Movie Posters that scared me as a kid.

Scared me so much I didn’t see the movies until much later.

Vanity Fair has the photo gallery.

After visiting with Danny Rose, Woody Allen’s most optimistic creation, perhaps it’s best to begin our exploration of The Purple Rose of Cairo with Woody’s take on the film, from Conversations with Woody Allen by Eric Lax:

When I first got the idea, it was just a character comes down from the screen, there are some high jinks, but then I thought, where would it go? Then it hit me: the actor playing the character comes to town. After that it opened up like a great flower. Cecilia had to decide, and chose the real person, which was a step up for her. Unfortunately, we must choose reality, but in the end it crushes us and disappoints. My view of reality is that it is a pretty grim place to be, (pause) but it’s the only place you can get Chinese food.

This should prepare you for the sadness that accompanies a viewing of this film and the sorry state of the lead character, Mia Farrow’s Cecilia.

Set in New Jersey of the 1930s Cecilia is buried beneath a country-wide Depression that has claimed the humanity of her husband Monk, a dastradly Danny Aiello, and, with the help of Allen’s longtime collaborator Gordon Willis, drained the color from the world around her. Woody recollects:

I deliberately wanted her to come out [of the theater] to a very unpleasant situation for her. Gordon was able to do that. I described to him coming out of the movie theater and it suddenly being the real world in all its ugliness.

Cecilia waits tables and trods beaten paths to broken door frames amid drab New Jersey browns. She finds solace at the local movie theater, where, in a neat reversal of the color-coding of The Wizard of Oz, the black-and-white of the fantasy world on screen is a veritable wonderland of richness and possibility and the colors of reality are stifling.

Woody Allen doesn’t appear in this film, and if you squint really hard, I guess you can see some of him in Cecilia. But I think that “looking for Woody” in the films in which he does not appear is sometimes a mistake. And it does a disservice to Mia Farrow’s performance. Woody Allen does not hold a patent on neurotic behavior – I found Mia’s Cecilia to be an original. Her beaming recollections of the previous night’s cinema smoothly countering her fumbling dishes at the diner.

But you can’t break dishes during a Depression. Her job lost and her two-timing abusive husband a constant oppression, she returns again and again to the cinema to lose herself in the latest bit of romantic escapism on display: The Purple Rose of Cairo, featuring an explorer named Tom Baxter, of the Chicago Baxters, whose import to the film is of some contention. Regardless, Cecilia fixates on him to the point that he notices. Upon her fifth viewing, Tom decides to approach her – by walking out of the screen and into the theater.

The smartest part about The Purple Rose of Cairo is that they waste no time explaining how Tom emerges from the screen. They waste no effects on it either. It just happens, and people are a little startled, and then they immediately start thinking about how this unexpected development effects themselves. And the funniest part for me, is the bickering of the characters left on screen who, robbed of their narrative, instantly descend into chaotic arguments. Here Woody anticipates the advent of reality television by a decade, as he accurately predicts that viewers will gladly sit there to watch unscripted interaction – as long as it is nasty enough.

Tom Baxter is the wide-eyed creation of up-and-coming actor Gil Sheppard – both are played by Jeff Daniels. After news of Tom’s defection reaches Hollywood, studio heads, in keeping with the pragmatic reactions in New Jersey, are less concerned with how this miracle transpired than with how much liability is at stake. They needn’t worry, for Gil quickly surmises that unless Tom is contained, his career is over. After all, we’re reminded several times, it’s the actor that is responsible for fleshing out the character and making him real. He speeds off to New Jersey to save his career from his greatest performance.

This is especially an interesting idea, considering that Jeff Daniels replaced Michael Keaton after about a week and half of shooting. In a sense, Keaton was unable to overcome his smash hit personas in Night Shift and Mr. Mom to pull off Tom Baxter. Woody didn’t say he was bad, but he was the wrong guy at the wrong time.

Michael Keaton was right out of the 1980s, not the 1930s. People are always trying to figure out if it was more than that, but that’s all it was… I’d love to do something with him, but that wasn’t the piece. I’d look at the dailies and he was fine, but you got no sense of a 1930s movie star from him: he was just too hip.

And Jeff Daniels as Tom Baxter is inspired casting. He has the perfect mix of bravado and naivete necessary to sell the fictional character within Cecilia’s reality. He’s slightly less compelling, I thought, as the actor Gil Sheppard where perhaps some of Keaton’s bite would have played better. Regardless, Daniels does a tremendous job.

Tom loves his freedom and pursues Cecilia robustly. She understands the impossibility of her situation, but softens after her initial resistance. Her home life is so devoid of hope or pleasure that hooking up with a figment is more promising than staying the course with Monk.

