by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark
Last night’s “feature” was Fried Green Tomatoes, a film I had been curious about at the time (1991) but had never actually seen, though I remembered buying a cassette single of two songs from the soundtrack: the Four Tops’ “What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted?” in a cover version by Paul Young (not a patch on the original but quite moving in its more restrained way) and a bit of the soundtrack score by Thomas Newman (Randy Newman’s cousin) called, if I recall correctly, “Ghost Train.” I was startled when I first heard about the movie because it was based on a novel by Fannie Flagg (who also co-wrote the screenplay with Carol Sobieski) which had had a similar but longer title, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café, and I had been under the impression that Flagg was a Southern-fried comedy writer. There’s comedy in Fried Green Tomatoes, all right, but for the most part it’s a romantic melodrama paralleling two stories, one taking place in the early-1990’s present and one in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s.
The plot starts with unhappily married housewife Evelyn Couch (Kathy Bates, top-billed) who, while on a trip with her husband Ed (Gallard Sartain), stumbles on what’s left of the Whistle Stop Café in Whistle Stop, Alabama, a small town built to service the passing railroad and which dried up when the trains stopped running by there. Later she goes with her husband to visit his aunt at a nursing home; the aunt can’t stand Evelyn and every time she shows up the aunt throws things at her to get her out of the room. But while Ed and his aunt are interacting, Evelyn stumbles on and quickly befriends another resident, Ninny Threadgoode (Jessica Tandy), former resident of Whistle Stop whose sister (we think) Idgie (Mary Stuart Masterson) co-owned the Whistle Stop Café with her best friend Ruth Jamison (Mary-Louise Parker). Ninny tells Evelyn a series of stories which are dramatized in flashback and become the narrative core of the film.
Interspersed with some grimly funny bits, some of them representing Evelyn’s attempts to pull her husband away from sports telecasts to make love to her (some of the silly things she does in that futile task include wrapping her otherwise nude body in cellophane and greeting him at the door so clad when he returns home from work, the sort of stunt that 1970’s anti-feminist authors like Marabel Morgan, whose 1976 book The Total Woman advocated things to hold your marriage together like slipping notes in your husband’s lunch when he went to work with messages lile, “I crave your body”), Ninny tells the story of how the Whistle Stop Café opened, how it freely mixed white and Black staff and customers (which would probably have been illegal in 1930’s Alabama, though there’s a reference to the Black customers having to get their food out of the back door and eat it behind the café, which would have been legal). Idgie Threadgoode never got over losing her brother Buddy (Chris O’Donnell – given what he looks like now it’s nice to be reminded of how hot and sexy he was when he was young; too bad this film’s nicest-looking man exits so early!) when he got his foot caught in a train track and was run over by a train.
In fact, she was so traumatized by this memory than when her friend Ruth has a baby boy Idgie convinces Ruth to name him “Buddy, Jr.” (He’s listed in the cast list as “Buddy Threadgoode, Jr.” and is played by Grayson Fricke, though how he got the mane “Threadgoode” when his mom’s last name was Jamison and his dad’s was Frank Bennett (Nick Searcy) is something of a mystery. But then the dynamics of a lot of the family names in this movie are mysterious; we’re not clear how Jessica Tandy’s character fit into the Threadgoode family and – surprisingly for a multigenerational film – she’s not depicted in the flashbacks so the producers, Jon Avnet (who also directed) and Jordan Kerner) didn’t need to cast another actress to play her as a young woman. Buddy, Jr. survives to be 30 (he has some sort of birth defect and his doctor told Ruth that’s about as long as he’d live anyway), but he makes it through school – his graduation is shown in the deleted-scenes section of the DVD and I think the film would have benefited if it had been left in (usually when you watch the “deleted scenes” section of a DVD you pretty quickly come to the conclusion that the filmmakers were right to delete them) – only before that he, too, is run over by a train, like his namesake, but instead of dying he just loses his arm and the Threadgoodes even have a funeral for his arm. (If that sounds silly, remember that when the 19th century Mexican dictator Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna lost his leg in a battle between Mexico and France, he ordered a full-dress funeral for his leg and had an elaborate tomb built for it.)
