Howard Hughes, Melvin Dummar, and the American (Dollar) Dream

Jonathan Demme’s Melvin and Howard is a small movie about small people, unless you count reclusive zillionaire Howard Hughes, whose massive shadow hangs over the whole enterprise. Dennis Bingham's Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre cites Melvin and Howard as the first film in the subgenre "biopic of someone undeserving.” The undeserving someone in this case is Melvin Dummar, the Utah man who, after Hughes’ death in 1976, popped up as a major beneficiary of Hughes’ vast estate by way of a mysterious handwritten will unearthed at the headquarters of the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City. The so-called Mormon Will was eventually judged a blatant forgery. But through a number of court hearings Dummar continued to insist that he’d rescued Hughes in the Nevada desert in 1967, giving a needy old man a friendly lift to Las Vegas.

 Melvin and Howard is a fanciful riff on that slice of history, taking Dummar’s story at face value. (Hollywood veteran Bo Goldman won an original screenplay Oscar for his lively telling of the tale.) It begins with a scruffy and  maniacal Howard Hughes (played with his usual panache by Jason Robards) gleefully racing his chopper through the desert, before the fun ends with a spectacular crash. Hours later, garage mechanic Dummar happens along in his truck, stops to take a leak, and discovers the fallen tycoon. Throughout their ride, Hughes remains taciturn and cranky, until the chatty Dummar gets him to singing a favorite old song, “Bye Bye, Blackbird.” At journey’s end, after Hughes reveals his identity (and borrows some cash), they go their separate ways.

 The bulk of the film is a portrait of Dummar (well played by Paul Le Mat) as a perennial dreamer, someone who can’t hold down a job but is convinced that happy days are just around the corner. He loves wife Lynda (the adorably ditsy Mary Steenburgen in her Oscar-winning role), but can’t quite seem to provide a stable life. The centerpiece of the film is the on-again off-again marriage of these two: at one point she leaves him and their daughter to work in a topless bar. Their fortunes seem to turn when he gets Lynda onto a talent-and-game show in which (despite her tap-dancing ineptitude) she wins a large sum of money, all of which Melvin quickly squanders. The romantic allure of money, as seen in this segment,  is at this film’s very heart.  The show is called Easy Street, and its smarmy host alternates between sexual innuendo and a worshipful attitude toward big bucks. It seems all too apt that Lynda’s tap routine is performed to the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction.”

 If you’re Melvin Dummar—a laid-back guy convinced that life on Easy Street awaits if only you believe hard enough—it’s perfectly likely that Howard Hughes would leave you a fortune. The question of the mysterious will continued to dog the real Dummar’s life, which ended in 2018. Melvin and Howard, though, concludes long before that, returning to the footage of two unlikely buddies, an old man and a young one, joyfully belting out an old musical-hall tune. 

 I worked briefly with Jonathan Demme in 1974, when he’d just returned from directing his first film, Caged Heat, for Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. He moved on to some studio gigs, but Melvin and Howard was his true breakthrough, showing off his skill at capturing American life and moving him toward the big pictures, like 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs. (I’ll mention in passing his sharp ear for musical scoring.) Unfortunately he left us much too soon.  

 

Jane Fonda Joins a Book Club

Of course, as a woman of a certain age, I belong to a book club. So, while on a recent plane flight, I couldn’t resist checking out Book Club, a film featuring some rather spectacular women of a certain age: Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen, and Mary Steenburgen. This movie—basically a romantic comedy for the AARP set—touches on the very real challenges of getting older. Like: facing the dwindling of sexual opportunities. And coping with grown children who insist on denying you any fun, just in case you might fall and break a hip. Sometimes Book Club is endearing, sometimes merely embarrassing. But it’s a hoot watching four lovely ladies (who among them have earned four Oscars and six Emmys) hold the screen.

The writers of Book Club surely tailored each role to the actress who would be bringing it to life. The part of a ditsy widow too intimidated to pursue romance is perfectly suited to the talents of fluttery Diane Keaton. Mary Steenburgen shines as a still-cute housewife trying desperately to coax her husband into bed. (Her story contains the largest amount of slapstick and has the least convincing outcome, but I have always been susceptible to her sunny charm.) Wry Candice Bergen owns some lively moments as a federal judge thrown into a tailspin by her ex-husband’s engagement to a Barbie Doll type. Exploring on-line dating, she finds herself encountering some much shorter men, including balding tax accountant Richard Dreyfuss. Finally there is Jane Fonda, as a brittle but very successful entrepreneur who oozes sex appeal but has always dodged marriage.

Fonda looks slim and gorgeous, though (at 81) she’s much the oldest of the four women. She’s also totally convincing, though in the distant past I have tended to find her comedy roles (in films like Barefoot in the Park and Fun With Dick and Jane) rather belabored.  That plane flight gave me the opportunity to explore her life (Thanks, Delta!), because one of the other onboard offerings was a fascinating 2018 documentary, Jane Fonda in Five Acts. This film, made with Fonda’s full cooperation, walks the viewer through her remarkable career as an actress, activist, and fitness guru. The first four acts of the title represent the eras in which Fonda’s life was shaped by men: by her father, actor Henry Fonda; by first husband, filmmaker Roger Vadim; by second husband, activist/politician Tom Hayden; and by third husband, media tycoon Ted Turner. In on-camera interviews, Jane Fonda freely admits that her low self-esteem has long made her susceptible to the influence of attractive males.  With her glamorous but chilly father and with each of her husbands, she strove to remake herself in order to win approval. It was only after divorcing Turner in 2001 that she feels she has come into her own as a woman with her own beliefs, goals, and enthusiasms. It’s ironic, therefore, that Book Club casts her as the gal who has chosen never to marry, until an attractive and persistent man convinces her he can love her just the way she is.

I was struck in particular by two of the documentary’s revelations. First, that although she admires the wrinkled face of her good friend, Vanessa Redgrave, Fonda lacks the courage to allow herself to age naturally. Yes, she’s had some work done. Second, the disapproval she sensed from her own mother (who later committed suicide in a mental institution) stunted her own ability to show motherly warmth. That’s why it’s largely on her own daughter’s behalf that she has made this film.