Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean

The cast of the Broadway show "Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean" celebrate opening night backstage at New York's Martin Beck Theatre, Feb. 19, 1982. From left are, Sandy Dennis, Cher, and Karen Black.

COME BACK TO THE FIVE AND DIME, JIMMY DEAN, JIMMY DEAN      A-

USA  (109 mi)  1982  d:  Robert Altman

Altman spent the entire decade of the 80’s recovering from the critical failure of POPEYE (1980), a box office bonanza that grossed nearly $50 million dollars, preferring to make smaller more intimate films, none of which came close to generating even a million dollars, converting a series of plays into movies starting with this one, followed up by STREAMERS (1983), SECRET HONOR (1984), and Fool for Love (1985).  Adapted from the Ed Graczyk play, Altman chose to use the same set from the short-lived original Broadway stage production, which features two identical small town “five-and-dimes” separated by a two-way mirror, which allows simultaneous viewing of both the present and the past, shooting the entire film in a single room.  Normally one might think this would be a disaster in the making, an exhaustive endurance of tedium, but keeping the same Broadway cast, Altman turns this into a tour de force drama, a showcase of acting talent that becomes searingly confessional.  Set in a Woolworth's diner in a near empty town not far from where GIANT (1956) was filmed in Marfa, Texas, this is the site for the reunion of the “Disciples of James Dean” fan club, commemorating the 20th anniversary of his death.  It’s not your typical reunion as these women have not kept in close contact, so as they delve down memory lane, life holds a few surprises in store.  Sandy Dennis, Cher, Kathy Bates, and especially a mysterious appearance by Karen Black add to the building intrigue, as the mood starts off friendly enough, but each woman has highly personalized sequences that likely include mirror flashback sequences, where the initial polite tone of respectful quiet builds to a crashing crescendo of in-your-face drama, literally surprising the hell out of the audience, as something so light and easygoing suddenly takes a turn into the world of a Bergman chamber drama. 

Using the old-fashioned jukebox music of the McGuire Sisters, singing songs like “Sincerely,” this is really one dynamo of a women’s picture, as these women delve into each other’s habits and character flaws, literally dissecting one another onscreen in an attempt to redefine themselves in a new and different way, not as they were, but as they are, or can be, now.  This metamorphosis of change doesn’t come easy, as many, especially Sandy Dennis, kick and scratch the entire way, absolutely refusing to alter her perceptions.  Her near manic stubbornness is like living in a protective bubble with the other women continually poking and prodding until the bubble bursts.  This kind of liberating intensity is not for the squeamish, but it makes for extraordinary theater, resembling Fassbinder or early Cassavetes, as few others make films as blunt as this one, an ensemble work featuring dynamic performances as dramatically powerful as any Altman film, which might surprise a few people, as this is a hard film to see, never released on Video or DVD even after the passing of thirty years.  That situation has been rectified somewhat, as it’s one of the feature films traveling the country in 2011 as part of the UCLA Festival of Film Preservation.  Initially shot on 16 mm, then blown up to 35 mm, again much like early Fassbinder and Cassavetes, this adds a bit of edginess to the raw emotions on display, never looking pretty, but always challenging the audience with the claustrophobic feel of the world closing in.  All seem to be holding dark secrets of some kind, where slowly through the fixated probing of Black, things are not as they seem, where people soon become unglued.  Using a brilliantly innovative set design, the film seamlessly crosses between the 1975 present and the 1955 past, blending revelatory moments in the present with a familiar emotional arc from the past, where each period of time continues to shed light on the other.

