... but Prince captures the essence of '30s comedies better than any of the directors (from Peter Bogdanovich to Woody Allen) who have slavishly imitated them.

Prince and the gifted and debonair Jerome Benton

...he asks the camera to drink in every primped and pomaded inch.

Thank you NPS!! I'd never read this. In fact I didn't know a positive review of this film existed



He better have this quote framed & on a wall somewhere



I had no idea 'Rome was gifted, y'all!!

...Prince and Benton's antics are a form of subversive blackface...

...

Watching "Under the Cherry Moon" as the story of two black hustler/trickster figures making mockery of the stuffiness of upper class white culture, by flouting all the conservative notions of race, gender, and sexuality, opens the film up to a different viewing. Especially considering this came out at the height of Reagan's America.

the Story&Idea wasn't bad but the Whole Acting Cast just were Wack IMHO.Prince tried that Morris Day Bag on Himself&Folks didn't buy it from him&also for the First time anywhere Prince the Mystique Cat let His Guard down&was Seen as Corny with that Film.Nobody can't Sell that Film with Him as a Actor&that Scary Camera Work that still makes My Head Hurt from just remembering the Swings at the Movie House back in the day.

In that vein, I actually find UTCM to be much less pretentious than the parts of Purple Rain where we are supposed to be serious about certain scenes.

the acting sucked man yall try to make prince out to be a God...it sucked admit it!

Posted here and elsewhere in the past but deserves a repost.

http://archive.salon.com/...9tayl.html

A.F.R.O.-.Deco
Prince's unfairly maligned second film mixes
swank screwball comedy with uptown sass.
by Charles Taylor



The luxurious settings of 1930s movies were less the province of the characters who could afford them than the ones who knew how to have the most fun. For all their art-deco elegance, the comedies and musicals of the era were populated by the sort of earthy performers you wouldn't expect to find on the social register. Cruising through the plush, satiny settings with an air of cheerful disrespect, Mae West, Jean Harlow, Ginger Rogers and others kept all the wealth on display from seeming like just cold cash. In contrast to stiff swells determined to be tastefully discreet about their bucks, the wisecracking stars most popular with Depression audiences acted out an unabashed fantasy of finding yourself in the chips.

A gloss on '30s movies that combines lowdown comedy with high-fashion style, Prince's "Under the Cherry Moon" (1986) was not what anybody expected as a follow-up to the hit "Purple Rain," although it's a much more enjoyable movie. "Under the Cherry Moon" isn't in the same class as "Top Hat," "She Done Him Wrong" or "Dinner at Eight," but Prince captures the essence of '30s comedies better than any of the directors (from Peter Bogdanovich to Woody Allen) who have slavishly imitated them. The movie has a casual, tossed-off approach and an air of impudent swank. If Becky Johnston's script proceeds more by flourishes than plot development, she still includes plenty of snappy repartee. And Prince was lucky enough to have the benefit of Richard Sylbert's production design and Michael Ballhaus' cinematography, which bring the lush, silvery look of '30s movies into the age of Versace and rock 'n' roll.

When Prince appeared in the early '80s, the essence of his appeal lay in the way his outrageously sexual image flouted the new conservatism of American society (it was a Prince song that prompted a shocked Tipper Gore to found the Parents Music Resource Center). Every enjoyable movie fantasy is rooted in some emotional or cultural reality, and here that reality is the Reagan era, with its agenda of relegating wealth and privilege to a chosen few. But, in place of speechifying, the movie's cultural nose-thumbing expresses itself as a dedication to the principle of fun.

