Melvin and Howard would be a curiosity in Jonathan Demme’s filmography if not for the fact that his entire filmography is a collection of curiosities. Demme isn’t just a genre-hopper, but rather a director who finds unexplored spaces in between the familiar tropes. And when you’ve made the Citizen Kane (1941) of women’s prison movies in Caged Heat (1974), the greatest concert film of all time in Stop Making Sense (1974), the greatest one-man show of all time in Swimming To Cambodia (1987), and the greatest serial killer movie of all time in Silence of the Lambs (1991), as well as brilliant and borderline-unclassifiable comedies like Something Wild (1986), exactly what kind of movie could be classified as a digression?
Disparate as his work is, there is a distinct Demme-ness running throughout his films. There’s a throughline of themes and motifs that make even the more difficult-to-pin-down movies definitively his, though he may lack the immediately identifiable style of a David Fincher or a Quentin Tarantino, and he almost never wrote the films he directed.
Even by Demme standards, Melvin and Howard is a bit of an oddity. It’s a working-class dramedy based on a scandal that once grabbed national headlines but is now mostly forgotten. The object of that scandal: the so-called ‘Mormon Will,’ a handwritten testament purportedly written in 1968 and secretly delivered to a minor officer of the Mormon church. The document is purported to be the final wishes of Howard Hughes, who was at one point the richest man in the world and one of the most famous men in America before he retreated into mysterious seclusion. The authenticity of the Mormon Will became a major point of legal contention, especially given that no other credible document emerged indicating what should be done with Hughes’ billions after his death. And the man at the center of the story who claimed to be the only one who could explain the whys and wherefores of the contested document was a gas station manager by the name of Melvin Dummar.
The most obvious angle of interest here would be the courtroom drama to determine the will’s authenticity, but Demme is characteristically disinterested in the conventional approach. Working from a script by Bo Goldman, who would go on to have a more straightforward approach to Hughes as a co-writer of Rules Don’t Apply (2016), Demme’s take is a realist’s fable about fate, capitalism, and American dreaming that takes the fantastical at face value without losing sight of the truth about life on the narrow margin of the middle class.
Perhaps the best way to access the subtle yet powerful Demme-ness of Melvin and Howard is through his portrayal of Howard Hughes, the real-life billionaire, aviator, and movie impresario who is one of the two title characters. Hughes has been featured as a character in a wide range of movies, from biopics that attempt to separate fact from fiction to pop-fantasy portrayals where particular elements of Hughes’ carefully crafted public persona become a lens through which to view a number of distinctive—and distinctly American—characters.
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Howard Hughes would be an obvious point of fascination for filmmakers based on his astonishing biography alone. Longworth notes that one of his obituaries deemed him the “most publicized” man of his time. He was the world’s richest man, co-creator and pilot of the world’s fastest plane to take off from land, creator and pilot of the world’s largest plane in the Hercules (don’t call it the Spruce Goose), and a co-conspirator with the CIA to steal a sunken Russian submarine off the ocean floor. But no doubt filmmakers also identify with him as a kindred spirit, a true-blue movie freak. He was producer and filmmaker himself, and a notorious paramour to some of the most famous actresses in silver-screen history. His lifelong fandom extended beyond business and artistry into pathological cinephilia. In the later years during his psychological decline, he would lock himself in screening rooms, alternately sleeping and running movies for days, weeks, once even four months at a time.
In her terrific book Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom In Howard Hughes’ Hollywood, Karina Longworth writes that in 1968, during his extended residency in a Las Vegas hotel—which he purchased to avoid having to change rooms—Hughes became a regular viewer of local TV station KLAS, which showed movies every night. After he sent several complaints to the station about their programming choices and nightly hiatus beginning at 1 a.m., owner Hank Greenspun suggested Hughes buy the station and air whatever he wanted whenever he wanted. So Hughes did. He sent in a list of desired movies every week, and often “fifteen minutes before a movie was about to end, the station would get a call telling them what the next movie needed to be.” So, Hughes essentially invented the world’s first movie-streaming service 50 years early, with a subscriber base of one.
Hughes has been a character in several movies, most obviously in the biopic The Aviator (2004), one among many of Martin Scorsese’s five-star masterpieces, where he was portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio. He was also the subject of another fairly conventional biopic, The Amazing Howard Hughes (1977), starring Tommy Lee Jones and filmed for TV as a three-and-a-half hour miniseries before it was recut as a two-hour feature. Another 1977 biopic, Hughes and Harlow: Angels In Hell was far less well received. Most recently he was played by Warren Beatty in the flawed but compelling Rules Don’t Apply (2016), which focused on the period of Hughes’ life from 1958 to 1964 when he began to increasingly withdraw from society, spending much of his time cultivating and obsessing over a coterie of would-be new starlets he kept largely secluded in a series of rented houses.
