Melvin and Howard

Jonathan Demme's breakthrough movie featured the shaggy energy and affection for marginal American eccentrics that marked his earlier Citizens Band (1977) and such later films as Something Wild (1986) and Married to the Mob (1988). Melvin Dummar (Paul LeMat) is a barely-getting-by Nevada milkman. ...more

One critic called Jonathan Demme's wistful, strange comedy "an almost flawless act of sympathetic imagination" and compared it to Jean Renoir directing a script by Preston Sturges. Actually, it was the fertile imagination of screenwriter Bo Goldman that concocted the story of Melvin Dummar (Paul LeMat), a Nevada milkman who picks up reclusive billionaire hitchhiker Howard Hughes (Jason Robards Jr.). According to this woolly tale, Dummar later inherits $150 million when Hughes dies. Goldman and ...more