Melvin and Howard (1980): A “Good” Samaritan and A Millionaire

Posted on October 7, 2021 by 4 Star Films

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The opening sequence of Melvin and Howard takes on more and more meaning the longer the movie goes on. It’s very simple, really. We open up with some joyrider on his motorbike tearing through the desert, taking on every jump through the arid wasteland with reckless abandon.

As one might suspect, his foolhardy stunt bites him in the butt; he winds up in a spill, leaving him incapacitated in the middle of nowhere. It’s night and pitch dark now. Thankfully, there is a good samaritan who picks him up. As he gets closer and pulls the injured man into his car, we get a better look at him. He’s a scruffy-looking man well-advanced in years.

Here we have the inauspicious introduction of Melvin and Howard. Melvin (Paul Le Mat) is really a nobody, but he does have a sense of decency, picking up this old man without any pretense or sense of knowing who he is. Because Howard (Jason Robards), is Howard Hughes — the eccentric, aviating millionaire.

They talk and share something genuine between two people. Howard’s resistant at first. He doesn’t want to take part in Melvin’s friendly chatter nor does he go much for singing songs. Melvin nevertheless obliges with the tune he mailed into a music label for. They took his lyrics and supplied a tune. The outcome birthed a new Christmas classic, “Souped-Up Santa’s Sleigh.” Howard’s exterior cracks briefly as he relents and proceeds to hum a few bars of “Bye Bye Blackbird” in response.

The scene doesn’t look like much, but it plays extraordinarily well. Then, just like that, they part ways. At the request of Howard, Melvin drops him off out back of a hotel — the old man still hobbling and beat up. But he’s adamant this is where he wants to be, so Melvin relents.

We think this is just the beginning, and it is, yet we never see Hughes (or Robards) again (well, almost). But it’s this moment of initial connection and humanity that not only informs the rest of the story but sets the tone for Jonathan Demme’s free-flowing biography of a little guy.

If you want to think about it in such terms, it’s an off-center Howard Hughes biopic where the central character is a man named Melvin, who reflects a different cross-section of society. It’s the kind of story you wouldn’t think would get the Hollywood treatment and yet here it is, and the director gives it the kind of love and affection necessary to make it feel lived-in and sincere.

Here is a man who lives in a trailer. His wife Lynda (Mary Steenburgen) is a sweet woman and together they have a darling daughter who only sees the best in her folks even if their flaws are forever visible.

These are the flaws that keep the life of the Dummars in a constant state of disruption. Whether it’s money troubles, due to Melvin’s spendthrift philosophy, or Lynda’s working of the seedy nightclub circuit, there’s a great deal of dysfunction in their family life. But at their core is a near-oblivious simplicity and so even as their life is a bumpy ordeal, there’s something endearing them — making us wish the best for them.

He’s visibly repulsed by her work — he doesn’t want her flaunting herself in front of strangers. His home life is humble, but he gladly sits in front of the TV with his daughter feasting on pop tarts and bacon. Lynda never seems to dislike Melvin; she just knows it’s not possible to rely on him. So, over the course of the picture, they get divorced, then remarried, complete with one of those throw-em-together hotel wedding ceremonies for $39.

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If it’s not evident already, Melvin & Howard is a film that seems continually preoccupied with the desert backroads and small-towns of America. Where the country music is ubiquitous and people live simple, unadorned lives. Where Melvin’s chances to earn the mantle of milkman of the month get threatened or the car gets repossessed.

But there’s also an itinerant element — to pick up and go in search of new lives and new fortunes — and because the film chooses to stay with Melvin, the story itself takes on this antsy quality. Never being fully satisfied to dwell in one place. However, far from giving off a superficial impression, it winds up coloring a world with all sorts of genuine nooks and crannies.

It’s not a charmed life, but he meets it with continual candor. The reunited family gets by losing themselves in TV game show episodes of Easy Street, which become a kind of communal event for everyone. Lynda fulfills a dream by getting on the show as a contestant and feverishly tap-dancing her way through the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” to the prize of $10,000!

Still, the family splinters again. Melvin picks up and moves to Utah after marrying a Mormon girl. They set up shop in a gas station. The so-called focal point of Melvin’s life feels squeezed into the end of this movie, not that it’s shoehorned into the story by any means, but it shows how his life adds up to something more than the media frenzy that soon overtakes him.

Because he was the man who had the unsubstantiated will of the late Howard Hughes dropped on his gas station desk naming him as 1/16 beneficiaries of Hughes’s fortunes. That added up to approximately $156 million! In the aftermath, he found himself brought into court to testify as his story was heavily disputed. It does sound absolutely ludicrous.

How this seemingly unextraordinary individual could find himself at the center of something so grand and earth-shattering is a real-life farce. However, what lingers is the import of the first scene. Demme does well to return there if only briefly, to remind us what this frenzy was about.

