Arise ye pris’ners of starvation Arise ye wretched of the earth For justice thunders condemnation A better world’s in birth! No more tradition’s chains shall bind us Arise, ye slaves, no more in thrall; The earth shall rise on new foundations We have been naught we shall be all.
1984’s ‘Purple Rain’ was an incredible – and completely illogical – success. That film starred an at the time moderately successful pop star in their first acting role; an ensemble cast that was essentially made up of people that moderately successful pop star was either in a band with, was mates with, or was shagging; a script that had gone through several rewrites and rejections until eventually being shaped by a television writer building on that moderately successful pop star’s own bonkers ideas; and was also directed by an unknown debutant who’s recently edited an absolute flop. And who was far from the first choice.
The film made $70 million off a $7 million budget, picking up an Oscar as well for its troubles. Shit, thought Warner Brothers, We don’t understand it at all but this guy just shits money, maybe just do whatever He wants in future? When Prince said to Warner Brothers in 1985 that He was thinking of making another film, they greenlit the idea without even seeing a script. ‘Purple Rain’ was a monster hit when it starred a moderately successful pop star, now we’re getting the same shit again only now it’s by the biggest star in the world?? We could be talking Rocky IV numbers!!
Unfortunately for them (and their bank accounts), Warner Brothers didn’t take into account two major issues. One, Prince had already released His follow up album to the ‘Purple Rain’ soundtrack a few months previously, and although ‘Around the World in a Day‘ sold extremely decently, it was but a portion of the previous album’s haul and signified that Prince’s time in the sun at the absolute head of the commercial table was very intentionally coming to an end. Secondly, if you tell Prince that He can do whatever He wants, you’re gonna get some extremely weird shit from an artist already very much done with his commercial period and with a near psychopathic aversion to repeating Himself. Cool, can I shoot it in the French Riviera? asked Prince, And I want the guy who did The Boys of Summer music video to direct it. It’s going to be in black and white, you see…
I mean… I guess, replied Warner Brothers. Here’s $10 million.
Then Prince started coming up with this idea. He said, ‘We’re gonna do a movie and we’re gonna make it in black-and-white, and we’re gonna do it in France.’ He said, ‘We’re gonna start writing it.’ And I said, ‘Write a movie? I ain’t never written no movie.
In 1985, the 23 year old Benton was essentially The Time’s ‘Bez’, largely tasked with bringing a large mirror onstage for Morris Day to check his hair in and to provide ‘comic foil’ at the band’s live shows. He essentially performed the same role in the ‘Purple Rain’ movie, and his co-star role in ‘Under the Cherry Moon’ meant he is the only actor apart from Prince Himself to appear in both films. The female co-star role was offered to Madonna, and her turning it down despite her career long addiction to massive cinematic turkeys should have been another huge red flag. It was then offered to Prince’s then fiancée Susannah Melvoin, until she did some screen tests and… eeeeeeeeeeesh… maybe get someone slightly more experienced? They really went with ‘slightly’: the 25 year old Kirsten Scott Thomas had never appeared in a movie before, and just happened to be performing in a play in France at the time before being asked to come in to audition for a smaller role, and being bumped up to female lead once Melvoin’s lack of suitability was exposed (“[after the audition] they said, can you come back at six to meet Prince? And I had to keep reminding myself that this was real”). But they managed to get Terrence Stamp in to play that female lead’s father! Ah, no, sorry, Stamp quit the role soon after filming began due to it apparently being ‘not the role he was led to believe’. Maybe he thought he was going to be playing Morris Day, which would be a disappointment that I don’t think many of us would be able to get past. Still, Stamp was replaced by the guy who played General Orlov in Octopussy, who was perhaps a little more grateful for the experience: “Here I am on this gorgeous, sunny day in one of the most beautiful seaside cities in the world, being directed by Prince. And I had to pinch myself to make sure this was all real“.
Wait… directed by Prince??