What each filmmaker sees in Hughes—or what they choose to see—says as much about them as it does about the man himself. The Amazing Howard Hughes attempts a more conventional catch-all biography. The Aviator is somewhat similarly catholic, but also Catholic; in addition to buzzing with admiration for Hughes’ maniacal audacity as a filmmaker, Scorsese is focused on the duality between fervent genius and fervid madness, opening his film with an Oedipal scene of young Howard being bathed by his too-doting mother in a flash of Madonna/whore imagery that puts it on the same frequency as so much of his other work. For Beatty, the personal parallels are almost too obvious—a notorious playboy (or lecher, depending on your perspective) coming out of hiding to reassert his power over a domain where he once reigned supreme. No coincidence that this was Beatty’s first on-screen role in 15 years, and his first time back in the director’s chair since 1998’s Bulworth.
But even more telling are the movies where Hughes is a largely tertiary character. No doubt the one Hughes himself would like the best is The Rocketeer (1991), Joe Johnston’s whizz-bang superhero movie about a daring jetpack pilot fighting Nazis and an evil(er) version of Errol Flynn in the days before World War II. In the movie, said jetpack is invented by Hughes, played by Terry O’Quinn as a quasi-superhero himself. Not only does he invent the jetpack, but when our hero the Rocketeer gets into a jam, it’s ace aviator Hughes to the rescue in his own personal aircraft. This dizzyingly idealized incarnation of Hughes, a captain of both industry and the clouds, even gives a moralizing speech about not wanting his inventions used as weapons of war. The real Hughes raked in tens of millions of dollars in military contracts and often lamented they didn’t work with him more.
Hughes the inventor is similarly heroic in Francis Ford Coppola’s Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988), a Norman Rockwell-sheened biopic of automotive innovator Preston Tucker, who in the late 1940s attempted to design a cutting-edge automobile to rival Detroit’s Big Three. In one scene, Tucker—played by Jeff Bridges at his carnival-barking best—receives an out-of-the-blue call from Hughes. This version of Howard, played by Dean Stockwell, sees a bit of himself in Tucker’s convention-shattering boldness, and secretly helps arrange a business deal to help Tucker’s upstart company. This conception of Hughes as outsider capitalist is particularly notable because there is no such record of this meeting, or any conversation between the two men, ever occurring. Chicago Tribune critic Dave Kehr notes that fellow big-dreamer Coppola was essentially making Tucker as a veiled autobiography, with the Tucker car factory as a stand-in for Coppola’s own Zoetrope Studios. Thus, this Hughes is a refraction of a reflection. But his one scene also stands out in sharp contrast to the rest of the glossy business fantasia. When Tucker goes to meet Hughes at his airplane hangar, the movie is suddenly bleached of color, and its zippy score is replaced by an ominous droning soundscape. The Hercules looms like the Death Star. Hughes may be an ally here, but he’s a shifty, unknowable one, in some contrast to (Coppola’s) Tucker’s aw-shucks family man. This Hughes is an American dreamer shaded by the portent of nightmare.
And then there is Jonathan Demme’s Howard Hughes, the one who meets Melvin.
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Despite being one of the two title characters, Howard Hughes has less than 20 minutes of screen time in Melvin and Howard. He walks out of frame around the 19-minute mark of the movie, never to return again save for a brief flashback at the end. Howard is the first character to appear on screen, and his introduction is key. We meet him riding his motorcycle in the Nevada desert, giddily ramping his bike over mounds in the soil. Was the real Howard Hughes, in this era, prone to a little recreational stunt-biking? Probably not, although there’s a storied history of pilots, particularly WWII-era airmen, turning to motorcycle riding for thrills when they return home. That’s the connection between Hughes’ blockbuster Hell’s Angels (1930) and the former fighter pilots who would go on to form the notorious biker gang of the same name.
This incarnation of the elderly but still-spry Hughes dumps his bike and winds up dazed on the roadside, where he is picked up by a friendly if excessively chatty yokel in a pickup truck. This is Melvin Dummar (Paul Le Mat), alleged future beneficiary of the Mormon Will, although Melvin himself dismisses him when Hughes reveals his identity during the drive. “Well, y’know, listen. I believe anybody can call themselves what they want,” Melvin tells him.
Robards plays Hughes as a grouch with an ornery streak. His hair is a gray-white mane, and he wears a pilot’s leather jacket that has seen better decades. Though he never says it aloud—he reveals very little of himself—Howard is a man who once reached the greatest heights imaginable, both literally and metaphorically, but has lost his zeal. Improbably and almost against his will, Howard finds himself becoming charmed by the indefatigable Melvin, who recounts his latest get-rich-quick scheme: paying a company $70 to write music for the lyrics to a new holiday song he’s concocted called “Santa’s Souped-Up Sleigh.” By the end of the ride through the desert, the sun has risen and Howard has developed a begrudging affinity for Melvin, who even loans the old guy his last 75 cents. They part company, never to meet again.
