Raspberry Picking: Under the Cherry Moon (1986)

Greetings and welcome back to Raspberry Picking, where we look back at Golden Raspberry Award winners and decide whether they really deserve to be called the worst movies ever. This month we’re hanging out with Under the Cherry Moon, the disappointing juvenile delinquent younger brother of Purple Rain that cost Prince his fledgling movie career.

In the early 1980s, pop star Prince Rogers Nelson decided he also wanted to be a movie star. He’d gotten some leverage from the success of his album 1999, and told his manager Bob Cavallo that he wouldn’t renew their contract unless Cavallo got him a starring role in a studio film. Poor Cavallo couldn’t find a single studio willing to produce some minor celebrity’s self-promotion stunt (how times have changed!), so he produced the movie himself, hiring the director and writers and working off a basic plot outline provided by his client. Music publicist and Prince megafan Howard Bloom championed the film to the suits at Warner Brothers, and after much hemming and hawing, they agreed to distribute the strange object called Purple Rain.

Many critics didn’t know what to make of Purple Rain – it was a bit incoherent as a movie, but the songs were so catchy, and this Prince guy so watchable! Audiences, on the other hand, gobbled it up like popcorn. Purple Rain brought in $72 million against its $7.2 million budget, catapulted Prince to megastardom and became the quintessential rock movie musical almost overnight. So Warner Brothers barfed a bunch of money at Prince and gave him total creative freedom to make a follow-up, which he did in 1986 with a strange little picture called Under the Cherry Moon.

Prince knew he could do whatever the hell he wanted with his sophomore feature, and by Jove he was going to use that power. A series of eyebrow-raising creative choices for which the reasoning boils down to “Prince wanted it that way” ensued. He clashed with his original director, rock video specialist Mary Lambert (she of future Pet Sematary fame), so he fired her and took the helm of the film himself. He wanted an exotic locale, so he flew everyone off to the French Riviera. He wanted the movie to be in black and white, but Warner Brothers got cold feet at that idea, so they shot it in color and he spent a lot of extra money processing it into black and white in post-production.

More curiously, he also used his godlike powers to attempt a few career launches. He initially planned for his girlfriend Susannah Melvoin to play the female lead, but she couldn’t act, so he instead cast a twenty-five-year-old au pair and acting student living in France at the time, a young lady named Kristin Scott Thomas. Despite his now wide-reaching connections, Prince also selected first-time writer Becky Johnston as his screenwriter. She submitted a test script, he found it charming and true to his vision, and that was that.

The result was…well, it was something. If people weren’t sure what to make of Purple Rain, they really didn’t know what to do with Under the Cherry Moon. Reviews dismissed it as a silly vanity project (raising the question of what exactly they thought Purple Rain was) and it failed to gain any traction with audiences, taking in about $10.1 million against its $12 million budget. (Don’t cry too hard for Prince. The movie might have been a financial disappointment, but the soundtrack album, Parade, went double platinum and made almost every music critic’s yearly top 10.) During awards season, it received eight Razzie nominations and won five, including Worst Picture and, inexplicably, Worst Song. Come on, guys, if there’s one thing you know is going to be good in a movie helmed by Prince, it’s the music.

Because of that, as we may expect, Prince the Musician had plenty of career left, but Prince the Film Director did not. He did eventually make the desired sequel to Purple Rain – 1990’s Graffiti Bridge – but by then, no one was in the mood and Graffiti Bridge pulled in five Razzie nods of its own. Purple Rain was officially a fluke.

Or was it? Let’s dive headlong into the film the man really wanted to make, the unadulterated Prince-ness of Under the Cherry Moon. Just how terrible is it?

THE STORY

It’s…not. It’s not terrible at all. In fact, it’s many different kinds of wonderful. I’m a little bit in love with this dumb movie.

Rarely have I felt such bafflement as I do when contemplating what the hell the Razzie voters were smoking in 1986. Under the Cherry Moon is magical. It’s one of the best movie experiences I’ve had this year. I want everyone to see it. It should be studied and analyzed as an example of how to make a good movie that still has bad movie bonafides.

Under the Cherry Moon opens on its very worst moment, followed immediately by its very best moment. The former is the opening narration, provided by a breathy British lady whom I believe but am not positive is Kristin Scott Thomas, tells us the two-hundred-eighty-characters-or-less version of the entire story. We then cut to Christopher Tracy (Prince) wearing an extremely silly hat and playing the piano in a nightclub called the Venus de Milo, where a MILF in a feathery white suit and a birdcage veil (Francesca Annis) makes bedroom eyes at him and his buddy Tricky (Jerome Benton) eggs him on from afar. Christopher and Tricky, we soon learn, are gigolos from Miami who wish to marry wealthy European women. Christopher gets involved with the feather suit lady, Mrs. Wellington, while Tricky is carrying on with their landlady Katy (Emmanuelle Sallet), but Christopher isn’t satisfied and Katy is threatening to throw both men out of their apartment if they don’t start paying their back rent.

