Jonathan Demme's low-key charmer stands out as September 1980 continues

Plus this year's Best Picture winner enters the conversation

This middle installment of this month’s newsletter is only four titles, but it features two of the biggest titles of the month. Funny how that works out. We’re only going to cover one weekend, and on that weekend, two of the best movies of the year were released. Let’s jump right in!

---

SEPTEMBER 19

Melvin and Howard
Jason Robards, Paul Le Mat, Elizabeth Cheshire, Mary Steenburgen, Chip Taylor, Melvin E. Dummar, Michael J. Pollard, Denise Galik, Gene Borkan, Lesley Margret Burton, Wendy Lee Couch, Marguerite Baierski, Janice King, Deborah Ann Klein, Theodora Thomas, Gloria Grahame, Elise Hudson, Robert Ridgely, Susan Peretz, Robert Wentz, Hal Marshall, Naida Reynolds, Herbie Faye, Charles Napier, Jack Kehoe, Pamela Reed, Sonny Carl Davis, Brendan Kelly, Danny Tucker, Shirley Washington, Cheryl Smith, Jason Ball, Darrell Devlin, Danny Dark, Linda Cardoso, Melissa Prophet, Garrie Kelly, John Thundercloud, Martine Beswick, Charlene Holt, Melissa Williams, Antony Alda, James Lyle Strong, Rick Lenz, Gary Goetzman, John Levin, Kathleen Sullivan, Jack Verbois, Rob Reece, Joseph Ragno, John Glover, Dabney Coleman, Charles Horden, Joseph Walker Jr.
cinematography by Tak Fujimoto
music by Bruce Langhorne
screenplay by Bo Goldman
produced byArt Linson and Don Phillips
directed by Jonathan Demme
Rated R
1 hr 35 mins

Melvin Dummar, a lovable loser, gives a hitchhiker a ride in the desert one night and years later learns it may have been billionaire recluse Howard Hughes.

Howard Hughes looms large over the American myth.

Small wonder so many filmmakers have either made films about him over the years or tried desperately to do so. You could write an entire book about failed attempts at telling some aspect of the Hughes story, and some of our most revered directors would show up in that book. There is some irony in the notion that that one of the best-known films to ever touch on the Hughes story barely features the reclusive billionaire at all, but even here, the idea of Howard Hughes colors everything you watch even when he’s not onscreen.

There’s a reason the film’s title, when properly stylized, is Melvin (and Howard). The film is very much a portrait of Melvin Dummar, and even if you lifted the Howard Hughes stuff out of the movie completely, it would feel like a perfect Jonathan Demme film from the era, focused on people living lives that Hollywood never typically paid any attention. Paul Le Mat didn’t star in enough films, frankly, and he’s great here as Melvin. He can be infuriating at times, endearing at times, and the combination of the two explains the way he and Mary Steenburgen keep colliding with each other for the first half of the film. Melvin’s the kind of guy who is unable to keep a dollar in his pocket, dreaming well beyond his means to a degree that constantly puts his family in an impossible position. Steenburgen plays his first wife, Lynda, and she deserved the Academy Award she won for Supporting Actress. It’s an amazing performance, hilarious and heartbreaking. Steenburgen has this great daffy comic persona here, playing Lynda as sweetly dim with this innocence that makes her strip club scenes charming instead of sleazy. Pamela Reed brings a totally different energy to things as Melvin’s second wife, Bonnie, and you can see why both women were drawn to Melvin just as easily as you can see why they would grow disappointed or frustrated by him. Both actors are great, and they play that eventual resignation once they recognize who Melvin really is and how he’s never going to change as something less than love but close enough.

image courtesy of Universal Pictures

The film opens with a mini-movie, this whole different tone, and it plays out at its own pace. We see someone riding a motorcycle out in the desert, alone at magic hour, and it’s beautiful, idyllic. Even though we’re at a distance, you can feel the power and the freedom as the rider tests the bike, tests his own nerve, then really leans into it. Demme lets us soak in it, the quiet, the solitude, in a way that underlines just how special it is. Then there’s an accident, and we suddenly jump to Melvin driving by himself. He finds this guy in the brush, broken and dazed, when he stops to use the bathroom, and he wrestles him into his truck. What follows feels like a one-act play about these two guys as Melvin drives this crazy-looking wounded mess all the way to Vegas. Jason Robards is fantastic here, and he communicates volumes about what Hughes thinks of Melvin in particular and people in general as the car ride progresses. Le Mat doesn’t let anything Howard says or thinks rattle him, though, and the way he eventually gets Howard to enjoy himself is an act of sheer charisma. When he drops Hughes off, Melvin drives away completely finished with things, content to have done the old guy a very annoying favor.