Sudie Bond plays Juanita, the widowed elderly owner of the establishment where they all used to work when they were kids, sharing their lives and their traumas together, all conveniently tucked away and nearly forgotten until unearthed by this reunion.  Juanita places her faith in God and takes a hard line against sinners and trespassers.  Cher, in her first meaty role, is surprisingly comfortable in the role of Sissy, something of a sexual floozy in high school and still amazingly candid, with a mouth that speaks her mind, never coy or bashful, quite capable of a full frontal assault, including godlessness.  Sandy Dennis plays Mona, the woman with the most to lose, as like Blanche DuBois, she clings to her dreams of the past, like living in a Glass Menagerie, as her fluttery speech and fragile state of mind appear to feed on her own self-inflicted neuroses and delusions.  The highlight of the reunion is always her recollection of the time she visited Marfa during the filming of GIANT, when she was chosen as an extra and miraculously spent the night with the brilliant young actor himself, naming her own child after Jimmy Dean, the object of their teen idol worship.  Kathy Bates is nothing less than brilliant in her role as Stella Mae, the sassy, straight talking Southern belle who struck it rich marrying a Texas oilman, a woman with a taste for hard liquor and easy living, who never for a second seems satisfied.  Marta Heflin is the quiet one of the bunch, Edna Louise, a bit dimwitted, constantly reminded of that by Stella Mae, but a friend to all, even if they barely know she’s there.  Karen Black as Joanne is the mystery woman with a role that requires unraveling the tightly wound secrets from each person, as she has a special transparency all her own.  She’s startlingly dark, an angel of gloom that seems to hang over each of them like a dark cloud hovering over their own guilty consciences, but she’s anything but happy about it, feeling like she’s continually been dealt a losing hand.  She seems to be the only one paying a price for everyone else’s delusions, as much like Edna Louise, she has become invisible.                

 

None of these six women would ever see themselves as feminists, yet they stubbornly cling to their own separate beliefs, where this film is a dialogue that challenges all their assumptions.  Something of a free-wheeling emotional slugfest, everyone gets to take their shots, but also gets shot down by the others in this collective group therapy where no one walks out a winner.  Everyone’s artificial façade is exposed, and none too gently, where the drunken and pointedly judgmental tone is strangely familiar with Edward Albee’s Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), where Dennis is the link to both films. But the Graczyk play here, while confoundingly interesting, full of bracing moments, simply isn’t in the same league as Albee.  While it has its own complexities with some extraordinary intimate moments between women, there is simply not the same kind of depth or realization.  Instead it is a portrait of delusion and loss of faith, where an unending sadness permeates every inch of that room, yet in Altman’s hands it feels magical, as if our own lives will be cleansed by their personal anguish and pain.  It’s a reminder of the kind of interior poetry that few filmmakers can master, that Altman achieves here and perhaps again later with Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love, another rarely seen effort.  The 80’s was a decade when Altman went smaller, peering into the bleak and dysfunctional souls of damaged humans who spend their lives covering up their own unbearable pain, which is usually a patchwork job that falls apart all too easily whenever someone gets too close for comfort.  Love is an elusive goal rarely if ever reached, as people are too busy building layers of protection that hide them from the truth about themselves.  Plato said:  Beauty is the splendor of truth—well not from the vantage point of any of these women, where the piercing knife only makes them bleed.   

Law of Desire (La ley del deseo)

LAW OF DESIRE (La ley del deseo)   A-    
Spain  (102 mi)  1987  d:  Pedro Almodóvar

Considered Almodóvar’s most personal, but also one of his funniest films, a blurring of art and reality, a jumbled mix of comedy, erotic drama, over the top melodrama, and suspense thriller, murder mystery, featuring a magnificent performance from Carmen Maura, who is perfect in her sexual ambiguity as a love-starved, overly sensuous actress who turns out to be a transsexual, who all but steals the movie from everyone else.  Opening with wild orchestral music by Shostakovich from his 10th Symphony (1987): Opening titles - Shostakovich's Symphony no.10 ... - YouTube (1:27), conducted by Kiril Kondrashin no less, you know you’re in for a bumpy ride, and this film does not fail.  The opening sequence is a hilarious film within a film, which features an actor following unseen voiced instructions to get naked and pleasure himself on a bed, a beautiful set up for a slowly developing scene where the camera eventually pulls back and we see two balding old farts reading a script of overheated, out of breath gasps and heavy pants of two supposed male characters having sex.  Also featured are many signature Almodóvar touches, his love for the city of Madrid, a town filled with familiar faces and an over-testosteroned, yet inept police presence, male abandonment, an overexposed media, an almost peculiar interest in sex, telephones, dysfunctional families, dirty priests, and drug use.  This film, more than any other Almodóvar film, makes the best use of overly dramatic pop songs, where the lyrics perfectly express the emotions in such a character driven film.  In effect, Almodóvar is tapping into Latin American sentimental songs, called boleros, that are at the emotional center of this film, paying homage to different forms of expression that Spaniards had, to a certain extent, disdained before Almodóvar came onto the scene.