The bulk of the film takes place after the fateful encounter between the two men and before the revelation of the Mormon Will. It’s a chronicle of Melvin’s blue-collar life as a factory employee turned milk truck driver and his on-again-off-again relationship with his wife Lynda (Mary Steenburgen), with whom he has a pair of kids. Demme has a tremendous facility with female characters, so Lynda is fleshed out far beyond a sidekick wife-and-mother role. The performance won Steenburgen an Academy Award. Despite the title, Lynda is really the co-lead of the movie and eventually comes to realize what Melvin cannot: his grandiose dreams exceed his capacity, and he cannot be saved from his own oblivious optimism.
Melvin belongs in the Glass-Half-Full Hall of Fame alongside Pollyanna and Dr. Pangloss. It’s both his most endearing and frustrating quality, especially if you’re chipping in on the bills for any of the vehicles he has repossessed or the homes he loses. Self-inflicted adversity may roll off of him like water off a duck’s back, but people around him are drowning. It’s tempting to cast Melvin as the avatar of the American everyman, a Horatio Alger character played for slapstick, but Melvin and Howard is a fleet, nuanced character study, not a treatise freighted with metaphor. However, the universality of Melvin’s foibles, not to mention the deeply textured portrayals of both his home and work life, lend the film incredible authenticity. That fidelity to realism highlights the fairy-tale elements of the story, those occasional, extraordinary events that occur even in an ordinary life—like Lynda winning big on the Dummar family’s favorite game show. Or, say, like picking up a hitchhiker in the desert who happens to be the world’s richest man.
One guy certainly was never hesitant to position himself as the personification of an idealized American spirit: Howard Hughes. Melvin refracts that image, then magnifies its flaws. Nothing is ever quite big enough for Melvin or for Howard Hughes, be it (in the latter case) the scope of a blockbuster film or the size of a plane or the number of actresses in his modern-day harem. But that impulse doesn’t lead most Americans to billion-dollar fortunes, it just gets their boats repossessed and their credit scores lowered further. Hughes is his own cautionary tale, but Melvin is the infinitely more relatable one.
The subtext is there for those who wish to partake, but Demme is too much of a humanist to doom his protagonist to be a tragic counterexample in some didactic analysis. Demme is always rooting for the eccentrics and the outsiders. That’s the through-line of his incredible body of work. The inmates of Caged Heat have been cast aside by the law-abiding world. Stop Making Sense’s David Byrne is the unlikeliest of rock stars. In Philadelphia (1993), Andrew Beckett is the straight-laced lawyer alienated because of his sexuality, and ultimately turned into a kind of stranger to his own failing body. In Rachel Getting Married (2008), Kym is the black sheep in her own chaotic family. Clarice Starling is an outsider in the FBI because of her gender, Hannibal Lecter has been physically segregated from humanity for obvious reasons, and they’re both weirdos—oddly lovable weirdos—because they understand one another. Similarly, Melvin is a homespun idealist who can’t quite catch on in a capitalist society, though he never stops trying. And he does have a revelation at the end of the movie. When his lawyer tells him that he’ll likely never see a dime of Hughes’ money, Melvin replies, with little regret, that he always knew that wouldn’t work out. But he’s content because it confirms to him, if only to him alone, that he really did give a ride to Howard Hughes, and that Howard Hughes sang his song. Finally what Melvin has is enough.
Was the Mormon Will really the final testament of Howard Hughes? Several court cases found otherwise, and James R. Phelan and Lewis Chester, authors of The Money: The Battle For Howard Hughes’s Billions certainly don’t think so. Harold Rhoden’s book on the subject, High Stakes: The Gamble for the Howard Hughes Will, claims that reality is far more ambiguous than the final decisions of judges would lead you to believe, but Rhoden also happens to be the lawyer who was arguing for the validity of the will on behalf of Hughes’ longtime associate, Noah Dietrich. It certainly seems bizarre that Hughes would leave huge chunks of money not just to Dummar but also to the Boy Scouts and the Mormon church, although the Mormon connection isn’t quite as tenuous as you might think. One of Hughes’ longtime love interests, Terry Moore, was a self-described devout Mormon. Also, Hughes frequently employed Mormon church members as drivers for his bevy of handpicked beauties because he thought them less likely to make a move on these otherwise isolated women. Hughes was, to put it lightly, a bizarre fellow.
Karina Longworth notes that, “The legal battles over his estate did much to reveal the ‘real’ Hughes—as well as the limits to which it had been possible to ‘know’ Howard Hughes at all.” Those blurred lines between publicity and secrecy, fact and fiction, and brilliance and torment are what make Hughes such an interesting character, one so open to interpretation. And thus it’s notable that Demme’s take on Hughes as a character is so significantly different from all the other portrayals, and that Demme begins with the assumption that the Mormon Will is genuine. That’s the kind of big-hearted optimism Melvin trafficks in, even as the film is colored by streaks of world-weary cynicism that Howard would appreciate.