Robert Altman (1982)
‘Well, I didn’t think it was a great play. I didn’t like the writer very much. It had a Tennessee Williams/William Inge aspect to it, with each character having their say, and I thought that would be interesting for the actresses. It’s pretty simplistic …’
This is Robert Altman on Ed Graczyk’s Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, in an interview with David Thompson for the 2006 book, Altman on Altman. It’s hard to disagree with what Altman says. It’s not that easy, in writing about his film of the Graczyk play, to say much more. The very title brings to mind William Inge’s Come Back, Little Sheba. The five-and-dime store in which the action takes place is in McCarthy, a (fictional) small town in Texas rather than Louisiana or Mississippi, but the currents of sexual ambiguity and romantic self-delusion running through the play locate it in Tennessee Williams country. There’s an element of The Iceman Cometh too: the arrival of an apparent newcomer forces the other characters to recognise the lies and/or pretences whereby they live, as Hickey compels the clients in Harry Hope’s bar to do. The women in Come Back to the Five and Dime are members of a James Dean fan club, gathering to mark the twentieth anniversary of the star’s death. This is much more literally a memory play than The Glass Menagerie: the action shifts continuously, through lighting changes, between 1955 and 1975. The symbolic weather is desperate even by the standards of meteorological melodrama. There was a storm in McCarthy the night that James Dean died but it’s hardly rained in all the years since. There are rumbles of thunder during the 1975 part of the play but the storm passes over and the drought continues.
The reunion of the Disciples of James Dean, as they call themselves, also commemorates the filming of George Stevens’ Giant, the last film in which Dean appeared, in the Texas town of Marfa, some sixty miles out of McCarthy[1]. One of the play’s main characters, Mona, appeared as an extra in Giant; each year, she brings to the Disciples’ reunion what she claims is a piece of the remains of ‘Reata’, the Benedict family mansion in Giant. There’s a miniature replica of the mansion in the five-and-dime and ‘significant’ references to the lifesize version of Reata on the film set being a facade:
Mona: … that’s the way they do things in the movies … deceivin’ to the eye, they call it.
Mona also has a much larger claim to fame – that she bore James Dean’s lovechild. This child is the titular, never seen Jimmy Dean. Mona sees herself as having been chosen, above all other available women, to bring the son of Dean into the world; she recalls their intercourse as a chiefly spiritual experience. Ed Graczyk is nothing if not obvious in linking the worship of the Christian God with pop celebrity worship. Juanita, the widowed store manager, fights a running battle to keep the religious radio station playing, rather than the competing Country and Western music. At one point, the Disciples sing a chorus:
‘The eyes of James Dean are upon us,
All the live long day.’
Between 1976 and 1980, the play had productions in Ohio and Georgia and Off Broadway. Altman directed it on Broadway in February 1982. The reviews weren’t favourable and the run was short although, probably largely because the play saw Cher’s legitimate stage debut, the houses were good. Altman swiftly reassembled the theatre cast for the film version, for which Ed Graczyk did the screenplay. The director’s view that the material ‘would be interesting for the actresses’ is vindicated in the superb performance of Sandy Dennis and the fine work of Cher and Karen Black. Sandy Dennis’s neurasthenic vibrancy is here transmuted into a sustained crazy lyricism: she makes Mona beautiful, spellbinding and affecting, in spite of the ridiculous character that she is. Karen Black’s role as the mysterious Joanne is, if anything, even more garish. Joanne turns out to be the sex-changed version of Joe (Mark Patton), the one boy in the original Disciples, whom Juanita’s husband sacked from the five-and-dime back in 1955 because of his effeminate ways. Karen Black’s controlled, subdued playing is very different from that of her best-known roles, in Five Easy Pieces and The Great Gatsby, but it’s extraordinarily effective. She’s very convincing as someone who, in order to assert their gender, is excessively ladylike in her gestures and appearance. As the seemingly no-nonsense but secretly hurtin’ Sissy, Cher is as natural as she’s vivid. Sudie Bond (who, like Cher, went on to appear in Silkwood the following year, but who died in 1984) isn’t good as Juanita, though. From the very start, when Juanita goes round the store trying to swat a fly, she’s much too deliberate. It seemed to me that Juanita needed to be played more straightforwardly – Bond gives too many of her lines a tiresomely eccentric flavouring.
When I first saw Come Back to the Five and Dime, back in the 1980s, it was also the first time I’d seen Kathy Bates, who plays the aggressively bossy Stella Mae, and I was impressed. Watching Bates now, although her loudmouthed verve in the role is sometimes funny, I think Pauline Kael was right to criticise the playing as too stagy (Bates was still an inexperienced film actress at the time). Stella Mae married into money but has no children. As she and her companion, Edna Louise, whom Stella Mae has bullied and derided throughout, prepare to leave the five-and-dime, there’s talk about motherhood and Stella Mae insists she never wanted kids. Edna Louise, pregnant with her seventh but still herself childlike, says calmly, ‘But you’re not happy’. Stella Mae snaps back, ‘I’m happy, Goddamit!’ Kathy Bates bellows the line too harshly. Marta Heflin is graceful and touching as Edna Louise. As Pauline Kael also pointed out, this is the one character who’s not required to shed her illusions – perhaps because, as a poorly off working mother of six, Edna Louise can’t afford them. The God-fearing Juanita eventually has to concede that the Lord to whom she prays doesn’t seem to be listening. The buxom, aging good-time girl Sissy confesses that she’s had a double mastectomy. Mona is confronted with the truth that the father of Jimmy Dean (who is said to be mentally retarded but who has an unsurprising passion for driving fast cars) was not James Dean but Joanne when she was Joe. The serial revelations in Come Back to the Five and Dime are a tortuous concept and a torturous experience. The identity of Jimmy Dean’s father is especially obvious. You realise this so soon that you do a virtual double take when Joe/Joanne’s paternity is finally revealed.
Come Back to the Five and Dime was screened on the opening night of the London Film Festival, following the premiere of a new documentary about Altman. His widow Kathryn made a delightfully brief and witty contribution to the introduction – in contrast to Geoff Andrew, who, when they came to the NFT2 stage, didn’t immediately explain who she was but found the time to introduce himself as a huge Altman fan. ‘I’m a Robert Altman fan, too …’ began Kathryn Altman, charmingly but pointedly, when she was eventually given the chance to speak. She went on to explain how Cher got involved in this project. One day, Georgia Holt, Kathryn’s friend and Cher’s mother, phoned the Altmans by mistake, instead of her daughter. Mrs Altman noted that Come Back to the Five and Dime was ‘really made for cable’ and you can see what she means: the movement of Altman’s camera over the cast’s faces and bodies often seems designed to be watched in a living room rather than a film theatre. Even so, that camera movement is remarkably fluid, the cinematographer Pierre Mignot’s dusty palette of colours is expressive, and Altman’s use of a mirror on the wall of the store provides an easy and efficient means of moving between the present and the past of the story. There are no exterior scenes: Altman preserves the single set of the theatre piece. The aging of the characters up and down is sensibly minimal, as if in deference to the talents of the actresses on the screen: they can do the rest.
8 October 2014
[1] According to Wikipedia, Jett Rink, the character Dean played in Giant, was based on ‘wildcatter oil tycoon Glenn Herbert McCarthy (1907–1988)‘.
