The Much-Maligned ‘Under The Cherry Moon’ Is Ripe For Critical Reappraisal

Not to be one of those “I was there” people but I’ll never forget where I was when I first heard “When Doves Cry.” It was a pleasant spring night I was tooling around Paterson, where I lived in 1984, in my mom’s Firebird (long story) and the radio was tuned to a New York Top 40 station. The DJ didn’t announce the song, but the vocals were unmistakable. I’d been a Prince person for some time, having dutifully scooped up every album since the 1980 punk-funk incendiary device Dirty Mind (I was a little too clueless and Caucasian to have grokked For You and Prince, although I’d come around eventually), but this new tune was a whole new kind of stunner: daringly minimalist funk that swung like hell, practically avant-garde stuff. It was even more exciting to know that there was a feature-length movie attached to the song. “Doves” was the first single from the soundtrack of an upcoming movie that bore the intriguing title Purple Rain. When the DJ did announce the name of the tune, he said it was by “Prince and The Revolution.” And I thought, “Damn right.”
As for the movie, I think I saw it three times in the theater when it opened that summer. Directed by Albert Magnoli, it came to fans swaddled in levels of intrigue. While Prince had been long been a pop star and an object of controversy (his musical follow-up to Dirty Mind was, of course, called Controversy), he was notoriously press-shy, particularly for such an uninhibited performer whose primary theme was the erotic life. Purple Rain was structured around his home base of Minneapolis and plotted to reflect certain specifics of his actual life and career. Perhaps Prince’s portrayal of an ambitious musician known as “The Kid” would shed some light on the off-stage personality of the Artist himself.
And perhaps not. Prince’s performance as a motorcycle-riding bandleader not unlike himself was thoroughly convincing, in part because it demanded relatively little of Prince as an actor. The movie is, in a sense, a backstage musical, and Prince playing bandleader is efficient, driven, and just a touch despotic: The Kid is a visionary who’s not going to let anyone tell him what kind of music to play or how to play it. As a result, he catches all kinds of flack and mockery from rival band The Time. (Prince’s talents, of course, were so prodigious that he was also responsible for the ostensibly more commercial music played by The Time in that movie.)

As for The Kid in seduction mode, all he had to do was cock his head a certain way, drawl some nonsense about the purifying waters of Lake Minnetonka, and he had the green aspiring singer Apollonia on the back of his bike. While on-stage, The Kid —festooned in costume frippery and outrageous makeup— flaunted androgyny, the character during his scant leisure hours seemed a securely masculine player. But he kept you guessing—if not about the nature of his sexuality, then other things. The enigma of Prince was a huge part of his charisma, and even in the scenes when his character deals with devastating loss, he keeps things hidden while making his devastation clear. (The Kid also has rage issues, which he’s seen to have inherited from his father—and the anger he extends to women was uncomfortable to watch then, and today.) And in the concert scenes, he lets it all hang out the way only a born performer can. The soundtrack deservedly earned an Oscar for Prince in 1985.

As exhilarating as Purple Rain was, there was something about it that was too conventional for an artist as eccentric as Prince. The movie was a big enough hit that Warner Brothers indulged the artist, and handed him the directorial reins for a follow-up picture, 1986’s Under The Cherry Moon. Set on the French Riviera and shot in dazzling black-and-white (by no less a talent than Michael Ballhaus, the German cinematographer who was a crucial collaborator to the German genius Rainer Werner Fassbinder), the initially much-maligned movie is ripe for critical reappraisal. Moon hybridizes the fragmented and refracted aesthetics of Old Hollywood to a contemporary African-American sensibility. Prince and Jerome Benton play con men out to swindle an heiress (Kristen Scott Thomas, in her feature debut) only to have Prince’s Christopher Tracy fall hard for the woman. It’s an old plot, sure, but the race and class mutations it undergoes here are dizzying, despite the fact that the movie’s not a smooth a ride as it should have been in other respects. The “Wrecka Stow” sequence is a stone classic, and the movie’s soundtrack, which was released as the album Parade, is incredible.

One cannot write about Prince in the movies without mentioning his soundtrack to Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman. The soundtrack album is a movie of its own, with Prince acting as a kind of orchestrating Joker, more concerned with the complications of the Caped Crusader’s love life than with crime-fighting. If it came out today those creatures we call “fanboys” would be mightily confused; as it is, Variety’s review of Prince’s score actually referred to it as an “excrescence.” But besides remaining a killer funk record, it’s a particularly idiosyncratic example of the artist’s conceptual audacity.
The final film directed by and starring Prince was 1990’s Graffiti Bridge, a very trippy sequel of sorts to Purple Rain. While Cherry Moon was unfairly maligned, Bridge remains very much a misfire: a blurry rehashing of prior themes. While Prince tries, via female lead Ingrid Chavez, to invoke a new ideal of racially-inclusive artistic bohemia, the parts of the film don’t cohere, and Prince’s own performance betrays the distraction of a multi-tasking artist who’s bitten off more than he can chew—perhaps for the first time. Prince’s subsequent battles with the Warner record label no doubt had a part in closing off other cinematic opportunities, or maybe he just concluded that the big screen was no longer where he wanted to be. He continued to emit his mystique in music videos, although he ceded the director’s chair for those in the mid-‘90s. When it came down to brass tacks, this incredible multi-media star was finally a creature of music—a fact he emphasized on what turned out to be his final tour, on which he accompanied himself on a piano and nothing more.
Prince’s death is an awful tragedy that leaves the music world terribly poorer. One can hope, though, that in short time the music, and the films—which also include a smoking Prince-directed 1987 concert movie Sign O’ The Times—will all be made more readily available to see (and hopefully stream). The Prince catalog, as it currently stands, is a scattered mess, and it deserves better.
[Where to Stream Purple Rain]
[Where to Stream Under The Cherry Moon]
[Where to Stream Graffiti Bridge]
[Watch Batman (1989) on Netflix]

Veteran (that is, old-ish) critic Glenn Kenny has written for oodles of publications and these days reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com. He blogs at Some Came Running and tweets (mostly in jest) at @glenn__kenny.