So Christopher and Tricky see a little announcement in the newspaper that Mary Sharon (Thomas), daughter of and heiress to the enormous fortune of shipping magnate Isaac Sharon (Steven Berkoff), is about to turn 21, and upon that fateful day she will gain access to her $50 million trust fund. They decide she will make an excellent target, never mind that she is already engaged in an arranged betrothal to her father’s wealthy employee and also never mind that Isaac Sharon does not take kindly to strange men from Miami hanging around his precious little girl.

They crash the party at the grand Sharon estate. Mary comes down to the party naked, to the horror of her very prim and proper British mother (Alexandra Stewart), and joins the band on the drums. For the remainder of the movie, Mary will also be very prim and proper and British, so I suppose this character-establishing introduction snuck over from another movie.

Mary and Christopher are drawn to each other, but Mary doesn’t know what to do with Christopher’s free spirit, and Christopher doesn’t know how to handle Mary’s very proper upbringing or her psychopathic father. Seriously, speaking of things that snuck over from other movies, Mr. Sharon’s North Korean-level control of his daughter’s life and hair-trigger temper that Christopher keeps deliberately provoking would belong in a suspense thriller about a stalker if Berkoff weren’t so savvy and weren’t having such a wicked good time playing the part.

But of course, crazy dads can’t stop True Love, and Mary and Christopher develop a Beatrice-and-Benedick courtship. They bicker and flirt, bicker and flirt, bicker and flirt, and finally get it on surrounded by candles in a grotto. Tricky half-heartedly tries to pursue Mary himself, but he can’t stop True Love either. Many significant looks are exchanged. Many more outrageous costumes are worn. Prince songs play in the background. What could go wrong?

THE BAD

So about that opening narration. Hoo boy.

The opening narration informs us that “once upon a time in France, there was a bad boy named Christopher Tracy.” We are told that “only one thing mattered to Christopher…money,” so of course the remainder of the opening narration focuses on Christopher’s relationships with a variety of very wealthy women. “Christopher lived for all women,” the narrator then contradicts herself, “but he only died for one! Somewhere along the way he learned the true meaning…of love!”

Well, gee, thanks for all the spoilers, Ms. Narrator Person. Fortunately, unlike in certain other movies we could name, the narrator leaves us alone after that opening scene. Her dialogue does exemplify a near-fatal flaw in the movie, which is the, let us say unpolished quality of Becky Johnston’s screenplay.

Johnston later wrote The Prince of Tides, for which she received an Oscar nomination, and Seven Years in Tibet, both of which offer generous helpings of overwrought melodrama, but those movies both look like Se7en when placed alongside the repetitive gooey sentimentality of Under the Cherry Moon. Variations on two conversations – Christopher and Mary alternately bickering and flirting, or Christopher and Tricky loudly declaring their growing mutual affection for Mary – occupy an astonishing amount of this movie’s runtime. The Big Climactic Moment in which Christopher and Mary finally, truly confess their feelings for one another is brought about via the following conversation:

CHRISTOPHER: I love you.

MARY: No, you don’t.

CHRISTOPHER: Then I hate you.

MARY: No, you don’t.

CHRISTOPHER: Then I love you.

MARY: Define “love.”

This would be a bit less tiresome if they hadn’t been doing essentially the same thing, in every single one of their scenes together, for the previous eighty-five minutes. Thank goodness Under the Cherry Moon wasn’t made today; it would have been three hours long.

It might also be a bit less tiresome without Kristin Scott Thomas. These days, of course, Kristin Scott Thomas is a renowned grand dame of the stage and screen. The kindest thing I can think of to say about young, inexperienced Kristin Scott Thomas is that she gets a lot of mileage in this particular movie out of the doe-eyed, pouty-lipped thousand-yard stare she wears for all of it. Through no fault of hers, she is saddled with all of Johnston’s worst lines (“Do you like my birthday suit? I designed it myself!”), but the angry-bored whine with which she inflects all of them doesn’t do her any favors. She’s at her least bad when she’s acting with only her face and her body – the dance scenes between her and Prince are quite old-fashioned and lovely – but she’s still overshadowed by everyone else around her, including the backup dancers.

