Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean will stand out in your mind for a few reasons: its excessively long title, its cast that features three Academy Award-winning actresses – Cher, Kathy Bates and Sandy Dennis – or just for its rather strange premise and the place it holds in both director Robert Altman and the actresses’ filmographies. Released in 1982 and Altman’s first film after Popeye, which served as both a flop and a pivotal moment in his career, Come Back to the 5 & Dime is the first of several Altman-directed films adapted from the stage. He directed and partly financed the stage version written by Ed Graczyk, which debuted on Broadway at the Martin Beck (now Al Hirschfeld) Theatre in 1976 and only ran for 52 performances.
Despite lackluster reviews, Altman maintained an interest in the play and brought it to the screen half a decade later. In typical stage-to-screen fashion, the entirety of the film takes place in the front room of a Woolworth’s five-and-dime store in McCarthy, Texas. There are only a few characters you need to keep track of, but it is essential you do so because the film continually flips from 1975 back to 1955 without much inclination that the time period is changing. Instead, the camera will pan, or a character’s eyes will grow wide, and something from the previous time period will begin happening in the wall mirror behind the counter or just off-screen. You might actually miss the transition happening the first time or two.
Come Back to the 5 & Dime’s hot-headed, female-fronted cast includes the store runner, Juanita (Susie Bond), a god-fearing older woman with a nasally southern accent; Mona (Sandy Dennis), a mentally ill, very confused and still-devoted admirer of the 20 years deceased James Dean; Sissy (Cher, who made her Broadway debut in the play), a woman who masks marital problems and heartbreak in a more flamboyant attitude; the timid Edna Louise (Marta Heflin); the more loudmouthed and garishly dressed Stella Mae (Kathy Bates, whose acting abilities went rather untapped, unfortunately); and actors Mark Patton and Karen Black as Joe/Joanna, who undergoes sex reassignment surgery between the two periods and has the most emotionally resonate journey. Though the way the character’s gender transition is handled feels rather antiquated (at one point, Stella uses the term “half-man, half-woman”), the discourse is likely more a product of the times than it is blatant transphobia.
The women, back in 1955, were all part of a James Dean fan club that met in the five-and-dime, and their time as a group was firmly cemented when they learned Hollywood juggernauts Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean would be venturing to Marfa, Texas, a few dozen miles away, to film Giant. Not only in close proximity, the production was also in need of extras! Mona and Joe travel together and, according to Mona, are not only picked to appear vaguely somewhere on the screen, but she also becomes impregnated by Dean and later produces his sole heir. She honors the late actor by naming her son, who is never seen but often called after (hence the film’s name), after the actor.
As time passes, the more obvious the film’s muddled point becomes, though the unfortunate fact is that the plot doesn’t strike any chords as hard as it needs to. It’s simply character exploration, looking at the way society and life have shaped the women between the two periods. Though the women spent a pivotal time in each of their lives with one another and are now experiencing another day together, it seems as though they really could act like they enjoy one another more than they do. Between Sissy being called a whore, fun being poked at Joanna’s transition, yelling at Mona, revealing truths about Juanita’s late husband that would be better left unsaid and disregarding Edna’s entire presence several times over, it seems as though everyone is subject to an attack. After a lot of disagreements and arguing, the women decide to reunite in another 20 years, and it feels a bit ridiculous. When the end credits depict an abandoned and decaying five-and-dime, you’ll likely infer it means that a reunion didn’t pan out, at least not as planned. Honestly, how could it have gone well?
Though Altman must have been intrigued by adapting the play at least partly because of his admiration for Dean – he also directed a documentary on the actor after his death The James Dean Story in 1957 – the film doesn’t deal with anything about the actor other than emphasize how pronounced his stardom was and his almost effortless ability to bring people to their feet in adoration. If you go into the film hoping for heavy Dean content, you’ll be disappointed to know that photos of the icon on the walls are about all you’re going to get. In the end, it feels like the story is trying to emphasize how Dean will forever remain iconic and memorialized, but the women will keep changing. All they really have in common come 1975 are their bright red “disciples of James Dean” nylon bombers and memories. They haven’t kept up with one another in the two decades since his death, and the memories and experiences they have that still tie them together are frayed.
Three women – Sissy, Mona and Joanna – hold the most central roles and pronounced character arcs. Sissy goes from being the most free-spirited of the three to admitting that her marriage is, in fact, a disaster. The admission comes right toward the end of the film, though as the women interact, it becomes increasingly clear that things aren’t going as she says. Mona, though ostensibly a sympathetic character, is an emotional train wreck whose mental illness leads her to be defensive, rude and a liar. In the first few moments of the film, she effectively calls Sissy a whore and begins to hint at her son’s developmental deficiencies – neither of which are true. All those years ago, the three of them would perform songs in the diner together, like “Sincerely” by The McGuire Sisters, which actually was number one the year Dean died. The trio performing the song at the beginning and end works much like the rest of the film. It layers in tributes to the icon and the period in which he passed, like in the lyrics “I love that fella so/ He doesn’t want me/ But I’ll never never never never let him go,” and though the effort is there, it feels unrealistic that the three would want to perform together after what they went through. It ends up feeling awkward and falls flat.
Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean could be an enjoyable viewing experience in several situations: if you’re studying the films of Robert Altman, if you’re a big fan of one (or several) of the talented actresses involved or even to analyze the way an ensemble of female characters were depicted by a male director and writer in the ’70s/’80s. Still, while watching the film, it feels almost palpable that the Hollywood Renaissance – a time beginning in the 1960s when a studio’s involvement in the film became secondary to that of the directors – and Robert Altman’s role in said era was sputtering out.
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