A towering achievement.

dg-7

In PURPLE RAIN, the movie's star appears in front of the screen in a cloud of mystery.  His character, called simply The Kid has kind of a svengali effect on everybody he meets.  The club he plays in is the First Avenue which we learn has been the starting point for many up and coming superstars.  The movie's set in Minnesota, Prince's hometown and it doesn't seem like the kind of place people want to end up in.

There's other characters in this semi-biographical , semi performance movie. The rival act in the club(led by Morris Day of the time),  and a young girl, straight out of a cab who wants to make it big and steal the Kid's heart.  This isn't easy, because just when it seems like Prince is putting himself above the material(his own band walk egg shells around him) we go home and meet his parents.  In the movie's powerful dramatic scenes we see the father(Clarence Williams III) beating up his wife.  This happens a lot, and since The Kid gets beat up by his father everytime he tries to intercede, he stays down in the basement and turns up the volume sky high.

PURPLE RAIN is a towering achievement, one of the best musicals I've seen. The music is fantastic.   At the end of the movie on stage, Prince sings "I will die 4 U" and it's intercut with his father laying in a hospital bed with the mother beside him.  It's electric.  The whole movie is like that. This is a movie that not only has great music but the performances are good and dramatically compelling.  You see, the father was a musician himself, and very bitter that he didn't make it out of Minneapolis.  In a harrowing scene, after The Kid's mother has shot the father, he discovers a chest full of his father's music.  The movie wisely never tells us whether any of the songs at the end were the old man's songs.

I mentioned how Prince is like a svengali figure.  You see that in the forced scenes with his band mates, The Revolution.  Everyone seems scared of this guy, like he'll fire them or something.  In the end credits, all of the songs except one are credited to Prince.  There's a subplot involving two female band members who urge him to perfom their song, "Purple Rain."  He does and it's the crescendo of the movie, but that's a Prince song.  PURPLE RAIN is a wonderful movie and Prince is electric, but he doesn't seem like the kind of guy who'll take orders.

DG

STAR STAR STAR STAR (out of four)

score /10

dg-7 2 November 1998

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw0214207/