Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean **** (1982, Cher, Karen Black, Sandy Dennis) – Classic Movie Review 1760

Director Robert Altman’s stupendous 1982 film is the notable first of his fertile adaptations of stage plays. He makes a superb job of the stage to screen transfer of Ed Graczyk’s play about a group of women fans who get together again at their local Woolworth’s five-and-dime store in 1975 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of James Dean’s death in a car crash in the desert near by.

The Disciples of James Dean originally convened their fan club group when he filmed Giant near their small town in Texas, and this reunion is the occasion for a very American style event of reminiscing about the past and reflecting on the present. Come Back to the 5 & Dime is packed with witty and affecting dialogue, it’s and commendably very correct in its sexual politics. Comedy mixes with pain in the laying bare of souls and the revealing of hidden truths. 

Altman, who also directed the play with the same cast on the Broadway stage in 1976, boldly doesn’t worry about it seeming stagey. Indeed, quite the reverse, his filmic innovations are intended to make it seem all the more unreal, working with a single set, an ever-prowling camera and with wall-mirror ‘reflections’ back to 1955, allowing the first-rate, shamefully underused actresses to get on gracefully with Graczyk’s clever and moving lines.

In her first movie since 1969, Cher is a revelation as Sissy and this is the performance that set Cher’s acting career into orbit. But, even so, it’s Sandy Dennis’s and Karen Black’s hauntingly emotional powerhouse turns that stay longest and best in the memory. Black plays the mysterious Joanne and Dennis is Mona, who has a son mysteriously called James Dean Junior. And it’s all even more poignant now that the actresses, as well as the director, have gone. How sorely these unique talents are missed.

Kathy Bates plays Stella Mae, Marta Heflin is Edna Louise, Sudie Bond is Juanita and token man Mark Patton is Joe Qualley.

Reissued and shown at the London Film Festival in 2014 in a new 35mm print restored in 2011 courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. The preservation funding was provided by The Film Foundation and the Hollywood Press Association.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1760

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