Out In The James Dean Night-With Robert Altman’s Come Back To The Five And Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

Come Back To The Five And Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, starring Sandy Dennis, Cher, Karen Black, directed by Robert Altman, 1982

Jeff Sterling, the now retired journalist whose by-line appeared in many of the coffee-table magazines put there by those of the generation of ‘68 who still felt an unread urge to at least display tokens of their youth, was devoted to all things James Dean, an interest he would carry from his youth and throughout his working life. Had seen in Dean’s larger-than- life figure more than the other icons of the era like the young brash Brando with his brooding sexuality, his “better move on brother if you don’t want all hell coming down on your head,” his Johnny swagger around the women with a “take ‘em or leave ‘em” pose which for young Jeff defied all the anguish and trauma of his own girl-driven youth a kindred spirit. Or Elvis as much as he was driven, girl-driven to palely imitate the “King” with his sullen baby boy pose (that sullenness more than one girl, more than one tween girl of Jeff’s acquaintance was willing to turn into a smile), those sideburns and that hair combed just so, and those endlessly moving, gyrating, swiveling or whatever he could do with them hips that spoke of satin sheets and sweaty nights. Both, whatever else they projected, exuded an aura of long and fruitful lives about them whereas Dean, even a quick flash look at him exuded a certain casted dark shadow, a certain fatalistic view of the world turning him over soon much like his own then.

Assuredly Jeff was not attracted to Dean like some fan club groupie with a room filled with commercial memorabilia, his family had little extra money to do much more than provide an occasional outing at the Saturday matinee up at the old Strand Theater over by the Fields Corner Redline subway stop in the Dorchester section of Boston where he had grown to manhood in one of those infamous crowded triple-deckers that covered the area like a spider’s web. Nor was he like some blurry-eyed budding girl like one of his sister’s friends who did have Photoplay movie magazine cut-out photos of Dean all over her bedroom walls because she thought his blue-eyes, his blond hair, hell, even his world wary smirk which she had confessed to that sister she would not mind trying to change in person were “boss.” And Jeff decidedly was not one of those who twenty, thirty, forty years later still commemorated Dean’s 1955 death date like doing so would bring back the crushed crash dead, bring back some lost garden, bring back that long faded youth which would be eternally Dean’s. 

Jeff, as he told his old Dorchester streets friend, Tim Riley, a few weeks before at the Sunny Grille over a few cups of wine, had simple identified with the brooding smoldering figure of Dean not from the obvious film choice, 1955s Rebel Without A Cause, a preview of the jail-break from square cubed parents, ditto authority and cookie-cutters that his generation would take full throttle over the next decade or so, but the more literary East of Eden (adapted from a John Steinbeck novel of the same name) where Dean suffered all the angst, alienation, confusion, sexual stirrings and questioning the hypocrisy of the world that he had no say in creating that Jeff himself had endured. (When somebody had asked him how he only ten or so when that film came out was able to see Eden when she was watching Snow White or some Disney film he told her it was simply family economics since his parents could not afford a baby-sitter so they could go alone they dragged all the kids along, kids who got in free by the way accompanied by a parent in those days.)       

Jeff drew a distinction between the obviously alienated Rebel Dean caught up in some greater West Coast social drama dealing with JDs, hot-rod culture, and guys with time and discretionary money on their hands and the more subtle truths in Eden. So Jeff saw in the almost biblical Cain and Abel saga of Eden a replication of his own growing up times, of trying to make sense of a world he didn’t create, and didn’t feel like he fit into. Saw too, maybe post hoc since what would a barely teen-aged boy know of such things, James Dean along with Marlon Brando, Elvis and a few others as important coming of age icons for his generation’s jailbreak leap in the 1960s. That said, Jeff was at pains to insist whenever he was called on the subject by one of his old-time corner boys, including the night he was discussing the subject with Tim Riley, that he did love the midnight “chicken run” scene in Rebel, having himself ridden shot-gun for Dwayne Hutton on a few midnight runs when some redneck guys from Dedham or Norwood wanted to challenge Dwayne’s reign as king of the hill on the flats around the old Naval Air Station near the bay.