On another occasion, near the end of the film, Tricky responds to Katy’s admonishment of his behavior with “It’s a full moon, I’m a werewolf, bitch, KISS MY ASS!”, forgetting that he is in Under the Cherry Moon and not Thriller. But I’m not sure this is bad. In fact, I’m about out of things I’m sure are bad.

THE GOOD

Remember how I said before that Under the Cherry Moon’s best scene is its opening titles? Let’s take a careful look. We open on Christopher, in his dollar store Halloween hat, playing a soulful piano tune “play it again, Sam” style.

We cut over to the object of his flirtations, the lady in white, bathed in thick sensuous shadow.

Throughout the credits, we move quickly and repeatedly between them, focusing on the connections between their eyes, but especially their hands. Christopher’s hands caress the keys of the piano as the lady in white slowly pulls off one long white glove. But periodically, we are interrupted by a waitress delivering notes from Tricky, scribbled onto napkins, demanding that Christopher hurry up and get a tip from the lady already. We end with a lingering shot from Christopher’s perspective of the embers of the lady in white’s abandoned cigarette.

It’s a beautiful opening sequence – lovely to behold, tense, sensual, and punctuated at all the best and worst moments by unapologetic dopey sidekick comedy. It sets the tone for the entire movie with aplomb.

It also establishes the movie’s key ingredient, the man behind and in front of the curtain. Anyone who has seen Purple Rain already knew this, but Prince has an astonishing screen presence. He exudes watch-what-I-can-do magnetism in every frame. His pronunciation of the word “garçon” was engineered in some top-secret laboratory to imprint itself permanently on your brain so that you can never hear the word again without thinking of him.

And that’s just Prince by himself. He spends most of the movie getting nothing from Kristin Scott Thomas and resolutely spinning that nothingness into gold. That dynamic, which has torpedoed many a rom-com, works amazingly well to get and keep the audience on Christopher’s side even when the character is being a cad, which is often. And if he can make these scenes work so well when his scene partner is bored and detached, imagine the magic that happens when he shares the screen with Jerome Benton, who commits to the bit just as hard. They play off each other with dancelike movements and a rapid, musical cadence to the cornball middle school poetry of Johnston’s dialogue. You would be forgiven at times for thinking that Prince and Benton are secretly the romantic leads of the movie.

Steven Berkoff and Alexandra Stewart also stand out as Mary’s long-suffering parents. Berkoff stops short of ever derailing the movie with his character’s utter nastiness because he’s hamming it up so hard, and Stewart’s ultra-upright stiffness provides a perfect counterpart to his hunched-shoulder skulking about. They’re both bringing a lot to these characters that simply isn’t there in the script, and they deserve tremendous credit that neither of them have received.

Prince isn’t half bad as a director, either. Sure, he makes some first-timer mistakes: many scenes outstay their welcome just a bit, and characters’ non-musical movements are often awkwardly blocked. But the whole thing bursts with passion and personality. The set is like a black-and-white playground for Prince: he’s constantly testing what he can do with light and shadow, with reflection, with angles, and with ambient sound as well as music. Love and excitement can take you far, even when lack of experience or know-how would otherwise get in your way.

Oh, and the soundtrack itself is one banger after another, but I’m trying to tell you things you don’t know here.

What happened here? Why didn’t we barf money at Prince to make a half dozen more movies about himself? I think it’s pretty straightforward: both audiences and critics punished Under the Cherry Moon for failing to be another Purple Rain. They didn’t understand this weird black-and-white abstraction where Prince wore backless suits and didn’t play the guitar, and they didn’t want it. 

But thank God this movie exists. Thank God we had – and, we can hope, still have – artists like Prince who truly, madly, and deeply do not give a rat’s ass what anyone else wants from them, who reinvented themselves on whims because it was Tuesday, who lived their artistic lives out on limbs. Watching Under the Cherry Moon has been my Hanukkah present to myself, and a reminder of why I conceived the Raspberry Picking column in the first place. I will tolerate a hundred Inchons and Shining Throughs if, every so often, I can have one Under the Cherry Moon.

Quality of Movie: 4 / 5. It has a clear vision, fun characters, narrative tension, and bold aesthetic choices, held together by the glue of earnest amateur goofiness.

Quality of Experience: 4.5 / 5. Don’t let Kristin Scott Thomas drag you down. Go watch this movie and love it like I do.

Mandy Albert teaches high school English and watches movies – mostly bad, occasionally good – in the psychedelic swamplands of South Florida. She is especially fond of 1970s horror and high-sincerity, low-talent vanity projects. You can listen to her and her husband talk about Star Trek: Enterprise on their podcast At Least There’s a Dog! You can also follow Mandy on Letterboxd.