After The Killer in the Guest House Charles and I watched a 1991 Warner Bros. release called Graffiti Bridge, the third and last feature film made by Prince Rogers Nelson, who became a worldwide celebrity using his first name only. Prince made his first album in 1977, playing all the parts via overdubbing as Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder and Pete Townshend (on his solo albums) had done before him, and by the early 1980’s he was a huge music star, selling millions of copies of albums with titles like Dirty Mind, Controversy (the title song began, “Am I Black or white? Am I straight or Gay?” — though in real life Prince was definitively Black and straight) and 1999. Since Warner Bros. was a movie company as well as a record label, they decided to put Prince in a movie, written by Albert Magnoli and William Blinn and directed by Magnoli, called Purple Rain. Purple Rain cast Prince as “The Kid,” an aspiring music star in Prince’s real-life home town of Minneapolis, Minnesota (at least two other music legends, Judy Garland and Bob Dylan, are also native Minnesotans) who fears that he’s going to follow in the footsteps of his father (played by the excellent and woefully underused Black actor Clarence Williams III, who seemed to have fallen off the cultural radar screen completely after his 1960’s TV series The Mod Squad went off the air), an aspiring musician who never made it to stardom and took out his frustrations by beating his wife. The soundtrack album for Purple Rain was Prince’s most successful album, artistically and commercially, and produced great songs like “Let’s Go Crazy,” “When Doves Cry” and “Purple Rain.” I grabbed the album almost as soon as it came out and it’s still one of the most impressive music releases of the mid-1980’s (though it was Prince’s bad luck to produce it the same year Bruce Springsteen made Born in the U.S.A.: these two titanic and ground-breaking albums canceled each other out in the voting for the Album of the Year Grammy Award and so the Album of the Year award went to a piece of pop treacle, Lionel Richie’s All Night Long), but when I finally caught up with the movie via a VHS tape in 1997 I found it far inferior to the album:
Like the Beatles’ infamous Magical
Mystery Tour, it’s a series of good music
videos of Prince songs with a lot of nonsense in between them. Charles hadn’t
remembered the relentless misogyny of the movie — Morris Day (acting,
perversely, like a screaming queen who seemed to have intended his whole
performance as an audition piece for The Little Richard Story) literally throws a rejected girlfriend into a
dumpster, and even Our Hero makes his blindly adoring heroine (Apollonia
Kotero) take off her clothes and jump in a lake, and later gives her a good,
hard slap in the context of an argument. The frustrating thing about Purple
Rain is it’s the sort of bad movie that has
a good movie inside it struggling to get out; the conflict between Prince and
his wife-beating father (played by Clarence Williams III — and why hasn’t this talented actor been used better? Every
so often he surfaces for a part like this or his chilling portrayal of George
Wallace’s Black prisoner/valet in the recent George Wallace TV-movie — and then he disappears again), and the
extent to which his own life is mirroring his father (an aspiring musician
whose career is crumbling about him and who takes out his frustrations on the
woman he loves), could have been the focus of a very interesting movie if the
scripting had been tighter and if the director, Albert Magnoli, had been able
to get a good, or at least tolerable, acting job out of Prince. As it is,
though, he’s a gooey screen presence which you find yourself wanting to scrape
off the lens — like Cher in real life, Prince in this movie wears silly clothes
that work as stage costumes but are totally unbelievable as off-stage wear —
and the movie ultimately collapses under the weight of the star’s egomania. (He
even produced and arranged all
the music for the film, which means that even though the various bands in it
are supposed to have different
styles, they all end up sounding pretty much the same.) Purple Rain generated an excellent soundtrack album, and on the
album Prince was smart enough to realize that the title song was unfollowable
and therefore must be placed last — unfortunately, the filmmakers weren’t so
smart and allowed the transcendent moment (or what would have been a transcendent moment if Magnoli were a
better director and if Prince could have actually portrayed heartbreak at the
suicide attempt of his father instead of having some proto-MTV montage cutting
convey the impression that he was
feeling that emotion) to lose its energy in a burst of funky follow-up songs
that only indicated that, though musically Prince was genuinely original,
visually he was just another prancing Black performer copying Michael Jackson
copying James Brown copying Cab Calloway copying someone else no doubt lost in
the mists of time …
Prince followed up Purple Rain cinematically with a film called Under the Cherry Moon, which once again spawned a great soundtrack album, Parade, but which was dismissed when it came out as a hopeless mishmash of a film. Since it was at least nominally set in the 1930’s, Prince decided to film it in black-and-white even though he wore his typically flamboyant costumes that cried out for color. He also decided he was an auteur, so midway through the shoot he fired director Michael Ballhaus and took over the direction himself. Though Under the Cherry Moon was a box-office bomb, Warner Bros. allowed Prince to make another movie, and this time Prince got to write, direct and star in Graffiti Bridge, an ostensible sequel to Purple Rain in which Prince returns as “The Kid” and Morris Day ditto as his nemesis, “Morris Day.” (Morris Day was the leader of a band called The Time that became part of Prince’s entourage — though like the other bands he signed to his own label, Paisley Park, Prince produced them and therefore they ended up sounding pretty much like Prince — and two members of The Time, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, became a highly successful songwriting and record-producing team.) The script Prince came up with for Graffiti Bridge was basically an updated version of a 1930’s gangster film (though since all the principals are Black it also takes on the character of a “race” movie — especially a cheap one acted with such breathtaking incompetence one wonders, “Where were all the Black people who could act?”), shot in full-out noir style and dealing with a competition for control of the night life in Black Minneapolis. Morris Day owns six of the seven nightclubs in town and has a half-share in the last one he doesn’t own, the Glam Slam, which is run and managed by its co-owner, The Kid (guess who). He’s determined either to buy out Prince’s (I might as well use his real name) share in the Glam Slam so he can have a total monopoly or, failing that, to burn it down. The contest between Prince and Day takes the form of some weird macho stunts — in one scene Day stands over an ailing plant in the Glam Slam’s lobby, starts saying the alphabet, and when he gets to “P” he unzips his pants and … you don’t want to know — as well as battles of the bands between Prince’s group, the New Power Generation (before this Prince’s band, to the extent he had one, was called The Revolution, but he wrote a song called “New Power Generation” for this film and later decided to make that the name of his band), against Day’s band, The Time (which promotes its appearance by spray-painting their slogan, “What TIME Is It?,” on every available surface), with guest appearances by George Clinton and Mavis Staples.
