Boy, do I need a trip to the car wash! My trusty sedan badly
needs a good cleaning. A recent overseas plane flight allowed me to re-watch a
1976 comedy that’s essentially an ode to the joys and sorrows of working at an
urban locale designed for the cleansing of automobiles. This was the era when
young Black filmmakers seemed to take special pride in singling out the
idiosyncratic venues that anchored their own communities. (The trend stuck
around: see the Barbershop series that debuted in 2002.)
Car Wash was the third feature directed by a talented
young African American named Michael Schultz (his father was German), following
the success of another classic of Black cinema, Cooley High. I was
surprised to discover that it was written by Joel Schumacher, his third produced
screenplay before he moved on to a major directing career. (See, for instance,
his The Lost Boys, and a number of action hits.) Car Wash features
pretty much every established Black actor of that era. Ivan Dixon, Bill Duke,
Garrett Morris are some of them, along with a splashy appearance by Richard
Pryor as a shyster evangelist, Daddy Rich, who shows up in a stretch limo with
the Pointer Sisters in the back seat. There are familiar white faces too, like
George Carlin as a taxi driver who’s been fleeced by a passenger and
“Professor” Irwin Corey, as a mysterious little man who might or might not be
carrying a bomb.
The film takes place over the course of a single Friday,
from opening to closing. Dee-Luxe Car Wash, an East LA. establishment that
features old-fashioned handwashing, is owned by a white man with all the
troubles of the world on his shoulders. (Among them is his college-age son who
has developed an affinity for Chairman Mao and keeps trying to recruit his
dad’s employees to the cause.) These employees are a motley crew: among them a
jokester; a cowboy; an Indian; a guy with romantic troubles; two would-be song
& dance men who keep rehearsing the new opening of their act. Most
memorable is a flamboyant gay cross-dresser (played by Antonio Fargas) who disses
one of his co-workers, “ "Honey, I am more man than you'll ever be
and more woman than you'll ever get."
The film pokes fun at the variety of customers who show up
in expensive cars, such as the Beverly Hills matron who obsesses over the paint
job on her luxury sedan while her young son endures a spate of projectile
vomiting. There’s also fun to be had as patrons scurry in and out of the car
wash’s public bathrooms with all sorts of deviltry on their minds. The film
ends, though, on a serious note. Lonnie, the car wash foreman (Ivan Dixon) has
a long-ago criminal record, but he’s trying hard to stay clean while raising
two young children. As he’s closing up at the end of the day, he’s suddenly
confronted by Duane (Bill Duke), an angry young Black man who, looking for a
new approach to his apparently dead-end life, has discovered radical Islam and insists
that he be addressed as Abdullah Mohammed Akbar. I won’t go into what happens
between them, but it puts into perspective the fun & games of the rest of
the film.
Car Wash is hardly the sort of movie that wins
Oscars. But the good folks at the Cannes Film Festival nominated it for the
1977 Palme d’Or, and director Schultz was given a Technical Grand Prize, with
Norman Whitfield‘s funky musical score also hailed.