I grimaced at the parallel between the deaths of Scarlett O’Hara’s father and daughter in Gone With the Wind – they both died in horseback-riding accidents trying to jump the same fence on the same stretch of Tara – but at least Buddy, Jr. survived. Before that, when he was still a baby, his father Frank tried to steal him, only to die under mysterious circumstances that lead to Idgie being put on trial for murder and her Black hired hand, Big George (Stan Shaw), being threatened with lynching by the Ku Klux Klan (not the Alabama Klan but a bunch of Klansmen from Georgia because Frank was from there and the murder trial takes place over the line in Georgia). The trial is so similar to the one in To Kill a Mockingbird I joked “Where’s Atticus Finch when they need him?.” though in the end it’s the trial judge, not an attorney, who functions as the voice of reason and dismisses the case when it becomes clear to him that without a body and without hard evidence against Idgie there simply isn’t enough to hold her on, let alone support a guilty verdict against her. Eventually we get a macabre explanation which we may or may not be intended to believe: that Big George and the Whistle Stop Café’s cook Sipsie (Cicely Tyson, given a special credit and making this film an envoi to her) cut him up, barbecued him and served him to the police who were so energetically pursuing his killer.
Getting to know Ninny and hearing her stories emboldens Evelyn to be more assertive towards her husband and others – including a marvelous scene in which she repeatedly bashes in the front end of a red Volkswagen convertible that aced her out of a parking space at the local Winn-Dixie shopping mall (Winn-Dixie is a regional Southern grocery chain and there was even a 2005 movie called Because of Winn-Dixie, though in that film Winn-Dixie was a dog adopted by a new girl in school and the mutt helps her make friends) – and at the end, when Ninny moves out of the nursing home and at first Evelyn thinks she’s dead, then realizes she was released and is headed out to her old home, which was condemned as unsafe and torn down decades earlier, Evelyn takes her in over her husband’s objections. I’m generally not a fan of movies this sentimental, but Fried Green Tomatoes mostly worked for me; there’s a warmth and humanity that triumphs over the credibility-stretching nature of much of the plot, and it’s quite finely acted.
It was made four years after Jessica Tandy played a similar old-person-young-people-love-to-be-around role in *batteries not included (with her real-life husband Hume Cronyn partnering her in that one and also a film involving an old café), and as I said when I posted to this blog on *batteries not included one wouldn’t believe from all those kindly voice-of-wisdom parts Tandy played in the later stages of her career (she died in 1994, three years after making Fried Green Tomatoes, but she still had four films left to go on her résumé) that she had been the original Blanche Du Bois in the Broadway premiere of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947. (As good as Vivien Leigh was in the 1951 film, which otherwise used the same principals as the stage cast – Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden – I still wish Tandy’s performance as Blanche could also have been preserved.) I also quite liked the creative use of music in the score; many of the soundtrack cues are punctuated by wordless Black voices singing in gospel style, and towards the end we get a Black church service featuring highly regarded gospel singer Marion Williams doing the song “Didn’t It Rain?” – the one with which Mahalia Jackson out-rocked Chuck Berry in the 1958 film Jazz On a Summer’s Day. If we didn’t have Mahalia’s version Marion Williams would own this song, and even with the formidable competition she’s still damned good.
Fried Green Tomatoes is a movie that goes for an elegiac tone, waxing nostalgia even about things we shouldn’t be nostalgic about (though the portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan is neither the outright heroic one of D. W. Griffith’s notorious The Birth of a Nation nor the secular-monsters portrayal of people trying to be politically correct today, but an annoyance more than anything. The café owners and their supporters in the community (including the local sheriff, who’s a member of a Klavern himself but thinks these Georgia boys are being totally out of lime) talk the Klan out of burning down the place absurdly easily) mostly are able to keep their Black staff and friends out of trouble, and though Big George gets whipped he seems to regard the whole thing as just a price he has to pay for living in the South at the time (which in itself is a sad comment on the pervasiveness of racism that Black people knew white people could kill, whip, kidnap or rape them with impunity and that was just a fact of life they had to accept and cope with). It’s a film that makes the point against racism but doesn’t let it get in the way of the romantic nostalgia that overlays the piece and is probably the reason why some of the people who’ve reviewed t his on imdb.com have watched it 12 or more times. Fried Green Tomatoes is not usually one of my favorite sorts of movie, but I enjoyed it and thought it was well and tastefully done. I must say, though, that the titular fried green tomatoes are – like so many other items of Southern fried food – so thoroughly covered in batter and fried in oil they look decidedly unappetizing on screen!