Well, remember that The Boys of Summer director? Unfortunately, the fashion photographer and music video director Jean-Baptiste Mondino, who Prince had in mind, was unavailable*. Prince even asked Martin Scorsese, but the director idiotically passed on the star making opportunity by apparently joking that “There can’t be two geniuses on set”. Bit of shade throw on Jerome Benton there, Martin, but OK. Eventually, Prince decided to try and elevate up and coming talent again, when another music video director**, Mary Lambert, was trusted with her first film. Sure, it was a risk to entrust the movie in the hands of someone with no motion picture experience, but Prince had obviously seen enough of the flair that He was looking for in her music videos and it would mean… ah, no, sorry, after four days of filming she was let go, and Prince decided to give this directing lark a go himself. Lambert: “Prince has such a strong vision of what this movie should be… that it makes no sense for me to stand between him and the film anymore”. And, because it was being filmed in Europe, it was outside the auspice of the Directors Guild of America! They would tend to ‘look poorly’ on directors being fired in favour of lead actors taking over productions, but it’s the French Riviera, baby! Anything goes here!
(*the two would finally collaborate in 1988 when Mondino directed the I Wish U Heavenvideo, and also took photographs for the ‘Lovesexy’ album)
**considering that Jean-Baptiste Mondino’s video for The Boys of Summer won the Video of the Year and the 1985 MTV Video Music awards, and the Mary Lambert directed videos for Madonna’s Material Girl & Like a Virgin, Chris Isaak’s Dancin’ and Lone Justice’s Ways to be Wicked were nominated for a combined nine awards that night, you do have to question how far and wide Prince’s search for directors was)
He was a very precise director, because he came from music, where you have to get the notes just right. I remember I was doing a scene with Kristin Scott Thomas where I was chastising her, warning her not to see this man, and we hear ‘Cut!’ and the next sound we hear is this tapping as Prince comes down the corridor, having watched the scene on a monitor in another room. It was the sound of his high heels. I’d hear this tap-tap-tap-tap after every scene and I could always tell, depending on the rapidity of the tapping, what kind of notes he was going to give.
But it’s still good! It’s still good!, Warner Brothers thought to themselves, ‘Purple Rain’ also had a bit of a tortuous production, and look how much money that made for us! They would have been happy that Prince wrapped up the movie ahead of schedule and under budget. Then they got to see the film that they’d allowed Prince absolute carte blanche to produce. I think it’s fair to assume there were no dollar signs flashing in their eyes.
‘Purple Rain’ was a movie about an outrageously talented rock star who was basically Prince, and managed to pull it off because this rock star was played by literally Prince. It also helped that the movie was 60% made up of the greatest live act in the world playing impeccable versions of songs from the 28 million selling iconic album of the same name. ‘Under the Cherry Moon’ was a movie about a talented gigolo who was less obviously Prince attempting to scam rich women on the French Riviera, had all of two songs performed by the greatest live act in history – one played over the end credits and one rudely broken off halfway through – from a recently released one million selling album that didn’t even have the same name as the movie. Rather than include an epic and legendary live performance of Purple Rain, ‘Under the Cherry Moon’ would instead feature this shot:
But, fair play to Warner Brothers, they’ve often been criticised for poor artistic acumen and by not quite understanding what they had with Prince and His various flourishes, but let it not be said that the same was true of ‘Under the Cherry Moon’: they knew straight away what a colossal turkey this was, and were proved right. The ‘Purple Rain’ movie had its big premiere on July 27th 1984 at the Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles, in front of a star studded audience including Eddie Murphy, Stevie Nicks and Steven Spielberg. The ‘Under the Cherry Moon’ premiere was given away as a competition prize to the 10’000th caller to an MTV hotline. It was won a 22 year old hotel chambermaid, Lisa Barber, and so the world premiere was held at the Centennial Theatre in Lisa’s hometown of Sheridan, Wyoming, with the competition winner seated next to Prince throughout the film.
