Come back to the five and dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean

USA 1982

Dir: Robert Altman

109 mins

Cast: Cher, Sandy Dennis, Karen Black; based on Ed Graczyk's stage play. 

Rating: M

If Robert Altman hadn’t directed this movie, the reviews would have described it as Altmanesque. It’s a mixture of the bizarre and the banal, a slice of lives that could never have been led, a richly textured mixture of confessions, obsessions, and surprises. ...

Jimmy Dean was a Broadway play before it was a movie, and Altman, who directed it first on stage, stays pretty close here to Ed Graczyk’s script. He works just as closely with David Gropman’s extraordinary stage set, on which the movie was shot. Gropman has actually created two dime stores, one a mirror-image of the other. They’re separated by a two-way mirror, so that at times we’re looking at the reflection of the “front” store, and at other times, the glass is transparent and we see the second store. Altman uses the front as the present and the back as the past, and there are times when a foreground image will dissolve into a background flashback. In an age of sophisticated optical effects, this sort of dissolve looks routine until you learn that Altman isn’t using opticals, he’s actually shooting through the two-way mirror. His visual effects sometimes require fancy offscreen footwork for his actors to be in two places during the same shot. ...

Roger Ebert, RogerEbert.com

Robert Altman had previously directed the story on Broadway with the same cast. However, while the location remains the area of the store, the action is far from claustrophobic.

The action occurs on two levels with incidents of the reunion run parallel to events of 20 years earlier. Altman uses a wall-length mirror to effect the time changes.

The women arrive and each offers her memories of the earlier time. The recollections are, at first, comical and innocent but eventually the characters reveal their most painful secrets. The material is told with great emotion and Altman gets wonderful performances from his female ensemble.

Variety