Woody Allen’s fourteenth feature film might be seen as the third part of a trilogy (a quartet if we include the Allen-starring and written but Herbert Ross-directed Play It Again, Sam (1972)) of films exploring our relationship with and love for film, its two predecessors being Stardust Memories (1980) and Zelig (1983). In some ways, it could also be seen as a corrective to Stardust Memories in which film fans were presented as obsessives bordering on the psychopathic. Not so here – the leading character is a film obsessive but uses that passion as a means of escape from a nightmarish daily routine of poverty and abuse.

The Purple Rose of Cairo is a more affirmative view of obsession with film. As in Play It Again, Sam, one of the earliest images is a close-up of a face, enraptured by what they’re seeing on a cinema screen. In this case, it’s the face of Cecilia (Mia Farrow), a downtrodden woman in Great Depression-era New Jersey who escapes the bleakness of her life – she a clumsy, low-paid and unappreciated waitress in a diner and married to the womanising and abusive Monk (Danny Aiello) – by spending time at a local cinema. She becomes particularly obsessed with a fictional RKO film, the romantic adventure The Purple Rose of Cairo, the story of rich Manhattan playwright Henry (Edward Herrmann) who goes on holiday in Egypt with companions Jason (John Wood) and Rita (Deborah Rush) and meets archaeologist Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels). They return home with him for a “madcap Manhattan weekend” during which Tom falls in love with nightclub singer Kitty Haynes (Karen Akers). Eventually, Cecilia’s devotion to the film comes to the attention of Tom who steps out of the film leaving his co-stars stranded so that he can talk to her. He and Cecilia fall in love, but desperate studio bosses need Tom back in the film and send the actor who plays him, Gil Shepherd (Daniels again) to persuade him. Romantic complications ensue.

It’s the reverse of the idea from Buster Keaton’s masterly Sherlock Jr (1924), in which Keaton plays an equally addicted film buff who steps into the films he’s projecting. Allen takes the idea, flips it on its head (John McTiernan’s The Last Action Hero (1993) would try something similar but with very different results) and adds his own unique brand of comedy on the top. There’s no room here for his usual neurotic screen persona and he steps aside to give the lion’s share of screen time to his then partner Farrow whose film this unashamedly is. She may not be in every scene, but is as good as and the whole story is predicated on her love for film, a love born of loneliness, poverty and a desperate desire to find a better life. And she’s fantastic, heading a typically first-rate cast (Allen always manages to get the very best from even the unlikeliest of casts) – Aiello is monstrous as the abusive Monk (try to stifle those cheers when Cecilia finally works up the courage to leave him, even if her happiness is very short-lived) and Daniels, still early in his career, is wonderful as both the dashing but naïve Tom and the easily manipulated Gil. He replaced the originally cast Michael Keaton who left ten days into production when Allen felt that he was too “modern” to be playing a 30s screen hero.

There’s much fun to be had here wit the plight of the actors left behind in the film who are left in limbo, terrified that the projectionist will turn them off while they tread water awaiting the return of Tom, and the absurd situation is milked for every gag that Allen can think of (Cecilia tries at one point to rationalise her feelings for Tom with “I just met a wonderful new man. He’s fictional, but you can’t have everything.”) It’s typically clever stuff and rather gentle too – we’re a long way from the knockabout slapstick of Allen’s earliest films and the film is almost entirely lacking in the cynicism that alienated some viewers of Stardust Memories.

Here, some have complained that the finale is too downbeat, almost brutal. Forced to choose between Tom and Gil, Cecilia has little choice but to opt for the latter, consigning Tom to an uncertain fate – he sadly returns to the film, but the studio bosses are so alarmed by the events that they determine to never allow it again by destroying all prints and negatives. In the “real world,” Gil reveals that his supposed love for Cecilia was all a ruse as he flies back to Hollywood (albeit apparently wracked with guilt) leaving her alone with nowhere to live, no relationship and no job. The final moments offer her a glimmer of hope as she finds a new film to fall in love with as the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers favourite Top Hat (1935) opens at the cinema. It’s heart-breaking stuff, beautifully played by Farrow, as Cecilia finally accepts that fantasy and reality can never truly co-exist but the fantasy can still offer her a brief moment of escape from her horrible reality. The setting is perfect – during the Great Depression, going to the cinema was one of the few means of escape for many people, the chasm between the drab desperation of everyday life for so many Americans and the unbridled fantasy of the movies they were watching is immense but not, the film suggests, entirely unbridgeable. Gil’s manipulation of Cecilia (which may be reluctant, but he does it nonetheless) reminds us all that the magic of the films we love largely comes from being manipulated by people driven largely by ego and commerce.

The ending may be sad but the journey there is peppered with in-jokes aimed at both film buffs and the conventions of the films we grew up on – Tom nervously awaits the fade-out while kissing Cecilia because that’s always what happens in his films and while he can drive a car, he can’t actually start one as his character is only even seen in cars already in transit. He doesn’t believe in God either because religion was never written into his character, somewhat baffled when Cecilia tells him that religion is “a reason for everything, otherwise it would be like a movie with no point and no happy ending.”

Witty, clever, charming and often laugh out loud funny, The Purple Rose of Cairo could easily stake its claim as one of Allen’s very best films. Allen’s screenplay was nominated for that year’s Best Screenplay Oscar and won the BAFTA equivalent along with a handful of Golden Globes, BSFC Awards and several others. It runs a brisk 84 minutes, not all that much longer than the films that The Purple Rose of Cairo was spoofing, but as Vincent Canby of The New York Times so succinctly put it, “it’s short but nearly every one of those minutes is blissful.”