The Prince of Cinema

About a third of the way through Purple Rain, “The Kid,” the nom du cinema given to Prince in that film and its follow-up, Graffiti Bridge, sits behind the keyboard at the First Avenue club in Minneapolis to play “The Beautiful Ones,” a torch song from the perspective of a man who’s feeling like he’s on the wrong end of a romantic rivalry. (“You make me so confused/ The Beautiful Ones, you always seem to lose”) Yet what makes the “The Beautiful Ones” so powerful is that the song itself functions as a direct, impassioned, last-ditch plea for this woman to make a choice and come back to him. It peaks with Prince screaming, “Do you want him? Or do you want me? ‘Cause I want you!” 

At this point in Purple Rain, the woman in question is the luscious Apollonia (Apollonia Kotero), the classic ingenue-with-a-dream who’s come to Minneapolis to pursue a singing career. The Kid’s rival, here and in Graffiti Bridge, is the lovable rapscallion Morris (Morris Day), who’s the lead singer of The Time, an ascendent act at First Avenue, and a romantic figure whose entreaties sound like an old Smoove B. column from The Onion. (Just before The Kid hits the stage, Morris  is bragging to Apollonia about his “brass waterbed” and his Italian cook, “Gino S-Scagagracci or something like that.”) To this point, The Kid’s courtship of Apollonia has consisted mostly of a motorcycle ride through the countryside—which, on his amazing purple bike, with “Take Me With U” on the soundtrack, is plenty—and a prank where he convinces her to “purify” herself by taking off her clothes and jumping in a lake. 

Overall, the script offers the thinnest of pretexts for a song like “The Beautiful Ones,” other than the chemistry between The Kid and Apollonia, which is palpable from the jump. Yet the moment The Kid gets to the “Do you want him? Or do you want me?” part and points directly to her in the crowd, the camera dollies in slow on Apollonia’s reaction and it’s absolutely electric. Pure cinema. Almost no context necessary. Between the slow-building force of the song itself and Prince’s dramatic stage presence, the film sells you on an emotional moment that it hasn’t exerted much effort to propose. This is simply one of the most talented musicians of his generation operating at the peak of his powers, and to resist it would be not only futile, but almost disingenuous. 

This week brings a remastered IMAX release of Sign o’ the Times, the 1987 Prince concert film that accompanied the double-album of the same title, which included bangers like “If I Was Your Girlfriend,” “U Got the Look,” and “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man.” Though the film does include a few interstitial sequences—always the worst parts of any concert film, and certainly the worst parts of this one—there’s no larger story to tell or any pretext necessary for Prince to be persuasive on screen. The fact that it’s one of the essential concert films, often mentioned in the same breath as classics like Stop Making Sense and The Last Waltz, is remarkable in part because it’s not really a concert at all. The footage and sound from the European tour was deemed unusable, so most of the film was shot (and lip-synched) on the Paisley Park sound stage instead. You still come away thinking Prince had few rivals as a performer: The song craft, the choreography, the energy, the sheer aura of the man remains otherworldly. 

Yet it’s worth looking back at Prince’s efforts to become a movie star throughout a creatively fruitful six-year stretch, because it’s a fascinating window into his ambition, his creative eccentricities, and, frankly, his failures in trying to conquer a medium that challenged and often stymied him. The difference between Prince the stage performer and Prince the actor could be reduced to an explanation as simple as Fanny Brice’s famous quote about Esther Williams, the championship swimmer turned MGM attraction: “Wet, she’s a star. Dry, she ain’t.” But because Prince exerted so much control over his movies, beyond just his appearance and his admittedly limited range, the comparison doesn’t seem apt. Someone this eccentric and larger-than-life could never be a run-of-the-mill dud. 

Of course, Purple Rain was not a failure at all, but rather the success that bankrolled future failures like Under the Cherry Moon and Graffiti Bridge. Yet it is nonetheless a deeply strange blockbuster, because it owes more to the emerging conventions of MTV music videos than the hidebound traditions of cinematic storytelling. The first draft of William Blinn’s script was informed by plot points written by Prince himself, and the final draft, co-credited to director Albert Magnoli, makes it seem like the bullet points were never fully expanded into an actual screenplay. There’s the love triangle, some glimpses of The Kid’s troubled home life, and a manufactured conflict related to the club that ranks among the least convincing scenarios in cinema history. (So you’re saying that three superior acts may squeeze “The Kid” and the Revolution out of their gig at a Minneapolis nightclub?!)