Her guy pulled up, 15 minutes late, at the wheel of a white Buick convertible with personalized license plates that read LOVE. Eschewing the gravel driveway, He vaulted the chain-link fence and knocked on the door. “Hello,” He said, kissing her hand. “My name is Prince. Ready to have a good time?” Unfazed by the fact that her date was wearing more makeup and – thanks to a midriff-baring shirt – showing more skin than she was, Barber answered in the affirmative and took her seat in the car. Preceded by Sheridan’s female riding troupe, the Equestri-Annettes, and trailed by a posse of costumed cowboys, the couple cruised to the Centennial Twin theater, where 800 enthusiastic but inexpert stargazers waited. Singer Joni Mitchell entered unnoticed; crooner Ray Parker, Jr., a newspaper reported, was misidentified by some as Lionel Richie. “We cheered for anyone who was dressed weird or who was black,” says one Sheridian.
Inside, Prince sat with Barber in a back row. He did not buy her any Raisinets or popcorn but otherwise behaved like a perfect gentleman. “Well, there was one time during the movie when He played with my hair and He put his arm around me,” says Barber. “But that’s all He did. Honest.” And did Prince, rock’s reigning purple enigma, actually engage in conversation sometime in the evening? “Oh, yeah,” says Barber. “I asked Him how He liked it here. He said it was real pretty and that I was lucky to live here
The final insults were handed out on the 29th March 1987. While ‘Purple Rain; had bagged Prince an Oscar for Best Original Song Score, ‘Under the Cherry Moon’ picked up five awards from eight nominations at the 7th Golden Raspberries Awards. The Golden Raspberries are hardly a respectable benchmark of quality (giving Prince an award for worst song is a bit ridiculous in 1986, even if it’s for the ho-hum ? or $which didn’t make it to the ‘soundtrack’ album) and has always been more of a publicity stunt going after the easiest of targets, but it still says a lot that in 1986/7 that easy target was Prince.
And all this response is in many ways completely understandable: ‘Under the Cherry Moon’ is a fucking insane movie for anyone to make, in any circumstance. Generally, people with the kind of unfiltered creativity and insane thought process needed to make something as bizarre as ‘Under the Cherry Moon’ aren’t allowed to make movies. One single focus group or one sole administrative voice from the studio would have shut this movie down a long time before it even reached those poor residents of Sheridan, Wyoming. It’s a film made by people with no idea how movies work, an absolute folly of ego that I can’t recall many similar major studio efforts in the 39 years since. The closest major cinema release I can think of that was completely just the unfiltered whims of one inexperienced auteur’s insanity dump is probably Tommy Wiseau’s infamous ‘The Room’ in 2003. I would kill for the docudrama about the making of ‘Under the Cherry Moon’ and you know James Franco would want to play Prince. What, they’re going to double cancel him? May as fucking well do the film. In terms of hugely successful musical artists being allowed such an unmediated sandpit of a motion picture, you could perhaps compare it to The Monkees’ 1968 freak-a-thon ‘Head’, but there have been absolutely no similar examples since. Even if in 2004 the world’s biggest star Britney Spears had told Paramount Pictures that she wanted to follow up her $60 million grossing mini-hit ‘Crossroads‘, but demanded that there would be no further questions as Rob Zombie lurked menacingly in the background, the studio execs would laugh her out of the office. “Remember ‘Under the Cherry Moon’?” one exec would say, as the entire conference room collectively shuddered. As Patrick Goldstein said in the Los Angeles Times in 1986, the film was a “dismal flop that will probably be Exhibit A for years to come in any debate over the wisdom of letting pop stars make their own vanity Hollywood project”.
But is it a bad movie? Does it actually deserve its infamous reputation as one of the worst films of all time?
Absolutely not. Mostly for the reasons outlined above.
