Word: mona
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...SMALL CAST WORKS as an ensemble--no one character stands apart from the rest in the quality of her performance. The three major roles are played by Sandy Dennis as Mona, Cher as Cissy, and Karen Black as Joann. These women, along with the rest of the case, imbue their roles with an energetic magnetism that makes us want to know everything that has brought them to this reunion. These performances not only crane stereotypic responses to Dennis, Cher, and Black but reveal amazing depth--overcoming the possibility for shallow interpretations from the seeming narrowness of the plot...
...three have gathered to reminisce about the twenty years that had passed since their group had dissolved after the death of their idol James Dean in 1955. Each character seems burdened with something from the past that is revealed by the conclusion of the two-hour movie. Sandy Dennis' Mona stuns us with the insipidness of her character. Virtually insane, she consistently insists that she had an affair with James Dean some 20 years before while he was filming the movie Giant. Her every movement, including her stiff posture and constantly flickering tongue, make Mona a treacherously attractive woman...
Burt Reynolds plays the beleaguered sheriff who has tolerated the Chicken Ranch, in part because he loves Mona, the madam (Dolly Parton). One has never seen him so glumly tentative in a role. Parton plays Mona as if Mae West had been cryonically preserved but someone didn't quite finish the job of unfreezing her while restoring her to life. What is mostly missing is a sense of comic authority. Parton has interpolated a couple of her plaintive country songs, which do not fit the brassy Broadway banalities of Carol Hall's basic score. On the other hand...
...action shifts chaotically between two years, 1955 and 1975. In the earlier year Giant is shot near by, after which one of its stars, James Dean, dies in a car crash; in the latter the Disciples of James Dean, a group of local fans, are holding a 20th reunion. Mona (Sandy Dennis) and Sissy (Cher) are still clerking in Woolworth's, and Joanne (Karen Black), who had also worked there, returns to stir up old emotions...
Pictures of Dean are everywhere, and Mona seemingly has convinced everyone that her missing son-the Jimmy Dean of the title-was fathered by the cinematic god himself. "At that time he was our savior," she says. "He was the only one who understood us." The crumbling movie set has become a holy shrine to her, and from every visit she proudly bears back a fragment, like a pilgrim with a relic of the true cross...