The Purple Rose of Cairo

The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) is a fantasy romance from director Woody Allen you can watch online on iFILM. It's the depths of the Great Depression. Cecilia, played by Mia Farrow, waits tables, endures a brutish husband, and escapes her gray days the only way she can: in the dark of the local movie house.

She watches the same picture over and over. Then its hero, a dapper explorer named Tom Baxter, looks straight out of the black-and-white frame, stops mid-line, and climbs down into the audience to be with her. A character has fallen for a moviegoer. The rest of the cast is stranded on screen, the studio panics, and the real actor who played Tom, Gil Shepherd, rushes into town to fix the mess. Cecilia ends up caught between a perfect man who isn't real and a flesh-and-blood one who lies.

Jeff Daniels pulls double duty as both the fictional hero and the vain star. Allen has called this his own favorite of his films, a bittersweet little fable about what the movies do to us. Stream The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) online on iFILM.