Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

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Ruth, Idgie, and the whistle stop cafe

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe is a 1987 novel by Fannie Flagg. It was adapted into the film Fried Green Tomatoes, which was released in 1991.

Fried Green Tomatoes tells the story of Idgie and Ruth as they live during the early 20th century in the south, as they face racism, sexism, and deal with homosexuality. All with a touch of humor thrown in between. Their story is told by an old woman named Ninny Threadgood, when visited in her retirement home by Evelyn, an unhappy woman in a troubled marriage who becomes inspired by Idgie and Ruth's spirit and learns from them how to be her own person.

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This film/novel has examples of:

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: The Whistle Stop Cafe really exists, albeit in Juliette, Georgia, where the movie was filmed. And yes, they really do serve fried green tomatoes, as well as Bennett's BBQ.
• Ambiguously Gay: The movie decided to play Idgie and Ruth's relationship as a more subtle and heavily implied thing, rather than outright stating to the camera they were lovers. Nevertheless, the movie was acclaimed by GLAAD as the year's best film featuring a lesbian love story.
• Bait and Switch: A particularly tense one in the court scene.
• Beware the Nice Ones: What really happened to Frank Bennet? Did he just take off into the night? Drown himself? Or did the sweet tiny eldery black woman he had knocked out moments before crack his head with a frying pan, then serve his roasted flesh as pork in the cafe? Or maybe he just went fishing.
• Compressed Adaptation: Big George's wife and sons and their families are taken out of the film.
• Corrupt Hick: Both played straight and averted with various characters.
  • And the book has one of the most positive one in existence: Apparently no one knew that the judge at Frank Bennet's murder trial was the father of one of his rape victims
  • The judge accepts evidence he knows is complete hooey to be admitted into trial. The "evidence" exonorates a woman and a black man accused killing a white man. The judge has a special hatred for said white man, which is why he throws the murder charge out and rules the white man's disappearance as "death by misadventure".
• Cover Version: British blue-eyed soul singer Paul Young covered the Motown classic "What Becomes of the Brokenhearted" for the movie's soundtrack, and it became a moderate pop hit while going to #1 on Billboard magazine's Adult Contemporary chart. Whitney Houston had planned to record the same song for The Bodyguard, but after Young's version came out she went with Dolly Parton's "I Will Always Love You" instead, and the rest is history.
• Creator Cameo: Fannie Flagg showed up herself as a bizarre relationship expert.
• Deep South: As per usual Flagg work, it shows both the best of it and very very worse.
• Domestic Abuse: Frank Bennett beats Ruth Jameson.
• Door Step Baby: Of a sort. A woman dares not come home with a child because her husband has been in prison for years. Sipsie, who has always wanted a child, races down to the train station to get it. She names the baby George.
• Everything's Worse with Bees: Averted. Idgie can walk right up to a bee hive, jam her hand in it, and rip out a fist full of honeycombs without getting stung. As a Crowning Moment of Awesome for the actress in the movie, their stunt double couldn't do the scene that day, so she decided to do it herself for real.
• Finally Found the Body: Frank Bennet's truck is found in the river. Years later, as the garden by the cafe is being dug up, so is his skull.
• Food Fight: The director left bowls of weapons on each side of the room for Idgie an Ruth to use in the scene, and told them to improvise. The insanity and laughter going on is real. He also said it was supposed to be a metaphor for a sex scene.
• Freudian Excuse: Novel Only: Why is Frank Bennet the scum of the Earth? Because he was the child of an abusive father and walked in on his mother having an affair. Now he hates all women. Passionately.
• Frying Pan of Doom: Sipsie clobbers Frank Bennet over the head with one to keep him from kidnapping his son. Frank doesn't survive.
• Good Bad Girl: Eva Bates, very much so.
• Hanging Judge: Judge Smoote finally has who he thinks are Frank Bennet's killers in his courtroom. He's been after them for years. Although the exonerating evidence is the biggest load of crap he's ever seen, he throws out the charge of murder.
