Comedies With Surprisingly Sad Endings

Of all of the movies Woody Allen and Mia Farrow made together during their '80s run, this is perhaps the most critically acclaimed. A large part of that stems from its ending, which remains utterly devastating all these years later.

Farrow plays Cecilia, a poor housewife living during the Great Depression. Stuck in an abusive, loveless marriage, she attempts to escape the trauma of her everyday reality in the comfort of the movies. She becomes particularly obsessed by a new comedy-adventure film about dashing archeologist Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels). Through the power of magic, the fictional character of Tom gains sentience when he notices Cecilia sitting in the audience. He literally steps out of the movie screen to be with her. She finally gets the courage to leave her brute of a husband, but things become complicated when the real-life actor who played Tom, Gil Shepherd (Daniels, pulling double duty) shows up and falls for Cecilia.

When forced to decide whether to go off with Tom or stay in the real world with Gil, she chooses the latter. However, after Tom leaves, she discovers that Gil never actually cared for her. He was only deceiving her in order to get Tom to go back to his world. Homeless and heartbroken, Cecilia returns to the movie theater, where a new film is playing. The last shot of the film shows Cecilia smiling through her tears, able to escape her pain through the power of cinema. However, we know that this respite is merely temporary.

Allen rarely does traditional happy endings, but even by his standards, The Purple Rose of Cairo ends on a brutally sad note.