Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean

This is a set-bound independent film deals with a small assortment of characters who assemble at the small title store in a nowhere, dusty Texas town. Some work at the store, and some have moved out of town, but they are reuniting on the 20th anniversary of James Dean's death. It seems GIANT was filmed nearby 20 years earlier, and one of their own even appeared as an extra in the film. Some have moved on since then, others haven't. And some have changed completely. I won't go further into the developments, as learning who is who and what is what is part of the film's journey.

Robert Altman directed this, both on the stage and then on film, and it's more interesting than I expected. I've never been a fan of Sandy Dennis or Karen Black, and so I've never gone out of my way to see this again after I saw it the first time. I am, however, a fan of Robert Altman. Altman has always been known for his great rapport with his actresses, and that quality serves him and his cast admirably in this. These are interesting, fully-fleshed out women, and the voices are very genuine. Sandy Dennis plays a variation of her usual emotionally fragile screen persona, but Altman manages to rein in her histrionic tendencies. Karen Black is much better than usual, in an unusual, but subtle performance. Cher famously made her first serious foray into dramatic acting here, and she's tough and terrific. A young and fiery Kathy Bates is also memorable. Stage veteran Sudie Bond rounds out the main cast.

I saw this earlier this year on TCM, and for the first time years ago on Showtime. I am always fascinated about the places where movies are filmed on location, and Giant is my favorite of James Dean's movies. It is easy to see when watching the movie that it is based upon a play with one set, but that doesn't detract from it. Even though the introduction warned about flashbacks, I wasn't aware just how quickly the movie would go between the present day of the story and two decades before. That meant I was confused for the first 15 minutes or so, so don't be surprised if you are too. Then I realized what was happening and stopped worrying about what time frame it was at any given moment. Rewatching it, having an idea about what is going on, did make it more enjoyable for me. Recommended.

One of Robert Altman's lesser known movies looks at a group of James Dean disciples getting back together on the twentieth anniversary of Dean's death. "Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean" very much has the feeling of a play, as the whole thing takes place in one enclosed location (a Woolworth's five & dime store). I notice that a major theme is gender roles in the small Texas town where they live: the women are have always been forced to suppress their emotions, while the effeminate man is not accepted at all.

A common trait of Altman's movies is that many people are talking at once. That's the case here, but it's accentuated by the mirrors, which show what happened twenty years earlier while "Giant" was getting filmed not far from the town. I guess that in the end, the movie deals with nostalgia and how realistically we view the past. I was born long after the '50s, so even though I can watch the movies and listen to the music, I can never fully understand what it was like to experience these things for the first time. Does this count as authentic nostalgia?

I'd say that the movie is worth seeing. It's not Altman's best movie by any stretch, but I think that it had very good character development. Starring Sandy Dennis, Cher, Karen Black and Kathy Bates.

The critique of social institutions and the portrayal of social outsiders remain Altman's central preoccupations in one of his more minor, less genuine attempts to revise our sense of American history by subverting some of its most trenchant myths. He's definitely better with a cast of hundreds, painting broad pictures of their complex interactions and entanglements by inventively using overlapping sound and dialogue, documentary realism and improvisation than he is with a cast of only a handful, each taking turns to ramble on with romantic soliloquys while the rest look on. This was made no clearer than in the embarrassing dud he shot next, Streamers. But there are some touching moments and themes in this obsessively nostalgic period piece about flashbacks, memories and disabused denial about the past, though they arguably have less to do with the substance on the screen than with Altman's tenacious devotion to the project. This first of numerous play adaptations by post-Hollywood Altman in the '80s comes to pass within a petite retail variety store in parched McCarthy, Texas, where a James Dean fan club reunites in 1975. The movie flits between then and 1955, the year Dean died, as the six members divulge skeletons in the cupboard hearkening back to then. The store is not far from where the great Dean film Giant was shot that year.