• Happily Adopted: Big George, adopted son of Sipsie.
• Has Two Mommies: Buddy "Stump" has Ruth and Idgie.
• Hey, It's That Lady / Hey, It's That Voice: Evelyn's best friend (aside from Ninny) in the movie is Erica "Yoga" Jones from Orange is the New Black, and has the voice of Patti Mayonnaise from Doug.
• Hooker with a Heart of Gold: Eva Bates, again very much so.
• I Am a Humanitarian: After Sipsie kills Bennet, she and the others at the Whistle Stop Cafe take a page from Sweeney Todd and serve him to the investigator looking for Bennet in order to hide the body.
• Human Resources: Frank Bennett gets cut into steaks and served in the diner
• Imagine Spot: done multiple times with Evelyn Couch.
• Inspector Javert: Smoote's own daughter was raped by Bennet, but he still hunts for Frank's killer. He later becomes the judge at Idgie and Big George's murder trial. by which time his daughter has died, and he dismisses the case despite knowing the evidence of innocence is fake.
• Ironic Echo: There's a family joke told several times in the film about a flock of ducks landing in a small pond. The first time it's told by Buddy to Ruth right before he's killed. The last time it's told it's told is by Idgie to Ruth on Ruth's deathbed. Ruth wanted it to be the last thing she heard as she was dying.
• Lethal Chef: Subverted--Sipsie's a Supreme Chef but what she did to Frank with a Frying Pan of Doom was very literally lethal.
• Loads and Loads of Characters: The novel. It's fairly easy to keep track of them, however.
• Never Mess with Granny: Sipsie.
• Noble Bigot with a Badge: Grady, despite being a racist himself, stands up to a crowd of out-of-town Klansmen when they attack Big George. In the novel he's a Klan attending bigot who uses the N-word frequently. He's also half of Railroad Bill, and breaks into boxcars to throw canned food into black communities so their residents won't starve.
• One-Woman Wail: A slow gospel version is sung throughout some scenes.
• Pass Fail: One of the novel's sub-plots is about a black character who is able to pass as white, only to cause trouble to a passing relative who recognized her without realizing she was trying to do so.
• The Ladette: Idgie is rough and tomboyish and lives in the woods for a time.
• Parking Payback: Evelyn rear-ends six times a car that stole her parking spot.
• Railroad Tracks of Doom: Two instances of this trope happen in the story. In the second incident, the victim did not walk away in one piece. In the first, the victim didn't walk away at all.
• The Red Stapler: The author of the book found an old abandoned ghost town, and decided to write the book to make up a story behind the place. Then the movie came and they filmed it in the same ghost town, and ended up cleaning the place up a little. The film and book brought so much attention to it, that they opened up the actual whistle stop cafe there.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: Judge Smoote thinks that Idgie and her cook killed Frank Bennet but dismisses the case anyways. Unbeknownst to him, the real killer is the cook's adoptive mother.
• Scrapbook Story: The novel tells various characters' stories through traditional narrators, newspaper clippings and the local Whistlestop newspaper The Weems Weakly. The end of the book evens has recipes from the titular resturant.
• Straw Feminist: Various purposefully comical stereotypes show up in Evelyn's time, and after getting caught up in the story, Evelyn herself becomes an aggressive female-empowerment activist for a while before calming down. And she is awesome.
• Throw It In: A lot of the scenes in the film were improvised, such as the drunken baseball game, or the food fight. In one instance Ninny's actress is trying to remember what her line is, before remembering it and going on. They decided to keep this in because it made for a convincing dramatic pause.
• Trickster: Idgie exhibits almost all the characteristics: disdain for social conventions, dubious relationship with the truth, gender-bending behavior, seeming immortality.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: Idgie and Ruth.
• Unreliable Narrator: Did Idgie really serve that body as barbecue to customers? Maybe, maybe not. Ninny isn't about to let facts and details get in the way of a good story, so we may never know. This applies to pretty much everything she says to Evelyn.