Although Jeff has never been a fanatic about his tastes he nevertheless will take any appropriate occasion to wax poetic about the first of a line of creative guys, white guys mainly, who lived by the motto-“live fast, die young, and make a good corpse.” As he told Tim when they were at the Sunny Grille thanks to modern technology he has been able to watch such classic (and only major) Dean films as Rebel Without A Cause, Giant, and East Of Eden in the comfort of his own home. And has been able to watch other related documents to the Dean legend like Robert Altman’s Come Back To The Five And Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. He had recently re-watched the film and one night he was talking with another of his old high school friends, Sam Lowell, over a few glasses of white wine at Simmy’s Grille over in Gloversville about the highlights of the film and reminiscences of a review that he did when that film came out in the 1980s for the now long defunct East Bay Other in California:

“Who knows who, where or when some new trend, some new icon will hit the population right between the eyes, will speak to some unnamed, maybe un-nameable, feeling that makes a person whole for a few minutes. You can name the icons in a couple of minutes though the ones that strike your own generation most easily come to mind and that for my generation would include the unseen subject of Come Back To The Five And Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean,  James Dean. Not everybody, including this reviewer, did like the women from that small Texas town did and form a club, create a shrine to, or commemorate the personage of James Dean but many drew some kind of sustenance from his life, his story, and that mumbling confusion about what was happening to him in a world that he did not create, and which he had no say in creating that he projected on the screen. That look stirred many more people than those aficionados like the women in this film.             

This is an intriguing film in many ways from the single set setting of the inside of a Woolworths’ Five and Dime store to the dramatic secrets that these women have held within themselves since they formed the James Dean Fan Club in 1955 and had enshrined his memory psychically and psychological since his death that year. There was probably no more iconic site in small town America in the 1950s beside some steepled church or the post office on Main Street than the local branch of the national Woolworth’s chain. That home for every cheap gimcrack known to humankind was central to the growing up experience of lots of small town baby-boomers and their older brothers and sisters who bought their first small gifts for some sweetheart there, or had something to eat at the lunch counter (make mine a grilled cheese sandwich and lime rickey in season, please at the one I frequented in Uphams Corner), or, and here is where we separate out the generations, find out who was touched by the Dean glow, played the jukebox three songs for a quarter that was conveniently located within arm’s reach at that counter. Later events, the sit-ins of early 1960s down south to integrate those damn counters (and support efforts by those in the North who picketed in front of the store in Boston including this reviewer) would seriously tarnish the image of that idyllic scene as would the triumph of the mall in finishing such stores off in small town downtown.                      

Strangely this film although it is about devotees of the James Dean mystique is very little about him and plenty about what drove the various personalities to join the club  and to keep the flame alive twenty years later. And the almost mythical hold that his person held in their lives, for good or evil. Apparently James Dean cast spell on the ability of the women to tell the truth, if only to themselves. Starting with the leader of the club, Mona (played with great aplomb and feeling by Sandy Dennis) who was so hooked on the Dean legend that she created a separate universe for herself claiming that the illegitimate child, Jimmy Dean, that she conceived was Dean’s child, moving on to Sissy (played by Cher with that world-weary and wariness that she has brought to many roles) who has lied to herself that her husband was coming back after he had rejected her after her breast cancer operation, and, finally, to the other central figure, Joanne (played by Karen Black with that slippery sexuality she brought to many roles) who as it turned out had been, back in the day, a guy, Joe, who it turned out had been transgender and had had  an operation to prove it. Oh yeah, and who back in the day had impregnated Mona and thus the other unseen Jimmy Dean of the title. Nice work, Robert Altman.                

Of course some films are meant to further some storyline, others like this one are conceived to highlight the interplay between characters and in this film that is exactly what you get. Get the interplay between the characters (including the lesser characters which fill out the cast, tough and cynical Stella Mae, fertile Edna Mae, and the older woman, Juanita who managed the store) through flashbacks to events in 1955 interspersed with the 1975 actions all confined to that single store. Moreover the interplay between the characters at any given moment made you think the whole experiment could blow up any minute as the deep secrets keep slowly getting revealed to show, well, to show that these women were made of ordinary human clay, just wanted something to believe in, something greater than themselves and their ordinary human clay lives. Join the club, sisters, join the club.