Those there are an unhinged Sandy Dennis, who leaped at the opportunity to be an extra when Giant was on location and who, nine months later, gave birth to a son she maintains is Dean's. She's taken the late bus. Then there's Cher, the acerbic five-and-dime waitress, who boasts relentlessly about the size of her breasts. She shows up late after lending a hand at the truck stop. And Karen Black, whose skeleton in the closet is the film's biggest culminating beat. The others who float in and out of the story are the newly well-heeled oil wife Kathy Bates, supplying ironic echoes of Liz Taylor in the epic movie playing such a pivotal role in the plot; crushingly meek woman Marta Heflin, now pregnant for the umpteenth time; Mark Patton, who prefers the fashion wear of the opposite sex, and Sudie Bond, who runs the joint. She opens the film by preparing for yet another day on the job, swatting flies and listening to gospel hymns on the radio, and also calls after young Jimmy Dean by name.

What Altman does with his ensemble is emphasize the script's relationship between the repression of women and male-dominated society's fear of sexual variation and gender uncertainty. The film's one male character to appear is implicitly, and sensitively, viewed as feminine, rather than the archetypally effeminate, woman-identified, and gay. The film also implies, in one of its most creative and penetrating story elements, that he's become something much more socially unacceptable for the reason that his social order had no place for a gay man.

The film is otherwise little if not distended with surprises that seem like they came from a very heartfelt writer's legal pad. As the women largely rotate, literally, going at each other in monologue prose, spoken in deep-Texas country drawl, we learn of emotionally demanding surgeries and the difficult realities of Dennis' eponymous son. Altman is extraordinarily efficient at keeping things moving, even when you're unsure whether you're watching something occurring in 1975 or 1955.

What makes this minor exercise noteworthy is that Altman shot it in 16 mm, and made do with merely 800 large on the whole project. Altman continually employs mirrors as a way to connect scenes like a dream between the present and the past. Manifestations in mirrors are part of the film's various frame compositions. The effect was seamlessly accomplished with a double set with two-way mirrors controlled by computerized lighting techniques. They become a window into 1955, allowing the characters to stare into the past, until that's what it all is, punctuated by hypnotically poignant shots of the decaying, abandoned five-and-dime store, while the song fades and the wind blows.

This film isn't mentioned very much today, nor was it talked about very much when it was first released, but the picture has been christened a classic among Robert Altman fans, and it's easy to see why. This is one of the director's most stunning achievements. It's not that Ed Graczyk's script is anything special. It isn't. But Altman is a master of storytelling. It doesn't matter how derivative the project he's given is. When he gives a project everything he's got, it results in something very special. That is the case with Five and Dime. Graczyk's story takes place in a five and dime store located in a small Texas town where a group of women reunite for the twentieth anniversary of James Dean's death. The event turns out to be a very painful one, as each woman is forced to reveal the skeletons in her closet. The film was originally a stage play, and was also directed by Altman. As a play, it just didn't wash, but as a film, it is a masterpiece. Again, this has much to do with Altman's mastery of storytelling. His amazing ability to make something out of virtually nothing. But much of the credit also must go to the solid female ensemble which includes Sandy Dennis, Karen Black, Kathy Bates, Marta Heflin, Sudie Bond and Cher. In her first real crack at serious acting, Cher is thoroughly impressive. She has several strongly emotional scenes with Sandy Dennis and Karen Black(two of the most remarkable actresses to grace the New York Stage and Hollywood screen), and Miss Cher holds her own in every last one of them. A classic or not, this is an unforgettable, often moving motion picture experience. It's almost impossible to walk away from this film without feeling something. Highly recommended.

I remember when this film came out... I was an Altman fan then but I could never convince any of my friends to go see this with me (I was in high school at the time). Twenty years later I finally catch it on Bravo, and found it well worth the wait (and boy am I glad I popped a tape in to record it).

The acting in this film is superb, as is the direction (as you'd expect). Altman has taken a stage play that takes place on a single set and brought it to the screen in a way that manages to preserve the theatrical ideosyncracies (e.g., the actresses don't change their appearance, or even their outfits in some cases, in flashbacks to twenty years earlier) while still being masterfully "cinematic" in the way Altman composes his images.

If anything, the Achilles' heel of this movie is its script, which appears to be taken verbatim from the original stage play. There were times, especially towards the beginning of the movie, when it seemed somewhat awkward, but in a way that probably wouldn't seem as out-of-place in a play. I guess that's why they call it "stagy". But still, it's a minor complaint, and the great acting and compelling story more than make up for it. Overall I give this movie an 8/10.