Eusebio Poncela plays Pablo (a stand-in for the director?), a character who’d feel right at home in Fellini’s LA DOLCE VITA (1960), whose self-centered narcissism is reflective of the gay life in post-Franco Madrid, as he parades around in silk suits and wild flower shirts wearing shades, playing the film director from the opening scene who takes home any young man that interests him, feeding him with lines of coke, so he’s pretty much butt naked much of the time, while Maura plays his sister Tina that used to be his brother, and stars in his latest one-woman-show stage production of a 1930 Jean Cocteau play, The Human Voice, a monologue about a woman and a suitcase which resurfaces again in Almodóvar’s next film as well.  Tina is also caring for Pablo’s young daughter Ada (Manuela Velasco), exposing her to the comforts of the church (where she sang as a young altar boy) in her own overtly personalized way (“I used to jerk-off in here all the time.”), breaking out into sacred song for a priest that is extremely uncomfortable seeing what’s become of this once favored child.  There is a wildly inventive scene where both Tina and Ada are on stage, Maura is wearing a revealing silk slip while talking on the phone in one of those life or death conversations, while young Ada appears to be levitating as if she's standing on thin air in a slowly moving dolly-on-wheels, lip-synching to one of the more overtly dramatic songs in the film, Maysa Matarazzo’s “Ne Me Quitte Pas (Don’t Leave Me)” La Ley Del Deseo (Trailer) YouTube (2:27), which works so well, she does it again going back the other way.  This becomes even more hilarious when Ada’s real mother, Bibiana Fernández, one of Spain’s most famous real-life transsexuals, shows up and wants to take her to Milan, but Ada has no interest in her mother’s cavalier and overly nonchalant lifestyle and wants to stay with the more stable and dependable Maura, who she emulates, much of which is acted out just offstage.  Again, the song lyrics brilliantly match what we are experiencing onstage.

Back to the life of the director, Pablo, who we first see with lover Juan, Miguel Molina, a younger man who is unable to commit, still exploring with the idea of love and is not yet comfortable being gay, so he returns to work in a small coastal town, leaving an opening for Antonio Banderas as Antonio, a bisexual young man who stalks and eventually seduces the director before murdering his boyfriend, making his move with such an all-consuming passion that all hell breaks loose, his first such venture into homoerotic sexuality, expressed by an overwhelming need to possess Pablo all to himself, where he shatters the ties that hold everyone together.  He disposes of Juan on a rocky cliff reminiscent of Vertigo (1958), while then covering his murderous tracks hiding behind lame excuses that are backed up by his overly protective mother.  Pablo, in despair at the death of Juan, drives into a tree and loses his memory.  At the hospital, Tina fills in all the lurid details of their past, including her love affair with her own father, which resulted in her sex change operation incest scene in La Ley del deseo with Carmen Maura (Almodovar movie) YouTube (3:00).  Tina is the emotional center of the film, especially her poignant feelings about her tortured past and her distrust of men, where her history recalls Elvira in Fassbinder’s In a Year of 13 Moons (In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden... (1978), where like Elvira, she even gets her sex change operation in Morocco, but ends up being much more comfortable in her own skin.  She’s found a new love of her life, and it turns out to be none other than Antonio on another obsessed rampage.  The police, the bungling duo of real-life father and son, Fernando Guillén and Fernando Guillén Cuervo, haven’t a clue until eventually Antonio kidnaps Tina, demands Pablo, then in an hour of uninterrupted time that he successfully negotiates, makes love to Pablo while the dramatic music blares out onto the street below, confounding the police who can only scratch their heads as a crowd of onlookers gathers in mass.  LAW OF DESIRE is one of Almodóvar’s most explicit treatments of homosexuality in his films, in its day a breath of fresh air, representing the director at his best in the early stages of his career, where his ability to combine social commentary with an extraordinary amount of risk-taking cemented his reputation as an early forerunner in advancing queer cinema.  

Dog Day Afternoon

John Wojtowicz (actual bank robber on whom the film was based)

DOG DAY AFTERNOON                                         A                    

USA  (124 mi)  1975  d:  Sidney Lumet

I’m a Catholic and I don’t want to hurt anybody.                             

I’m flying to the tropics.  Fuck the snow.                             