Mavis Staples isn’t very well used in Graffiti Bridge — she plays a character called “Melody Cool” and
fronts a club of that name, but it’s only a cog in Day’s empire and she only
gets a few bits here and there in one of Prince’s numbers — but Clinton, whose
bands Parliament and Funkadelic pioneered the fusion of rock, soul, disco and
flamboyant theatrics that later made Prince a star, gets a quite impressive
featured number. (At his peak Clinton had “exclusive” contracts with two record
labels, signing Parliament to one company and Funkadelic to another, though
they were exactly the same people
except that Parliament had a horn section and Funkadelic didn’t.) Graffiti
Bridge has some things going for it,
notably the film’s marvelous visual look — through much of it cinematographer
Bill Butler seems to have been worshiping at the shrine of Josef von Sternberg,
making the whole thing look distant and foggy and highlighting (rather than
trying to conceal) the frankly unrealistic character of production designer
Vance Lorenzini’s sets — and a script that’s more passively sexist than the active sexism of Purple Rain. At least in this one nobody slaps a woman or throws
her into a dumpster, but the two female leads, “Aura” (played by one Ingrid
Chavez, who got an ‘Introducing” credit and was never heard from again, after
Prince’s first choices, Madonna and Kim Basinger, both turned it down) and
someone else whose name I can’t recall, both get seduced by Morris Day even
though this is one of those movies where a man can get a woman to have sex with
him just by glaring at her long enough. Aura is supposed to be Prince’s
girlfriend — the two have long romantic dates in which she reads him her own
poetry by the titular “graffiti bridge” (supposedly the location of the end of Purple
Rain. though it looks totally different)
while the orchestra plays Debussy’s “Sacred and Profane Dances” and Ravel’s
Introduction and Allegro for harp and strings (both written on commission from
rival Paris instrument makers who had invented different systems for making a
harp play chromatically), an intriguing choice that makes me wonder if it
reflects Prince’s overall taste in classical music. But that doesn’t stop Aura
from bouncing back and forth between Prince and Day — who’s supposed to be the
more butch one of the two but still
comes off like he’s auditioning to play Little Richard in a biopic.
And unlike Purple
Rain, Graffiti Bridge doesn’t even have a great Prince score to make up
for his deficiencies as a writer and director. The songs are professionally
competent, and “Round ’n’ Round” stands out because it features the almost
unearthly beauty (physical and
vocal) of a young singer named Tevin Campbell, but there’s nothing here as
memorable as the songs from Purple Rain. Graffiti Bridge was made at a critical juncture in Prince’s career,
just before he severed ties with Warner Bros., launched a long, acrimonious
legal battle with them to break his contract and also attempted to change his
name to an unpronounceable hieroglyphic symbol (something you can’t legally do,
by the way) and instructed the world that from then on he was supposed to be
referred to as “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince.” (My response was to joke
that if Charles Windsor were to give up his hobby of painting, he’d be The Prince Formerly Known as Artist.) The battles
between Prince and Warners were the reverse of most contests between artists
and record companies; a typical recording contract specifies that the artist
must produce a certain number of albums in a specified period of time. But,
partly because the increasing complexity of recording equipment and the
insistence of artists that they write their own material made the record-making
process take longer, and partly because record companies spent so much money on
each album they wanted to squeeze as many sales as they could out of each album
before allowing the artist to make a new one, artists frequently had the time
of their contract expired before they fulfilled the product requirement.
With
Prince, Warners had the opposite problem: he poured out so much material so
fast he gave them way more than
they could practicably release or sell, and so he completed his contract in
terms of amount of product well before it expired on the calendar. Prince’s
relentless pace of recording also, I think, negatively impacted the quality of
his music; once he was free from Warners and he created his own record company,
he flooded the market with quickly produced jam songs and not only didn’t bother
to separate the wheat from the chaff, he didn’t put in the time and effort it
would have required to make his good songs truly great. Graffiti
Bridge shows signs of Prince’s
deterioration as an artist (and as a public figure; though the hieroglyphic
hadn’t yet taken its final form, bits of it occur in the movie in wall
paintings, ornaments on Prince’s costumes and in the shape of at least one of
the instruments used by his band —and that whole “Artist Formerly Known as
Prince” business undoubtedly put off a lot of fans and shrank his market base);
the songs sound good but sloppy, and one aches for the additional concentration
and effort it would have made to bring them to the artistic level of the songs
from Purple Rain. Prince’s career
reached fabulous heights but there’s still an air of artistic unfulfillment
about it — a sense that he could have had a career as long as Louis
Armstrong’s, Duke Ellington’s, B. B. King’s or James Brown’s if he’d just taken
better care of himself and avoided all the weird shit he fell into — and the
sloppiness and formlessness of Graffiti Bridge catch the artist as he was beginning his decline and
show the parts of him and his character that would topple him from his
mid-1980’s artistic and commercial peak.