By the time the name “Howard Hughes” is finally evoked again, Melvin has been through it, and so has everyone who shares any part of his life. Bo Goldman’s script isn’t interested in what happens when Howard Hughes dies and a mysterious will shows up that names Melvin as a recipient of part of the Hughes estate. That happens with less than a half-hour of movie left to go. Instead, he’s interested in the kind of person who is constantly struggling and dreaming and never giving up even when it would make perfect sense to do so. It’s a sweet-hearted film but it also sees the way the American Dream is crushing people like Melvin, the way the pursuit of it makes people crazy. Melvin believed in the game show dream, that wealth and happiness were always just one lucky break away, and he lived that way, like every time he got money in his pocket, he’d just won the lottery. Demme and Goldman don’t try to give you the answer to the mystery of the will. If anything, they way they handle it only complicates things further. Ultimately, Melvin doesn’t seem to care about the money one way or another. What makes him happy is the idea that he got Howard Hughes to sing his Christmas song, and that’s not something any court is ever going to litigate. The film is shaggy, strangely structured, and may frustrate someone looking for a movie where Hughes is front and center. But if you want to see what the mere existence of billionaires does to the social fabric, Melvin (and Howard) does a beautiful job of painting a portrait of one tiny man and the way he’s warped by the gravity of this single encounter.

Mother’s Day
Nancy Hendrickson, Deborah Luce, Tiana Pierce, Frederick Coffin, Michael McCleery, Beatrice Pons, Robert Collins, Peter Fox, Luisa Marsella, Kevin Lowe, Scott Lucas, Ed Battle, Robert Carnegie, Silas Davis, Stanley Kaufman, John Radom, Louie Cogie, Sondra Fortunato, Sheldon Relde, Timmy Leight, John Castellano, Suzy Fried, Steve Sturm, Leilani Gorre, Joe Stanton, Katya, John Fanelli, Josh Smilowitz, Vince Piccalo, Doreen Richardson, Bill Smith, Gwen Van Highland, Lawrence Mayer, Joel Greenberg, Sture Sjöstedt
cinematography by Joseph Mangine
music by Phil Gallo and Clem Vicari Jr.
screenplay by Charles Kaufman and Warren Leight
produced by Charles Kaufman and Michael Kravitz
directed by Charles Kaufman
no rating
1 hr 31 mins

A deranged old woman and her sons torture and kill women at their remote cabin, but two victims who escape come back to extract bloody revenge.

Low budget would be a step up for this skanky little rape-revenge movie.

Part of what I find so unpleasant here is that the film isn’t quite sure who the protagonists are. If the leads are Abbey, Trina and Jackie, three former college roommates who get together for a reunion weekend in the woods, then this is a horror film in which they are attacked and eventually get their revenge. If the leads are Ike and Addley, the developmentally-stunted redneck creeps who abduct, rape and torture Abbey, Trina and Jackie, this is a very different film, and I’m not sure Charles Kaufman figured out the difference. I think the film ultimately tips in the wrong direction and I have a real hard time personally sitting through it because it feels like it empathizes too much with the psycho family.

Like many Troma movies, this has a tangibly unpleasant quality, and my biggest complaint isn’t that it’s hyper-violent (it is) or that it uses rape as a cheap device (it does) or that it plays most of the violence against women for laughs (it does), but rather that it is aggressively incompetent. I may respect a well-made film that I disagree with in every way more than I respect a poorly-made film that has the right “message.” To pin this down to a particular time and place, this was made almost simultaneously with the first Friday the 13th, shooting on the opposite side of the same lake. Many places, including the IMDb, still list the wrong actor as Ike, one of the hillbilly sons, but it’s not their fault. Both of the sons performed under stage names. The film was released unrated, and it’s easy to see why the MPAA would have had trouble passing this as an R. It’s unrelenting. It’s too dumb to be upsetting, though, and even by Troma standards, Charles Kaufman has an almost unbearable filmography.

Ordinary People
Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore, Judd Hirsch, Timothy Hutton, M. Emmet Walsh, Elizabeth McGovern, Dinah Manoff, Fredric Lehne, James Sikking, Basil Hoffman, Quinn K. Redeker, Mariclare Costello, Meg Mundy, Elizabeth Hubbard, Adam Baldwin, Richard Whiting, Scott Doebler, Carl DiTomasso, Tim Clarke, Ken Dishner, Lisa Smyth, Ann Eggert, Randall Robbins, Cynthia Baker, John Stimpson, Liz Kinney, Steven Hirsch, Rudy Hornish, Clarissa Downey, Cynthia Burke, Jane Alderman, Paul Preston, Gustave Lachenauer, Marilyn Rockafellow, Don Billett, Ronald Solomon, Virginia Long, Paula Segal, Estelle Meyers, Stuart Shiff, Rose Wool, Douglas Kinney, Constance Addington, Edwin Bederman, Bobby Coyne, Michael Creadon
cinematography by John Bailey
screenplay by Alvin Sargent
based on the novel by Judith Guest
produced by Ronald L. Schwary
directed by Robert Redford
Rated R
2 hrs 4 mins

A family struggles to stay together after their oldest son dies and their younger son tries to kill himself.

