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Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy
Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982)
In director Robert Altman's low-budget drama (an ensemble
reunion film), a 1975 gathering of a James Dean fan club ("The
Disciples of James Dean") occurred at the local Woolworth's
5 & Dime in a small Texas town, on the 20th anniversary of the
screen legend's death. The play was written in 1976 by Ed Graczyk
and became the basis for the 1982 Broadway stage play:
- the innovative use of two-way mirrors for the flashback
sequences
- the six major characters, who revealed hidden secrets
and lost innocence over 20 years, including:
- Juanita (Sudie Bond), the Gospel music-loving manager of the store
after the death of her husband
- Sissy (Cher), a wisecracking cow-girl and bad-girl often bragging
about the size of her boobs, but remaining a five-and-dime waitress
for 20 years; she had undergone a double mastectomy which caused her
town bully-husband to leave her
- Mona (Sandy Dennis), a disturbed and unstable female who falsely
boasted that she was an extra in the Dean movie Giant
(1956) filmed closeby in Marfa, TX, and asserted that Dean
fathered her now 20 year-old, simple-minded son (named Jimmy Dean after
the star): ("I was chosen above all them thousands of others")
- Joanne (Karen Black), well-dressed and Porsche-driving, also a trans-sexual
who had a sex-change operation about 13 years earlier, and her revelation
of a second major secret - she was the actual 'father' (as Joe, Mona's
HS effeminate boyfriend who was raped by the town bully) of Mona's
son Jimmy
- Stella Mae (Kathy Bates), the chubby, well-to-do wife of a rich petroleum
executive
- Edna Louise (Marta Heflin), a shy, timid and withdrawn mother with
many children (and again pregnant)
- the re-enactment of the trio of MacGuire Sisters (Mona,
Sissy, and Joe/Joanne) performing a singing-dancing number
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Joanne (Karen Black)
Mona (Sandy Dennis)
Sissy (Cher)
Stella Mae (Kathy Bates)
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