Gil Sheppard’s arrival complicates the absurd, yet budding romance. He is determined to get Tom back on the screen at any cost, but as long as Cecilia inhabits the real world Tom refuses to reenter the film. Gil, distraught at what looks like the end of his career, leans on Cecilia for support and pretends to fall for her as well. I say pretends, because, well, that’s how it plays out. But it sure seems like he is smitten, at least for a little while. So much so that you can forgive Cecilia for being a little confused at this point.

Tom, prevented from taking Cecilia on a romantic escapade in the real world by the large wad of fake currency in his pocket, concocts brilliant plan: he takes her into his film late at night, where his money is good and his friends are on the way to the Copa. They have a wonderful night, and the characters are so relieved to get on with the show, that they don’t mind Cecilia tagging along. She has the night of her life.

Cecilia and Tom come down off the screen once again into the theater where Gil is waiting for them. He puts Cecilia to a decision: the actor or the character. As Woody said, we must choose reality. But is it even a choice? In another comment on the film, Woody said, “…reality hurts you in the end, and fantasy is just madness.” Neither seems a winning hand. So Cecilia breaks Tom’s heart, collects her things to fly off with Gil, only to be informed, in front of the very same movie theater, that Gil fled town without her.

With absolutely nothing to show for her brief brush with adventure and the promise of happiness, or at least the illusion of the promise of happiness, Cecilia trudges into the theater and sits down amidst her suddenly superfluous luggage. She stares blankly at the floor thinking about the life she must resume, when all of a sudden, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers whirl across the screen, dancing cheek to cheek. She lifts her head, she begins to watch, and she begins to smile. Film rescued her once again.

Despite Woody’s negative feelings on reality, Chinese food access notwithstanding, I found the ending somewhat more positive than I had expected after Gil’s betrayal. I felt that the movie could be seen as a love letter to the transformative power of film. The awesome and dangerous power that fiction, especially cinematic fiction, holds over many. And the wonderful power of the imagination, that allows those devotees to bring the world of the film shockingly close to their own reality. It’s two way street – like love. It has to be  Think of the Star Wars universe, and the extent that our insatiable demand for that reality brought forth such an array of content, product, and ultimately drivel that almost everything in the original films has been realized in almost every conceivable way. Check out the new Harry Potter theme park in Florida. It’s the world of the book and film in aching clarity.

Woody Allen didn’t need to waste a second of screen time on the explanation of how Tom Baxter came down off the screen. The answer was obvious – it was Cecilia’s love and devotion that made him real. Even if it only lasted while the lights were down.

It is a sign of the times that our movie heroes no longer go traipsing off to Mexico to scratch their itch for unlikely nobility, filthy lucre, or good old-fashioned trouble. The show-me-your-papers crowd in Arizona would have us believe there are so many illegals heading north that even celluloid mercenaries looking south of the border better stay home lest they be trampled. Myself, I’d suggest that the abundance of lead being slung in Mexico’s drug wars makes telling stories about brave yanquis, especially the contemporary variety, about as plausible as having Madonna sing with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

Once, however, the land of Villa welcomed Humphrey Bogart so he could die a greed head’s death in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and Robert Mitchum, fresh out of a very real jail, as he tracked down a missing Army payroll in “The Big Steal.” You should know about “The Magnificent Seven,” of course, just as you should “The Wild Bunch”: two classic Westerns that sprang from the idea of American bad men finding something good inside them under Mexican skies, the former ending with a triumphant ride out of town, the latter with a fireball of dark glory. And then there is a hugely entertaining Western that is too often forgotten, “The Professionals,” which is about early 20th Century mercenaries who are crazy brave but not stupid. Four of them, to be exact: Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan, and Woody Strode, each possessing more testosterone by himself than there is in all of Hollywood today.

Lancaster was a former circus acrobat who did his own stunts and, legend has it, could handle himself in a street fight. Marvin fought his way through World War II as a marine in the Pacific, and, with a mug like his, he must have put up his dukes a few times as a civilian, too. Ryan boxed in college (and was nothing less than splendid in the fight racket noir “The Set-Up”). Strode played football at UCLA, broke the NFL’s color line (alongside college teammate Kenny Washington), wrestled professionally, died a righteous death in “Spartacus,” and, though he was 52 when “The Professionals” was released in 1966, looked like he was made of steel cable.

You could hunt for a long time and not find a cooler cast, and I say this without having mentioned Jack Palance and Claudia Cardinale, who are in it, too. They were gathered together by Richard Brooks, one of those filmmakers whose biggest movies you may remember – “In Cold Blood,” “Elmer Gantry,” “Blackboard Jungle” -– but whose name has pretty much been washed away by time. Brooks wasn’t a powerhouse like John Huston, for whom he wrote “Key Largo,” nor was he the directing equal of a Huston or a Howard Hawks. He was a former newspaper reporter whose ideas and passions bounced all over the place, the way they must have when he worked general assignment. He found the inspiration for “The Professionals” in a Frank O’Hara novel called “A Mule for the Marquesa,” and it became one of only three Westerns on his resume. Maybe Brooks should have made more; “The Professionals” earned him Oscar nominations for best director and best adapted screenplay. But even so, every time I watch it, I come away thinking it was the cast that had all the fun.