Ordinary People is a different film every time I’ve seen it, and the decade between each of those viewings has something to do with that. I saw the film when it came out, when I was ten years old, and at that point, even Conrad (Timothy Hutton) seemed like a grown-up to me. When I saw the film around the age of 20, I felt like I understood Conrad’s perspective. The next time, I felt much more in tune with Judd Hirsch’s Dr. Berger, looking at this broken family from the outside. But the last couple of viewings finally brought Beth and Calvin Jarrett (Mary Tyler Moore and Donald Sutherland) into sharp focus for me, and it feels like I’ve seen this story from every point of view now, and in doing so, the simple greatness of Alvin Sargent’s adaptation of Judith Guest’s novel becomes so apparent.

One of the smartest things Robert Redford did as a director was hire Mary Tyler Moore to play the grieving mother who does her best to simply will her family’s problems away. It was a canny reaction to her long-established reputation as America’s sweetheart. She struggled after The Dick Van Dyke Show went off the air, already feeling boxed in by people’s expectations of what she could or couldn’t do, and her long run on The Mary Tyler Moore Show only reinforced those feelings. While I don’t think she ever had a role quite as raw as Ordinary People again, she earned that Oscar nomination here and more than proved that given the right material, she was capable of anything. Beth is brittle, unable to find a way to give Conrad or Calvin what they need once they lose Buck, their oldest son, and Moore does an amazing job of never cheating, never giving you that moment that lets you know Beth is actually just fine. Even when she sees her family slipping away, she can’t change. She’s too afraid of what would happen if she ever relinquished even the slightest bit of control over that facade.

Timothy Hutton was handed the rest of his career with this role, and he’s very good as Conrad. I think a lot of young actors could have made a reputation given the same role. It’s a showcase designed to make a young actor look good. The performances I think are really sensational here are by Hirsch and Sutherland, who both support Hutton in remarkable ways. The way Sutherland plays Calvin’s gradual realization that he may have to choose his son over his wife is piercing, and the final scenes between Sutherland and Moore are some of the best work he’s ever done. I also think Elizabeth McGovern and Dinah Manoff are terrific as young women who play important roles in Conrad’s life, one of them representing his future, one of them his recent past. Ultimately, I love that film doesn’t offer any easy band-aid to grief, but instead paints an honest portrait of the way it twists us and the way it can destroy a fragile family if the right piece is the one that goes missing. Bonus points for the best use ever of Pachelbel’s Canon in D.

Without Warning
Jack Palance, Martin Landau, Tarah Nutter, Christopher S. Nelson, Cameron Mitchell, Neville Brand, Sue Ane Langdon, Ralph Meeker, Larry Storch, Lynn Theel, David Caruso, Mark Ness, Bert Davis, Jeffrey Sudzin, Darby Hinton, Kevin Peter Hall
cinematography by Dean Cundey
music by Dan Wyman
screenplay by Lyn Freeman & Daniel Grodnik & Bennett Tramer & Steve Mathis
produced by Greydon Clark and Lyn Freeman and Daniel Grodnik
directed by Greydon Clark
Rated R
1 hr 29 mins

An extraterrestrial hunts humans for sport until a disturbed veteran and a truck stop owner team up to stop it.

This film was shot by the cinematographer of Halloween, stars the guy who played the alien in Predator as an actual alien predator, and features scenery-chewing turns by a pair of beloved character actors, but it is far less than the sum of those parts.

This is Greydon Clark’s second movie of the year and, like his earlier film The Return, it’s a science-fiction film set in and around a very small town. This may be even less ambitious than the earlier film, and it leans more towards horror than science-fiction, although I wouldn’t call this “scary” by any measure. It doesn’t help that the film’s primary villain really doesn’t show up until the last few minutes. There’s some good make-up by Greg Cannom, but there’s also a whole lot of these nasty little hairy frisbees with teeth that aren’t very good, and some very silly gore.

One of the ways you know it’s a Greydon Clark film is that there’s absolutely no sense of pace or rhythm to it. The film just lurches along from scene to scene. Sometimes, you’ve got Larry Storch and a bunch of Cub Scouts getting attacked by the hairy tooth frisbees. Sometimes, you’ve got horny teenagers on a hike. Sometimes you’ve got Martin Landau playing crazy. Even Dean Cundey behind the camera can’t make anything out of this mess, and aside from the very cool poster Filmways put together, there’s nothing memorable here. I’ve seen people try to make the case that this was an “inspiration” for Predator because Kevin Peter Hall plays both aliens and they both hunt humans, but that’s like saying The Exorcist was the inspiration for The Devil and Max Devlin because they’re both about the Devil. This thing wishes it had one-twentieth the energy or invention of that film instead of just hairy teeth frisbees, but sometimes, you work with what you’ve got.

---

Okay. Three days from now, we’ve got one more jumbo-sized edition of the newsletter. It’s all from the final weekend of the month, and you’re going to get the weirdest Oscar player of the year, Marty Feldman’s directorial debut, a Woody Allen film (but not one of the early, funny ones), some more punk rock and one of the sneakiest charmers we’ve covered so far. You don’t want to miss any of that, and since today’s newsletter was free, some of you might not be subscribed.

Do it now so you don’t miss the conclusion of September 1980!