In her essay in the great collection ‘Prince and Popular Music Critical Perspectives on an Interdisciplinary Life‘, De Angela L. Duff argues that while ‘Purple Rain’ was Prince offering a carefully created image that would, essentially, make Him look as cool as possible, ‘Under the Cherry Moon’ was the closest we got to seeing the real Prince on film:
“While Under the Cherry Moon (…) is maligned by most, the film is the ultimate public document of Prince as his most authentic self. While Purple Rain, Prince’s first film, presents one side of him, the mysterious, aloof artist he exhibited in public from the onset of his career, Under the Cherry Moon represents him as he truly was with his close friends and associates: hilariously funny”
De Angela L. Duff: Under the Cherry Moon: Prince as His Most Authentic Self
No movie this insane could truly be bad. No movie that’s as much a fascinating, one of a kind glimpse into the unfettered ego of someone who is an inarguable once in a lifetime genius in one artistic outlet assuming He would be one in another, could really be considered bad. ‘Under the Cherry Moon’ is such an artistic curio that it’s rarely less than a truly interesting watch. And it’s so frequently hilarious, and perhaps mostly intentionally so. The chemistry between Prince (Christopher Tracy) and Jerome (Tricky), stemming from their real life friendship, is electric, and imbues the movie with incredible personality that is never present in truly bad films.. And, seriously, how can a film with this many amazing scenes ever be considered bad??
We all agree that the ‘Wrecka Stow’ scene is probably the greatest in cinema history – watch Prince’s hilarious performance in that scene and tell me he deserved to be considered the worst of any year – but what about the scene where Christopher and Tricky notice bats (bats?!) in the cafe they’re in, something that is never mentioned or explained elsewhere in the movie??
Or what about when Prince is trying to guess how Mary Sharon (Kristin Scott Thomas) acts in bed??
And, of course, Prince sitting in the bath, wearing a huge hat, sinking a toy boat and yelling out “FASCIST!”. I refuse to believe anyone has ever watched this movie and not been too bewildered by what they’ve just seen to ever give it a cogent review, good or bad.
The influences that Prince was bringing into the movie were so out of step with 1986 contemporary film making, and offers further further evidence that ‘Under the Cherry Moon’ was a failed artistic reach rather than a truly bad film. Prince protégée Jill Jones explained to journalist Alan Light:
We used to watch so many old films. A lot of Italian films — He loved ‘Swept Away’ — old Cary Grant. He got into David Lynch at one point, so He really started looking at, like,‘Eraserhead‘; I remember screaming at that little worm-baby or whatever it was. He was looking at European directors, trying to pull all of that in. He was really into the old studio system, too, Louis B. Mayer, he had books on those, looking at how that was structured
Classic screwball comedy influenced by ‘Eraserhead’? Sure, Prince, perfect follow-up to ‘Purple Rain’.
Playing off many of these influences, the movie takes the premise (and often the aesthetics) of a classic 1950s Hollywood tale of an upper class and well-to-do usually shut off section of the elite being interloped by penniless but charming scammers, who proceed to tear the ridiculous nature of the ruling class apart. The misunderstood (and, in the end, largely unrealised) genius of ‘Under the Cherry Moon’ is that it transposes 1980s black culture onto this whiter than white aesthetic, and pokes fun at the pomposity of its supposed ethnic betters. The ‘Purple Rain’ movie had presented the myth of Prince as being mixed race, as He was conscious of the negative effects of this planned huge blockbuster being considered ‘too black’. In ‘Under the Cherry Moon’ though, Prince’s blackness is a huge part of the movie, and in 2016, members of the African American Film Critics Association acknowledged that Prince was making a ‘bold statement’:
How many films set and actually shot in the French Riviera starred a Black man then, or even star a Black man now? With 1986’s Under the Cherry Moon, Prince inserted Himself and Black men as a whole in places where society insisted He nor His kind belong. The fact that Prince shot Under the Cherry Moon in black and white is no coincidence. In an actual 1930s era film, a Black man dressed like Prince’s Christopher Tracy would most likely be a butler or performing usually for whites only. In many ways, He used Under the Cherry Moon to correct, or at least, challenge Hollywood’s stereotype and that of American society at large of where Black men, in particular, belonged.
That classic ‘Wrecka Stow’ scene isn’t Christopher/Prince just making funny words, as Mary Sharon actually suspects, but Him demonstrating how far removed the woman is from the streets of the real (black) world that Him and Tricky come from. He even makes a joke about how Kristin’s character might “get black” during sex: meaning becoming less inhibited, less concerned about her prim self awareness. And that bat scene, of course, references how… black people are scared of bats…? Like I said, it’s not entirely successful.