—Sonny Wortzik (Al Pacino)

Opening with a gorgeous montage of New York City set to the music of Elton John’s “Amoreena,” seen here on YouTube (3:38):  Dog Day Afternoon - Amoreena (Elton John), which may as well define the style of director Sidney Lumet, born and raised in New York City, using the city itself as the backdrop for so many of his films, where especially in this film the surging pulse of the people in the city is felt throughout.  Also, as is typical in Lumet films, the director wastes no time getting into the heat of the action, which begins almost immediately, as the audience is pulled into the intrigue of a 3-man bank heist at closing time of a small neighborhood bank where one of the robbers (Gary Springer) immediately has second thoughts and pulls out, leaving behind two of the more memorable characters in movies, John Cazale as Sal, the rifle-toting, dimwitted, socially challenged side partner to the heist mastermind, Sonny, played by the volatile but constantly besieged Al Pacino in arguably the greatest performance in his entire career.  Like no one else in memory, his believability in pulling off so many harrowing ups and downs throughout these few short hours is nothing less than masterful, as afterwards, his character remains unforgettable, more etched in our memories than many of our own relatives due to the frazzled and emotionally exposed nature of his performance.  Despite being a fidgety and completely amateurish bank robber, Sonny is seen in purely sympathetic terms, pulling the audience and the people in the film to his side instead of the authority of the police, who are shown nothing but disrespect throughout once it results in a standoff with hundreds of armed police lined along the streets outside while Sonny and Sal hold about ten bank employees inside the bank as hostages. 

Using an economy of means, the afternoon drags on much like a chess match where each side is hopeful to gain the upper hand, where the mood outside the bank is a wall of cops, sharpshooters and news reporters, with the public cordoned off just behind with highly demonstrative and swelling crowds, not to mention the presence of the ever-hovering helicopter, connected by a lone telephone that connects the beleaguered Sonny to New York Detective Sergeant Moretti, Charles Durning, who’s positioned across the street in a barbershop with a direct view of the bank.  Durning has an utterly thankless role, as he’s continually portrayed by Sonny as the wretched arm of the police.  Coming on the heels of major news headlines from the murderous Attica police raid to the Kent State massacre, the public in the Vietnam era was sick of hearing about the continuous misuse of authority.  Sonny’s sense for the theatrics reaches its peak while bravely standing on the sidewalk in the midst of police negotiations where he starts rallying the public with cries of “Attica! Attica!”  This sends the crowd into a frenzy of support while the police can only sheepishly look chagrined at getting embarrassingly upstaged by a two-bit criminal in public right on the streets they are assigned to preserve and protect.  What’s truly remarkable here is the documentary style of social realism on display, which Pacino plays to the hilt through the ever changing moods that consist of high drama but also devastatingly quiet moments.  Sal’s equally depressing mood, offering his partner little or no help at all, provides a feeling of hopelessness that pervades inside the bank, where Sonny has to continually offset that mood with his own optimism and initiative.

But this film is all Pacino, stripped of any sense of surface artificiality as we slowly learn more details about his personal life, which couldn’t be more compelling, especially since this entire event is based on a true story.  When Sonny asks Moretti to bring his wife to the scene, the entire complexity of the mood shifts, largely due to the simply outstanding performance by a stunning Chris Sarandon as Leon, who is rushed from his bedside at Bellevue Hospital by the police, but because he’s so over medicated, he refuses to speak to Sonny, as the television reports begin announcing their mystifying marital relationship.  Sarandon is so effective in the role that even the police become sympathetic, realizing that the only reason Sonny is robbing a bank is to get the money needed for Leon to have a sex change operation.  The entire bank heist dove-tailing out of control parallels a melodramatic love story, each turning into an unmitigated disaster.  The heartbreaking moments between Sonny and Leon who eventually talk on the phone, or between Sonny and some of the employees inside the bank who help him dictate his personal will, are quietly revelatory, providing a glimpse of a person under siege by a mounting distress that few could possibly comprehend.  This is one of the few films that matches the tone of the era, where the public has survived the assassinations of the 60’s, the mounting evidence of rampant police brutality, the government overreach in Watergate along with more secret bombing missions in Vietnam, a President who resigns before a certain federal indictment, where the stress and anxiety about losing faith in your own government is at an all time high.  All of this disheartened mistrust is wrapped into the character of Sonny, who courageously carries it all upon his shoulders, a man whose intentions couldn’t be more well-meaning but veers completely out of control in acts of exasperating desperation.  Lumet is to be commended for bringing such a morally complex saga into our lives with such riveting intensity, where it’s impossible not to relate to someone who’s dreams are dashed before your eyes yet insists he can still make it better, as tragic a figure as has been seen in contemporary cinema.