Melvin and Howard is a 1980 American comedy-drama film directed by Jonathan Demme. The screenplay by Bo Goldman was inspired by real-life Utah service station owner Melvin Dummar, who was listed as the beneficiary of USD$156 million in a will allegedly handwritten by Howard Hughes that was discovered in the headquarters of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City. A novelization of Goldman's script later was written by George Gipe.
Plot synopsis
In the opening scene, Hughes loses control of and crashes his motorcycle in the Nevada desert. That night, he's discovered lying on the side of a stretch of U.S. Highway 95 where Dummar stops his pickup truck so he can relieve himself. The disheveled stranger, refusing to allow the Good Samaritan to take him for medical help, asks him to drive him to Las Vegas. En route, the two engage in stilted conversation until Dummar cajoles his passenger into joining him in singing a Christmas song he wrote. The man warms up to his rescuer and before he's dropped off at the Sands Hotel, he identifies himself as the reclusive billionaire.
Most of the remainder of the film focuses on Melvin's scattered, up-and-down life, his spendthrift, trust-in-luck nature, his rocky marital life with first wife Lynda, and his more stable relationship with second wife Bonnie. Lynda leaves him and their daughter to dance in a sleazy strip club, but eventually returns, but she remains frustrated by her husband's futile efforts to achieve the American dream. Melvin convinces her to appear on Easy Street, a game show hybrid of The Gong Show and Let's Make a Deal, and although her tapdancing initially is booed by the audience, she wins them over and nabs the top prize of living room furniture, a piano, and $10,000 cash.
Melvin agrees to invest in an affordable house in a new development, but while Lynda tries to keep their finances under control, he rashly buys a new car and a boat, prompting her to take their daughter and toddler son and sue for divorce. Melvin is comforted by Bonnie, the payroll clerk at the dairy where he drives a truck, and the two eventually wed and move to Utah, where they take over the operation of a service station her relatives had owned.
One day, a mysterious man in a limousine stops at the station ostensibly to buy a pack of cigarettes, but after he drives off Melvin discovers an envelope marked "Last Will and Testament of Howard Hughes" on his office desk. Afraid to open it, he takes it to Mormon headquarters and secretes it in a pile of incoming mail. It doesn't take long for the media to descend upon him and his family, and eventually Melvin finds himself in court, admitting he once met Hughes but vigorously denying he forged the will that finally fulfills his dreams.
Principal cast
Critical reception
In his review in the New York Times, Vincent Canby called the film a "sharp, engaging, very funny, anxious comedy" and commented, "Mr. Demme is a lyrical film maker for whom there is purpose in style . . . Melvin and Howard is commercial American movie-making of a most expansive, entertaining kind." [1]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times described it as "wonderful" and added, "This is a slice of American life. It shows the flip side of Gary Gilmore's Utah. It is a world of mobile homes, Pop Tarts, dust, kids and dreams of glory. It's pretty clear how this movie got made. Hollywood started with the notion that the story of the mysterious Hughes will might make a good courtroom thriller. Well, maybe it would have. But my hunch is that when they met Dummar, they had the good sense to realize that they could get a better - and certainly a funnier - story out of what happened to him between the day he met Hughes and the day the will was discovered. Dummar is the kind of guy who thinks they oughta make a movie out of his life. This time, he was right." [2]
Variety said, "Jonathan Demme's tour-de-force direction, the imaginative screenplay and top-drawer performances from a huge cast fuse in an unusual, original creation." [3]
Pauline Kael gave the film a very positive review in The New Yorker : "Jonathan Demme's lyrical comedy Melvin and Howard which opened the New York Film Festival on September 26, is an almost flawless act of sympathetic imagination. I doubt if Jason Robards has ever been greater than he is here. Mary Steenburgen's Lynda Dummer has a soft mouth and a tantalizing slender wiggliness, and she talks directly to whomever she's talking to - when she listens, she's the kind of woman a man wants to tell more to. Demme shows perhaps a finer understanding of lower-middle-class life than any other American director." [4]
In one episode of SCTV, the film was parodied with Rick Moranis as Melvin and Joe Flaherty as Howard Hughes. Along the way they meet and pick up Howard Cosell (Eugene Levy), Congressman Howard Baker (Dave Thomas), and Curly Howard (John Candy). At the end of the sketch the film is called "Melvin and Howards".
Awards and nominations
The film won the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Film.
Mary Steenburgen won several awards for her performance, including the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress - Motion Picture, the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actress, the Boston Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actress, and the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actress.
Jason Robards was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe and was honored by the Boston critics.
Bo Goldman won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Drama Written Directly for the Screen, the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Screenplay, the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Screenplay, and the Boston Society of Film Critics Award for Best Screenplay.
External links
See also
References
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Films directed by Jonathan Demme |
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| 1980s |
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