Melvin and Howard

This is the film that landed director Jonathan Demme (Stop Making Sense, Something Wild, Silence Of The Lambs) into the top grade in Hollywood and marked him out as a director worth watching.

Melvin Dummar (Paul Le Mat) picks up a hobo (Jason Robards) who has crashed his bike in the Nevada desert. He badgers his pissed-off travelling companion into singing Bye, Bye, Blackbird. In the early hours of the morning Melvin drops off his passenger, gives him some loose change and continues home. From then on the film follows Melvin's passage through the rest of the 70s. His wife Lynda (Mary Steenburgen), a stripper, leaves him, divorces him and then heavily pregnant, remarries him. She wins $10,000 on a TV show, he uses the money as down payments on a Cadillac and a yacht, she leaves him again. He moves in with Bonnie and they run a gas station. Then Howard Hughes, the millionaire film producer and flying-boatsman dies, leaving Melvin $156 million: since Hughes was the hobo Melvin had picked up all those years before.

The opening credit sequence, an endless highway unspooling in a car's headlights, hints at a road movie, and with the constant shifts from Nevada to Califomia to Utah and the picking up and dropping of several characters on the way it certainly feels like it. But this is a film about money and relationships not the American dream.

The characters are observed in an affectionate, good humoured, and most important unpretentious way, emphasised by Tak Fujimoto's (Badlands, Philadelphia) casual, free-form photography rather like television reportage. Apart from a few dark moments, the film remains buoyant and enthusiastic just like its central character indicative of this is Melvin's insistence that what really matters, whatever happens to the money, is that "Howard Hughes sang my song". The real Melvin Dummar, for this is a true story, appears as an affable snack-bar attendant.

Review by Stephen Cox
Taken from EUFS Programme 1995-96