1984 was a strange time for American film musicals. They weren’t exactly extinct; for the third year in a row, the Oscars found enough nominees to award an award for original score (basically, best song lineup, rather than sole original song or original score). At the same time, however, the genre had been transformed by a more realism-focused 1970s, a more spectacle-driven 1980s, and a belated embrace of pop music. As a result, the summer of 1984 was alive with movie music, but only the Muppets were really keeping up with traditional show tunes (in The Muppets Take Manhattan(consciously a throwback to the showbiz musicals of yesteryear.) Elsewhere, there was Dolly Parton, who might have been a constant musical movie star in previous generations, teaming with Sylvester Stallone in Imitation diamond; dance musicals as the mini-sensation of the summer Interrupt’ and the one who keeps playing No strings attached; and strange attempts to embody the spirit of rock and roll as a future cult object. Streets of Fire.
The biggest musical of the year fell into (or near) that last category when it emerged in July 1984: Purple Raina hybrid of a behind-the-scenes musical, concert film and early biopic featuring pop genius Prince, winning that year’s Oscar for Best Original Score, comfortably beating out the Muppets. 40 years later, Purple Rain It feels both singular and influential. Perhaps most notably, it also feels like a creative evolution of the film musical, though not many subsequent projects followed in those particular footsteps.
Praising Purple Rain The film’s cinematic merit is not to lionize director, co-writer and co-editor Albert Magnoli at Prince’s expense. It’s just that, despite his multiple starring roles, Prince exists outside the world of cinema, as does the soundtrack album. Purple Rainhis own ambitious project packed with iconic Prince hits. “Let’s Go Crazy,” “Darling Nikki,” and the title track all appear in the film (performed more or less in their entirety!), but it’s entirely possible to formulate a relationship with the album and its hits without knowing too much about the film or Prince’s truly uncanny on-screen presence.
The character that the Prince plays in a certain way Purple Rain It seems to be largely based on himself, though it is not a flattering self-portrait. It is also difficult to discern how much of it is intended to be self-deprecating; one would expect that someone of Prince’s artistic talent would probably be aware that the mercurial musical performer, leader of the house band at Minneapolis’ First Avenue rock club, comes across as petulant, moody, opinionated, misogynistic, and even abusive. The nature of misogyny in Purple Rain There’s been a lot of discussion about this topic; it’s too common to feel like a mere product of the times, and the women who have collaborated with Prince on various creations (Apollonia Kotero, Wendy Melvoin, Lisa Coleman) get plenty of screen time to air their grievances. But the film also doesn’t offer much insight into these dynamics. It’s not so much a question of representation not equaling approval as it is of the simplicity of the representation itself, as Prince’s character clearly inherits the abuse he sees his father (Clarence Williams III) inflict on his mother (Olga Karlatos).
That plot point underscores one of the many ways Prince assigns himself a childlike demeanor throughout the film. Though he was in his mid-20s when he made the movie, his character is referred to only as The Kid. He seems to live at home, despite having a steady job as a musician, owning a nice motorcycle, and a penchant for barn sex, all of which indicate that he might be ready for his own place. He generally speaks and acts with the countenance of a 15-year-old, whether it’s going wide-eyed and talking quietly, getting moody, or engaging in playground-level flirtation with Apollonia, an aspiring singer he sort of mentors. Truthfully, The Kid doesn’t seem particularly suited to mentor anyone, and though the film seems to understand this, it also has a somewhat watery, sometimes downright baffling relationship with the creative process at large. (There is no explanation or illustration of which songs are supposed to electrify the First Avenue crowd or why, a bigger problem decades later when most of them sound like Prince classics.)
Some of these narrative and characterization issues can probably be blamed on Magnoli, who did not have a particularly prolific career (especially if you remove the various Prince music videos from his filmography). On a technical level, however, Magnoli actually delivers, because Purple Rain The film is often breathtakingly beautiful in its look and technique. The film’s opening performance, “Let’s Go Crazy,” not only glows in the stylized colors of a rock club; Magnoli also edits montage fragments that introduce the characters, paced slightly off-kilter and without warning to keep the audience on their toes. Throughout the film, he and Prince seem to yearn to escape the confines of narrative cinema, whether by merging the performances with the film’s drama, refusing to cut from the former to please the latter, or focusing intently on them. Though the film is not a traditionally integrated musical, its best sequences have the audacity of one. Many 1980s musicals used their pop roots to distance actual filmmaking from imaginative leaps in the form of the 1950s and 1960s; sure, the editing has some post-MTV panache, but it’s often in service of concert footage that safely compartmentalizes the music within a familiar framework. The performances in Purple Rain They flow in and out of the film, often dominating it in a way that makes it a more distinctive viewing experience.
The idea that an artist could fictionalize his own story for the cinema existed before Purple RainAlthough the success of the film probably helped later installments of the subgenre such as 8 milesPrince himself starred in two more films, both directed by himself, none as popular as this one, in which his neophyte status as an actor couldn’t be clearer. Some musicians make an album whose creative magic they can never replicate on subsequent releases. Prince, who made nearly 40 studio albums during his legendary career, didn’t have that particular problem. (The album Purple Rain It’s not even its commercial peak.) But in the cinema, maybe Purple Rain It needed to be this specific kind of strange, seductive, sometimes unpleasant jolt to the film musical form.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer based in Brooklyn. He is a regular contributor to The AV Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts on www.sportsalcohol.comalso.
