (Deborah Rush), encourages Cecilia to choose Tom and perfection. The rest of the characters, mistakenly thinking that they will be able to resume their old life if only Tom rejoins them, beg Cecilia to pick Gil. When she decides to follow their advice, Tom is stunned by her betrayal (like Isaac or Danny). He sadly returns to the screen.
Gil tells Cecilia to hurry home and pack a bag so that she can join him for the trip to Hollywood. At home, Monk at first apologizes and begs her to stay; however, when it is clear that she is really going this time, he tells her he doesn’t care. Eagerly hurrying back to the theater, she is shocked when the manager tells her that all the movie people have returned to Hollywood, including Gil Shepherd. The manager also reveals that Gil was very relieved that he was able to prevent his career from going down the drain.
We are given a brief glimpse of Gil on the plane, appearing ill at ease; however, now that we realize just how much he was simply “acting” with Cecilia, we have no clue whether his discomfort is due to his conscience or simply his fear of flying. This fear may be symbolic of his unwillingness, in contrast to Tom, to make an impulsive leap of faith. Throughout the film, he has been overwhelmed with fear that this incident might destroy his career. Given the harsh economic times in which he lives, and his earlier revelation that he once drove a cab, his obsession with material success is perhaps understandable. However, these factors no more excuse his betrayal of Cecilia than did the justifications given by Lou or Yale in Allen’s previous films.
Understanding at last that Gil was only using her, Cecilia accepts the manager’s invitation to go in to see the new Ginger Rogers–Fred Astaire film that has just arrived, the 1935 production Top Hat. Still clutching her bag and ukulele, Cecilia sits alone in the darkened theater as she watches Fred and Ginger sing and dance their way through Irving Berlin’s classic number “Cheek to Cheek,” the song that played over the film’s opening credits. Still entranced by movie magic, Cecilia smiles slightly as her moistened eyes hungrily cling to the screen.
By her own refusal to forsake the world’s “reality” for a magical chance at perfection, Cecilia has betrayed her own romanticism and condemned herself to a life even emptier than the one with which she began. Without her job, and with no illusions left about the possibilities of a decent life with Monk, she seems destined to end up with the prostitutes in the brothel.
When we last see her, Cecilia obviously hopes that what happened once may happen again, that if only she stays long enough and believes hard enough, Fred will dance down from the screen and whisk her up to “heaven.” Like the children in the audience of Peter Pan whose faith brings Tinkerbell back to life, she cannot help praying that such a miracle will happen again. Her only other option would be to fall into the hopeless despair which must result from living in a world without God, a world she herself has described as “a movie with no point, and no happy ending!”