Tricky and Christopher are so obviously coded as a gay couple, both as camp as Christmas, unashamedly feminine, and shopping for clothes at a shop called ‘Diva’. One of the film’s main conflicts comes when Tricky gets jealous with Christopher getting close to Mary, even going as far to declare “I’m my own man, just like Liberace!”. Joy Michael Ellison, a professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at University of Rhode Island, goes even further than De Angela L. Duff in arguing that ‘Under the Cherry Moon’ not only finds “Prince at his most authentic self” by contending “part of this authentic self was not only unapologetic Blackness, but also a queer and transgender aesthetic”.
Ellison (themselves a nonbinary transgender person) calls ‘Under the Cherry Moon’ a “queer/trans camp classic”, and argues how Prince couldn’t help but be influenced by Minneapolis’s strong history of trans visibility and trans right (or at least, as Ellison contends, be influenced by people directly influenced by it). Ellsion dives deeper still into the film’s idea of queer (or at least queer-coded) characters infiltrating and mocking the heteronormative world of the upper classes:
The cover of ‘Under the Cherry Moon’s accompanying album ‘Parade’ shows Prince with thick eyeliner ringing His wide eyes and His hands raised to frame his face. His expression and the position of His hands imitate the vogue dance moves created by the drag queens and trans women who participate in ball culture. Ball culture is a Black and Lantix queer and trans cultural space, characterized by social networks called houses and competitions in which participants walk a runway. It’s an art form with roots that are older than one might expect, stretching back to the 1940s. In ‘Under the Cherry Moon’, Prince presents a tone-downed version of voguing when He dances on the top of that piano. Prince vogues again as the credits roll over the song Mountains.
What we see in Prince’s art work tells us more about ourselves than Him. ‘Under the Cherry Moon’ was undoubtedly shaped by a multiplicity of inspirations. Prince’s co-star Jerome Benton has said that many of the film’s jokes were pulled from real life – and I do not contest that was the film’s primary inspiration. We can only speculate on whether Prince was aware of the ways that His film echoed Black transgender aesthetics. Since Black transgender women have long influenced mainstream culture without acknowledgement, Prince likely did not know where some of His favorite dance moves came from. What we know for sure is this: there is something about Prince that calls to us as trans people.
So, yeah, Golden Raspberry Awards, was that ever considered?
But is it a good movie??
Mate… not especially, no.
It has been argued – completely validly – that a lot of those original crushing reviews came from white, old, cishet men who were never the intended audience, and were never going to be grasp a film that dared to not be catering exclusively to white, old, cishet men (which most movies were back then and continue to be today). I am also a white, old, cishet man, and perhaps there are levels to this movie that will never truly strike a chord with me. Like I said, it’s an utterly noble artistic failure, that if Prince was in any way open to His artistic vision being at all edited could have actually been great. It’s (adorably) all over the place, and after we’ve been yucking it up with Christopher and Tricky for 90 minutes, it’s a ridiculous tone shift for us to be asked to suddenly express remorse over an unintentionally hilariously over the top death scene.
Actually… was even that overwrought death scene unintentionally hilarious?? After offering up a high camp romp, was Prince just laughing at us all again with that most camp tragicomic death?? Was all of this just Prince fucking about, pissing Himself that Warner Brothers had just handed him $12 million to film Himself making his mates laugh while dicking around? David Foil, in 1986 for The Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, probably got it right first time:
I get the feeling people are taking the film far too seriously. Don’t do that. I don’t think Prince, who directed it, did … . He reportedly relied heavily on cinematographer Michael Ballhaus for technical guidance, but the wicked, deadpan sense of fun in the film probably has a great deal to do with him.
Maybe it’s just a bad movie. Maybe it’s a great one. Maybe it’s Prince’s unharnessed ego. Maybe it’s a glance into His true self that we never got elsewhere. Maybe it’s a veiled support for Minneapolis’s trans community.
Maybe it’s one guy having a laugh, that was never meant to have 4000 words written about it 39 years later.
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