Lest we feel slighted that this movie wasn’t really about Melvin and Howard at all (or at least mostly Melvin), in some way it says as much about Howard Hughes’ life by leaving out all the trumped-up treatment. It’s the romantic in me, but I would like to believe that even our momentary interactions with one another can be blessed.

It is possible to touch someone else, adding even a little bit of goodness into their lives. It’s this kind of goodwill to strangers that can stay with them for a lifetime, whether or not they include us in their wills or not. Who knows, you might be entertaining angels unawares, or misanthropic millionaires, for that matter.

4/5 Stars

Citizens Band (1977): Radio Waves in Everywhere America

Posted on October 5, 2021 by 4 Star Films

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“How can such a small mind have such a big antenna?” – Paul Le Mat is Spider

Citizens Band (also known as Handle With Care) is not about music. Instead, it documents the increasing craze during the 1970s for person-to-person radio communication. Initially utilized for emergency messages, the radio waves soon got gummed up by social calls, with every Tom, Dick, and Harry looking to get a piece of the action.

It’s illustrated in the early sequences when Spider (Paul Le Mat) picks up a message from “Chrome Angel,” (Charles Napier) who gets pinned under his 18 wheeler in a rainstorm. It’s partially due to his own negligence on the road (He got distracted by some saucy call signs). Regardless, Spider is quick to search out help for him only to get disrupted by local nuisances like the self-proclaimed “Hustler,” a bratty kid who likes to brag about his exploits. He has a blatant disregard for FCC regulations.

It turns out our trucker isn’t much of a victim. In fact, we find out his broken arm is the least of his troubles because he’s run into the same problems as Edmond O’Brien in The Bigamist: he’s been holding court with two women. Well, three. Recently he’s been getting friendly with a local lady of the night named “Hot Coffee” who uses the radio waves to drum up business.

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The only reason he gets found out is through a bizarre piece of comic happenstance. They meet on a bus. There’s the bodacious “Dallas Angel” (Ann Wedgeworth) and the more pragmatic “Portland Angel,” (Marcia Rodd), and after they get over crying about their misfortunes, they laugh, and conspire to make him pay. One bit of malevolence involves releasing his load of cattle out of his trailer hitch. There’s enough here for a raucous subplot.

Back at his home base, “Spider,” aka Blaine Lovejoy, holds down the fort as an emergency radio relay CB station with his buddy Cochise. Lovejoy lives with his father (Robert Blossoms) and struggles through his contentious relationship with his brother (Bruce McGill), the local P.E. teacher. It runs deeper. Both share a complicated relationship with the local crush Pam (Candy Clark).

Their Pops is a near-cataonic figure who is shocked back to life daily by the whizz of the radio waves and his call sign “Papa Thermodyne.” For a brief instant, he’s returned to his glory days trading words with some of his buddies. It pulls him out of his haze and the sorry existence he’s resigned himself to.

The inclusion of both Le Mat and Clark results in an unofficial American Graffiti reunion, though they hardly shared any scenes in the previous film. Even if it is set in a generation later, Citizens Band somehow maintains a similar affection for radios and automobiles. They often act as the conduits for youthful entertainment, love, and the various dalliances and diversions making life what it is each and every day.

A callow teen named “Warlock” chats up the seductive Electra over the car’s radio. Joe Cocker’s “You Are So Beautiful” briefly plays in another sequence. You also get the sense the radios allow people to live double lives, facilitating something more than what they’re usually allowed to be in the everyday.

Much of the movie’s sense of fun revolves around “Spider” laying down the letter of the law. He resorts to patrolling the neighborhood, honing in on signals before raiding the homes and putting the perpetrators out of comission indefinitely.

If it provides any indication, Citizen Band relies on a fairly lax and casual narrative with the breadth of the ensemble bringing to mind Robert Altman without the same comic barb. On its own, Jonathan Demme’s movie settles into an absurd rhythm somehow befitting backcountry, everywhere America.

“Spider” continues on his righteous crusade to rid the waves of needless vermin. His nemeses include a ragtag laundry list of whiny pipsqueaks, self-righteous bible thumpers, paranoid anti-communists, and old ladies droning on about dreary childhood stories.

Thanks to this untethered interest in all the various quirks of the community, which subsequently become some of the films most enthusiastic vignettes, it’s never quite able to pin down its more emotionally dramatic sequences.

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This involves the strained relationship between brothers or even Pam’s conflicted, on-and-off romance with Spider. Certainly, there’s more story here and there could have been greater motivation, to empathize and understand them on a personal level. This is generally absent or at least not fleshed out substantively.

But there is enough in the way of world-building, humor, and genuine characterizations by the lead performers to make it feel worthwhile, if not totally sketched out. And because the cast is protean in nature, it’s pleasant enough to follow their lead through the ebb and flow.

