Movie · 1980 · Comedy, Drama · 1h 35m · R · English
Curator score: 6.3/10 (12.9K ratings)
Poor Melvin. All he wanted was to be Milkman of the Month. Instead, he lost his job, his truck, and his wife. Then Howard Hughes left him class="h-100"56,000,000.
Overview
The story of hard-luck Melvin Dummar, who claimed to have received a will naming him an heir to the fortune of Howard Hughes. Inspired by real events.
Ratings
Curator score: 6.3/10
IMDb: 6.8/10
Letterboxd: 3.65/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 91%
TMDB: 6.5/10
Director
Jonathan Demme
Production
Universal Pictures
Cast
Paul Le Mat, Mary Steenburgen, Jason Robards, Elizabeth Cheshire, 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
Curator Review
Verdict
A warm, offbeat American dramedy that turns a bizarre true story into something humane, funny, and quietly melancholy. It’s especially rewarding if you like character-driven 70s-to-80s transition cinema, loose naturalism, and films that find poetry in ordinary lives and improbable luck.
Best for
fans of humane character studies
viewers who like quirky true-story dramedies
admirers of 1970s American naturalism
people drawn to understated, lived-in performances
fans of Jonathan Demme or early indie-adjacent studio films
Skip if
you want a tightly plotted biographical drama
you dislike meandering, episodic storytelling
you prefer high-energy comedy or big emotional payoffs
you need a clear moral or narrative endpoint
Overview
Melvin and Howard is one of those films that feels both modest and strangely expansive. Jonathan Demme treats a ridiculous, very American tale with complete sincerity, letting the comedy emerge from behavior, circumstance, and the stubborn randomness of life rather than from punchlines. The result is warm without being sentimental, and observant without ever feeling condescending.
Worth noting
What lingers most is the film’s sense of texture: working-class routines, roadside encounters, strip-club glamour, media spectacle, and the odd dignity of people trying to keep moving. Paul Le Mat plays Melvin as a drifter whose luck is always just out of reach, while Mary Steenburgen gives the movie its spark and emotional center.
Bottom line
It’s not a film built for big twists or conventional catharsis. Its pleasure is in the accumulation of small moments and the way Demme finds grace in chaos. If you respond to American indie realism with a slightly fable-like glow, this is a very easy recommendation.
Top Letterboxd reviews
Filipe Furtado (4.5★) · 159 likes
A man is set up to dream, to keep moving, looking for something until satisfaction just arrives in the simplest of ways. From Melvin and Howard nocturnal meeting on, Jonathan Demme keeps a visual style that is never artificial but is also embbed of a film fable quality. Warm and funny and never condescending to its characters. Much more than other major American auteur films of 1980, Melvin and Howard does feels like a true end point for 70’s American cinema.
theriverjordan (3.5★) · 132 likes
“Melvin and Howard” tap dances with fleet-footed delight to the relentless tune of the never-ending hustle.
Director Jonathan Demme put Mary Steenburgen in a tulle stripper outfit, piped in The Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction,” and somehow charmed the pants - not off Steenburgen - but instead, off every critic in America.
Demme’s work, about a gameshow-born boom (and bust) of a showgirl and her milkman husband, won just about every indie award around around on its release. While its narrative is… more
Josh Gillam (2.5★) · 104 likes
When down-on-his-luck blue collar worker Melvin Dummar (Paul le Mat) saves an injured man (Jason Robards) claiming to be Howard Hughes from the desert, he doesn’t think much of it, but a media circus a decade later ensues that puts his life in the spotlight, in Jonathan Demme’s comedy-drama co-starring Mary Steenburgen, Pamela Reed, Michael J Pollard and Dabney Coleman.
It’s a charming film, looking at an eternal dreamer with a lot of ambitions, if not the follow-through to actually… more
Chris Cabin (5★) · 95 likes
One thing that always sticks out to me about Demme is how unburdened his films feel. Any other director makes a film like this and you feel the gears turning the entire time, attempting to logically explain the actions of the characters and the turns of the plot so everyone understands. Demme never did that and the result is that his films feel completely untamed and without a pre-set narrative destination, both in how they are shot, paced, and scripted. Someone needs to put this out on Blu-ray as soon as is humanly possible.
Sophy (5★) · 83 likes
For some people, no matter how good things get, things just don't get better.