"Under the Cherry Moon" is a fantasia of what might have happened if blacks in classic Hollywood comedy hadn't been relegated to playing maids and bellhops. Prince and the gifted and debonair Jerome Benton (he was Morris Day's sidekick in "Purple Rain") play a pair of gigolos loose on the French Riviera and insinuating themselves into the playground of rich whites. The sassiness of Mae West and Jean Harlow here translates into the jivey put-ons of a pair of slick black hustlers. As Christopher and his partner Tricky, Prince and Benton are something like Bob Hope and Bing Crosby doing Amos and Andy. (And if you know Amos and Andy only in disrepute, you probably don't know about the program's clever, punning verbal humor, like the great line "I not only denies the allegation, but I resents the allegator!") The difference is, Prince and Benton are nobody's patsies. Everyone who deals with them winds up feeling three steps behind, just as the poor straights who tried to have a conversation with Groucho or Chico did. When their landlady (the comely Emannuelle Sallet) tells them that Tricky's charms will no longer suffice to pay the rent, the two of them sink to their knees and become a pair of po' little orphan boys, begging not to get thrown out in the cold, mean streets.

Prince and Benton's antics are a form of subversive blackface. In the '20s and '30s, rich New York whites headed to Harlem for what they regarded as chic slumming. In "Under the Cherry Moon," the slums make house calls on the Vanity Fair set. Throughout the movie, whenever Prince wants to bait stuffy white people (or just have a little fun), he abandons his natural sexy speaking voice for a high-pitched black dialect. In one scene Christopher and Tricky, dining in a fancy restaurant with a tycoon's daughter (Kristin Scott Thomas, in her movie debut) they've set their sights on, make her read a phrase they've written out: "Wrecka Stow." To the pair's whooping delight, Thomas (who, with her tart comic delivery is as game as she is beautiful) pronounces it in her flawless English accent, and when she demands to know what it means, they tell her, "If you wanted to buy a Sam Cooke album, where would you go?"

Maybe because his sexuality had been the subject of speculation, Prince makes a grand joke out of his doe-eyed swanning. Wittily costumed in a series of ensembles that includes high-heeled boots, cut-to-the-waist jackets, beaded bandannas and skin-tight sequined pants, he asks the camera to drink in every primped and pomaded inch. At one point he sits in the bathtub wearing a bolero hat while Benton showers rose petals on him. The two of them conduct their partnership as an endless round of flirtations and flare-ups (too good-spirited to be homophobic), even falling into a couple of eye-flashing clinches. (The real drama queen here is Steven Berkoff, in one of his reliably disgraceful performances, as Scott Thomas' father. He makes his entrance in a white suit leading a big trophy dog on a leash and greets his daughter with a mincing, "Hello Kitten, how's the prettiest girl on the Côte d'Azur?" Oh, Mary!) But when he wants to be, Prince is an ace seducer. The movie's sexiest scene comes when he and Scott Thomas are talking on the phone, lying on their respective beds, not doing much more than listening to each other's breathing. And when he takes her to his seaside grotto, there's a lovely superimposed shot where the two of them appear to be making love inside her outstretched hand.

The bad buzz about "Under the Cherry Moon" began a week into the shoot when Prince fired director Mary Lambert (who had made a name directing videos for Madonna) and took over. His direction is a little all over the place. At times he seems to have gotten swept up in the movie's party escapades and the parade of scenemakers floating by the camera. The big set piece, Scott Thomas' birthday garden party, captures the slightly tipsy feel that pervades the film. But sometimes it's as important for a director to provide the right spirit as it is to be precise, and the most important thing to Prince here seems to be to keep us entertained. The stylish, slightly unsteady whirl of "Under the Cherry Moon" is like watching a '30s movie while slipping into an afternoon nap and having it become part of your dreams. It doesn't even wreck the fun when Prince moves from comedy to romantic melodrama in the last half-hour: His dreams just seem to have led him into another movie. And the comic tone is restored in the number ("Mountains") that ends the picture: Prince and the Revolution performing the song direct from heaven. Life is a parade, Christopher says. So's the movie. Prince wants to ride atop the float, receiving the crowd's adulation, but he's also larking about down in the street, happy to be one of the clowns.

SALON | Sept. 29, 1998

EDIT THE CREDIT.
[This message was edited Sun Mar 30 21:52:02 PST 2003 by NuPwrSoul]

thechronic said:

thechronic said: