alr

Melvin and Howard

Screening on Film
Directed by Jonathan Demme.
With Paul LeMat, Jason Robards, Mary Steenburgen.
US, 1980, 35mm, color, 95 min.
Print source: HFA

In the spirit of Preston Sturges’s send-ups of American institutions and values, Demme’s finely detailed, quirky comedy recounts the story of a working man (LeMat) who gives a derelict Howard Hughes (brilliantly played by Robards) a lift in the-middle-of-nowhere Nevada. Melvin Dummar is a loser straight out of a country-western lyric, whose wife (Steenburgen) has dumped him and who in Bo Goldman’s Oscar-winning screenplay seems incapable of ever outdistancing the bad luck that hounds him. Then out of the blue (and eight years later), Melvin becomes the heir to Hughes’s "Mormon will" and the cool $156,000,000 that the reclusive multi-millionaire has left him.

Part of film series

Read more

Treasures from the Harvard Film Archive: J–M

Current and upcoming film series

Read more

Música de Câmara. The Cinema of Rita Azevedo Gomes

Read more

From the Harvard Film Archive Collection …

Read more

People and their Virtue. Two Films by Wang Bing

Read more

Trenque Lauquen by Laura Citarella

Read more

I Heard It Through the Grapevine with James Baldwin

Read more

Filmmaker, Guest Worker: Zelimir Zilnik’s Expatriates

Read more

Adachi Masao’s Revolution+1

Read more

Out of the Ashes – The US-ROK Security Alliance & the Emergence of South Korean Cinema

Read more

Songs of Love and Loss. Elvira Notari’s Cinematic Realism