Tuesday Minute
No. 128 | June 29, 2010

Hollywood High-flier

Our theme this week
Howard Hughes and the movies

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   Howard Hughes, Moviemaker

Melvin and Howard (1980)

It’s a small miracle that this movie is as good as it is.  If the hook came up a pitch meeting, it likely would get a pass.  An affable, down-on-his-luck, small-town everyman inherits $156 million from one of the world’s richest men.  That’s a heavy load of hokum even for Hollywood.

You can imagine a thousand ways the film could have gone wrong.  Yet Melvin and Howard—despite an incredible story, the presence of Howard Hughes, and a protagonist who might have concocted one of the great frauds in history—offers something surprising:  it’s utterly believable.

Jason Robards plays Howard Hughes as an aging, crotchety loner, hardly what you’d expect for a famous billionaire, even a mysterious figure like Hughes.  When a motorcycle accident leaves him stranded on a desert roadside, he gets a lift from Melvin Dummar, the Good Samaritan with a pickup truck and a song he’s written for Christmas.  They ride through the Nevada night as Melvin tells Howard about his life.  When the passenger reveals his name, Melvin doesn’t want to be impolite.  “I believe anybody can call themselves whatever they want.”

Though both men get their name in the title, the story belongs to Melvin.  Paul Le Mat plays the lead (if you remember him from American Graffiti, here he is again in the driver’s seat).  The film follows his struggles through a series of jobs and a couple of failed marriages.  He never has much luck though he never gives up dreaming.  He doesn’t have a pretty life but you can see that quality of his that a guy like Hughes would have found appealing, and worth remembering, some day years later while scratching out his will.

That will, its authenticity, and the court case around it are not the prime focus of the movie.  The film is a slice of Americana, a charming riff on luck and misfortune and how the unbelievable might be true—and even if it’s not, it might be worth hoping it is anyway.

Credit for making the film work goes to director Jonathan Demme, while he was still relatively early in his career, and writer Bo Goldman, whose original screenplay won an Oscar.  They keep the focus of the story where it belongs, on the life of its accidental hero.  The cast is terrific, especially Le Mat, Oscar nominee Robards, and Oscar winner Mary Steenburgen, playing Dummar’s wife.  The performances, like the rest of the film, feel genuine, an accomplishment for a true-life tale that might have been more invention than truth.

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Melvin and Howard (1980)
Jonathan Demme, director
Trailer

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Melvin and Howard (1980)
Paul Le Mat, Jason Robards
“Santa’s Souped-Up Sleigh” & more of Melvin

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Quote of Note
Howard:  I have an aversion to song.
Melvin:  That’s what makes you an old asshole.
—Howard Hughes (Jason Robards), Melvin Dummar (Paul Le Mat), Melvin and Howard (1980)

…58…59…60.