The story they find themselves in is strictly meat and potatoes. With the fires of the Mexican Revolution reduced to dying embers, railroad baron Ralph Bellamy summons Lancaster, Marvin, Ryan and Strode to present them with a problem he expects them to solve: The bandit chieftain Jesus Raza, played by Palance, has kidnapped Bellamy’s wife, the fetching Ms. Cardinale, and he wants our heroes to rescue her. They know Palance from the old days. They’ve fought beside him but they’ll fight against him because that’s what hired guns do. And so, once the money is right — $10,000 a man upon La Cardinale’s return — they set out to do it again.

There’s no great overarching truth here that I can see, no haunting message of the kind that Sam Peckinpah used to send about time passing men by. What Brooks does is simply spin a yarn that gets off the launching pad because the railroad baron is a liar. Everything else about the movie is pure entertainment of the pre-CGI variety, starting with a dandy opening sequence in which Brooks establishes all of his heroes in less that a minute: Marvin is the weapons expert, Ryan the horseman, Strode the tracker, and Lancaster the guy who goes out the window in his long johns when he gets caught loving up another man’s wife. He’s by far the most corruptible of the bunch, but he’s also a damn good explosives man. And then there’s that killer Lancaster smile, as broad as the windshield on a Peterbilt. No way he gets left behind.

Funny thing is, even though Lancaster packs the most charisma in “The Professionals,” the best lines in Brooks’s taut, engaging script come from Marvin’s mouth. Early on, Bellamy points at a photo of him as a young man and says, “Your hair was darker then.” “My heart was lighter,” the silver-thatched Marvin replies. When our heroes realize they’ve been gamed by Bellamy, it’s Marvin who tells Lancaster, “Amigo, we’ve been had.” Later, they’ll realize that Palance and Cardinale have been playing them for suckers, too. But their reward for getting past all the treachery is the moment when Bellamy, beaten and cuckolded -– has any actor ever had more female co-stars stolen from him? -– calls them “bastards.” “Yes, sir,” Marvin says. “In my case an accident of birth. But you, sir, you’re a self-made man.”

The only one of the movie’s stars who gets short-changed is Ryan, who has little to do and hardly anything worthwhile to say. He deserved better, and got it three years later in Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch.” Marvin and Lancaster banter back and forth while hatching clever plans, and there’s a particularly evocative moment when, as they’re about to square off with a gang bandits, Marvin tells his old running mate, “Same set-up as Durango.” With a single line of dialogue, Brooks has told us volumes about them. As for Strode, he’s such a mesmerizing physical presence that he renders dialogue almost unnecessary, whether he’s scaling cliffs or shooting flaming arrows. Palance looks right, though not particularly Mexican, playing a rebel. Cardinale, an Italian import who doesn’t appear until halfway through the movie, wears a peasant blouse in the last act that is enough to make any red-blood male bug-eyed. There seems to be no way it can possibly withstand the pressure it’s under. The fact that it does may, in some quarters, be regarded as a tragedy of epic proportions. But “The Professionals” hews to the Western movie tradition of keeping females in their clothes. I love it just the same.

I love it for the swagger and certainty of its heroes, for its gunfights, train robberies, and canyon passages. I love it, too, for Maurice Jarre’s jangling score and cinematographer Conrad Hall’s shot of sweating dynamite before the explosion that Lancaster and Marvin think will set Cardinale free. There’s a well-worn feel to much of it, I’m not denying that, but to me, watching “The Professionals” is like putting on a favorite pair of Levi’s, faded, frayed and so soft and comfortable that I never want to take them off.

And yet, when people ask about my favorite Westerns, I rarely remember to include it on my long and rambling list. The obvious choices -– “The Searchers,” “The Wild Bunch,” “Unforgiven,” you know the rest — are there, and I throw in “Will Penny,” “7 Men from Now,” even “Rancho Deluxe” to make things interesting. But too often “The Professionals” doesn’t get a call unless it’s as an afterthought, and I don’t understand why. After all, it’s not just one of my favorite Westerns, it’s one of my favorite movies, period. The blank I draw seems like a variation on always hurting the one you love. For years–no, decades, because time is no longer on my side–I’ve backed and filled and called people a day later to tell them I should have mentioned “The Professionals.” But I’ve never felt I’ve properly atoned for my forgetfulness.

Until now.