Melvin and Howard

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Melvin and Howard
DVD cover
Directed by	Jonathan Demme
Produced by	Art Linson Don Phillips
Written by	Bo Goldman
Starring	Jason Robards Paul Le Mat Elizabeth Cheshire Mary Steenburgen Michael J. Pollard
Release date(s)	September 19, 1980
Running time	95 min
Language	English
IMDb profile

Melvin and Howard is a 1980 movie directed by Jonathan Demme and written by Bo Goldman, based upon the claims of Utah service station owner Melvin Dummar concerning a purported will written by Howard Hughes, leaving Dummar 1/16th of his $2 billion estate, which would have amounted to $156 million. Dummar claimed that Hughes bestowed the $156 million to him after Dummar picked him up as a lost hitchhiker late one evening in December 1968 and at Hughes's request, drove him to the Sands hotel-casino in Las Vegas, but the subsequent legal proceedings found his claims to be false.

The film is not, however, centrally concerned with the issue of Hughes or questions of whether Dummar's story was true or false (though the meeting with Hughes is treated as genuine). The meeting of the two men occurs at the start of the film, and the court case is dealt with briefly at the end; Hughes otherwise does not appear in the film, and the heart of the film is a portrait of Melvin's scattered, up-and-down life, his amateur songwriting and singing, his spendthrift, trust-in-luck nature, and his rocky marital life. The film is a portrait of a working-class America of country music singalongs, pop-tarts and dreams of getting rich (the characters obsessively watch a game show, and in one absurd moment Melvin's wife Lynda manages to get on the show and win money and furniture by tapdancing to "(Can't Get No) Satisfaction"); but it avoids outright satire or parody – or, rather, offers a complex mix of emotions: Lynda's dance is initially so ludicrous she's roundly booed, but she wins over the audience and in the end achieves genuine triumph.

Notable performers in the film are Jason Robards as Hughes, Paul Le Mat as Melvin Dummar and Mary Steenburgen, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role as Dummar's first wife, Lynda. Charles Napier, Dabney Coleman and Gloria Grahame also have small roles. Dummar himself has a small cameo as the counterman at a bus depot, as Lynda makes a gargantuan sandwich for her daughter Darcy out of half a French loaf before putting her on a bus back to Melvin.

The film was memorably parodied on the Canadian/U.S. TV show SCTV as "Melvin and Howards," a sketch in which Dummar picks up hitchhikers Howard Cosell (a famous U.S. sportscaster), U.S. Senator Howard Baker, and the Three Stooges' Jerome "Curly" Howard.