Finally, all the cast assembles for one sole purpose. They drive out to the outskirts of town, during another rainstorm, to perform a search and rescue mission to find a vanished Papa Thermodyne. Somehow it turns out an ending to fit the world we’ve come to experience thus far. Everyone gets their individual shoutout.

Citizens Band (or Handle with Care) is a slight film, but with the pieces it has in place and the extent of its subject matter, this is actually a worthy compliment. There’s a warmth and weirdness permeating its frames that, while engaging, also suggests the lingering specters of living in a small town. It’s both the joys and idiosyncrasies. The dark riffs of conflict, and the unifying humanity — all of us flying under the same colors.

Even at this early juncture in his career, Demme seems particularly well-attuned to this aspect of his ensemble. The best part is that he would continue down this same road with future efforts.

3.5/5 Stars

Review: American Graffiti (1973)

Posted on October 11, 2014 by 4 Star Films

The year was 1962. Cars were cool, the music was hopping, and teens were young and in love. It’s a simpler world, but it is not a world without your typical worries, especially since high school is over and college is just around the corner for some.

Curt (Richard Dreyfuss) is destined for college with a big scholarship under his belt, but he is still not convinced it’s the right fit for him.

Steve (Ron Howard) is also college bound, but he finds himself spending his last night patching things up with his girlfriend, Curt’s sister Laurie (Cindy Williams).

Their friend Toad (Charles Martin Smith) has the night of his life with Debbie (Candy Clark), leaving his puny Vespa behind after Steve’s loans his ride to the lovable geek.

Cool king of the strip John Milner (Paul Le Mat) gains an annoying co-passenger and winds up having an unorthodox but memorable night all the same.

It would be a pleasure to dive further and further into each arc, but it seems wholly unnecessary. The joy of American Graffiti is the ride it takes you on. The differing perspectives, varying experiences, and ultimately, a full realization of a certain time and place. True, I was never around in 1962, but it feels like I was. Some of Buddy Holly’s thunder has been stolen by the Beach Boys. JD (James Dean) is boss and Ozzie and Harriet can be seen on the picture tube. It goes without saying that the hottest pastimes are cruising and necking.

Understandably, George Lucas pulled from his own past love of cars and music to transport us back in time. That would have been impossible without the music that acts as the ultimate jukebox and it is pervasive wherever the night takes us. With that nostalgia comes Wolfman Jack who highlights the lightness of the age while also making a more somber cameo which contrasts with the image that he created on the radio waves.

This is a story about young adolescents, and it certainly is a comedy as life is often a comedy. There are memorable moments, fights, and times where we just need to puke. Through it all we learn a little about ourselves and those around us. Dreams can be made and re-imagined as they were for Steve and Curt. However, when it all comes down to it, each one of us has our own path we must carve an existence out of. For each individual it looked a little different. However, one of the reasons I always come back to American Graffiti is the timelessness or rather the way it so wonderfully freezes time. I feel like I’m there in the moment with these characters. I laugh, cheer, and empathize with them. Perhaps the time and place of their world differs from mine, but their worries and aspirations are universal.

No one wants to fade into the past and we all are looking for our girl in the white T-Bird. Only time will tell what actually happens. We just have to live life and see what kind of ride we get taken for.

5/5 Stars

American Graffiti (1973)

Posted on July 13, 2013 by 4 Star Films

Starring Ron Howard and Richard Dreyfuss with a host of others, this George Lucas directed film follows the lives of young people in California during the early 60s. It is the night before Curt and Steve are going off to college. They both want to make the most of the time left. However, Steve spends all his time trying to strengthen his relationship with his girlfriend (Cindy Williams). Curt, on the other hand, finds himself out in the town talking with girls and proving himself to a group of thugs. The rest of the film consists of the hot rodding antics of two other characters. A tough speedster (Paul Le Mat) finds himself driving around a 12-year-old girl. “Toad” the nerdy one (Charles Martin Smith), finds himself spending a wild night with a nice but peculiar girl.

With its classic music accompanied by Wolfman Jack and the vintage cars, American Graffiti is a blast of nostalgia that allows us to remember simpler times. It takes this important day in the life of these young individuals and it allows us to be a part of it. Each character has his own experiences that cause them to grow. Toad matures, Curt realizes he must experience college, Steve learns the importance of his girlfriend, and Milner realizes he really does not want to be “The King” anymore.

This film may have slower parts but that just makes it more enjoyable because then the night kicks into high gear when Toad loses the car, Milner beats up the thugs, or Curt has visions of a blonde in a T-Bird. Fittingly as he flies away to his unknown future he sees her white car cruising down the road. It was something that I had wanted to see the first time around but I had seemingly missed it. It made the ending even better.

5/5 Stars