A brief encounter
Peter Ackroyd
Melvin and Howard ('AA', Gate One and Screen on the Green) The legend of Howard Hughes is a powerful one; it resembles some allegorical painting by Delacroix, in which the aged figure of Despair, his shadow lengthening as he moves out of the picture, leads the People, who are too enwrapped in their own noisy progress to discern whom they are following or where they are going. Here was a man so dazzled by the masquerade of power that he fashioned his own soul into a mask. And that is what you see in the photographs: the soul itself has become an old, varnished thing, the prey of time and decay. Nothing vital remained in him; Hughes had become a shell pitted and marked by old lusts and treacheries. But if this were a painting, we would be compelled to note also the deadness of the eyes and the inconsequence of his posture: Howard Hughes was also a banal figure, like those skeletons in the Dance of Death who do not inspire awe or terror because they move like puppets, mechanically completing their predictable routine.
But Hughes poses a special problem for film-makers — he was a man who participated in, and actively helped to assemble, the Hollywood soft machine, a man who financed, produced and directed his own pictures, a man who knew the power of manipulating images in order to present his own vision of the world. He was a Merlin of the picture palaces, conjuring up images to comfort the great and to appease the populace. For that reason, the most interesting film-makers who try to deal with his legend will have, first of all, to set about exorcising it. Their job is, in a sense, to redeem themselves from his shadow, the shadow of manipulative capitalism, which hangs just as heavily over apparently serious and 'committed' films, such as Ordinary People or Kramer v Kramer, as it does over the Bond epics or Star Wars.
Melvin and Howard makes certain moves in this direction by concentrating upon a 'little guy', Melvin Dumarr; his story is a 'true' one in the sense that everyone wants it to be true. He rescues Howard Hughes from a motor-bike accident and, assuming that this old and somewhat decayed party is a vagrant, gives him a lift to Las Vegas.
Some years later, it transpires that Howard Hughes has left Melvin Dumarr 156 million dollars in his will. This might have been a contemporary version of some parable out of the New Testament, suitably commer cialised for an American audience — doing good might, after all, earn you a fortune. But the affair ran less smoothly than the hope: the will was disputed, and Mr Dumarr has received no money from Hughes's estate. He does, however, make a small appearance in this film, working behind a food counter. His brush with Howard Hughes has, after all, earned him a kind of immortality.
The character of Melvin himself, played here by Paul Le Mat, is in fact one of the most appealing features of this generally appealing film. Chubby-cheeked, affable, with those reckless high spirits which attach themselves to people of a genial and confident disposition. Jason Robards plays Howard Hughes precisely as one would expect him to: pale, straggling beard, the face creased and lined like a piece of silk which has been thrown into a dusty corner. As a result he manages to compel the attention of the cinema audience — with his remoteness, with his visage which resembles that of the Mona Lisa as described by Walter Pater — 'the head upon which "all the ends of the world are come" — and of course with his power, all the more sonorous for being invisible. Mr Robards plays him as a patriarchal figure, a man of infinite suffering and care on behalf of his people. When Melvin Dumarr drops him off by a parking lot in Las Vegas, and he limps in his rags to some remote, glittering penthouse, he is like a god walking in disguise amongst men.
So, in this sense, Melvin and Howard pays homage to Howard Hughes; there is no evil or banality pictured here, only a suffering benevolence. And although this is almost the last we see of Hughes, the film itself becomes a journey across the map of his personality. Other critics have seen it as a whimsical, funny account of American 'red-neck' life but this, it seems to me, misses the point. This is a film about the world which Howard Hughes created.
Las Vegas itself, for example, like some fake jewel glittering in artificial light and therefore Hughes's most appropriate monument, is amply celebrated here — with its tatty entertainments, and its inhabitants wandering lost among the wilderness of fruit machines. Although this is a film about poor people, the poverty here is of a peculiarly brassy kind, with the small houses filled with cheap bric-a-brac, the toys of capitalism, and with, of course, the omnipresent television. Melvin's wife wins 10,000 dollars on a television game show, Easy Street, hosted by Wally 'Mr Love' Williams; the fact that Melvin then squanders the money on a Cadillac and a boat is beside the point. The game show is the populist equivalent of Howard Hughes's own career: the contestants share his ambitions, but they can only fulfil them in an environment — of fake competition and garish stridency — which Howard Hughes himself helped to fashion. In such a culture, the adults are reduced to the level of children with their noses pressed against the screen. The sweetness of Melvin Dumarr and the absurd hysterics of his wife, are in a sense infantile — to be contrasted with the heavily aged and knowing Howard Hughes; their perceptions have been artificially, and some would say deliberately, arrested by those like Hughes who control and placate them.
Now what is curious about this film, and what mitigates its undoubted appeal, is the fact that it tends to accept this infantilist culture at face value. It finds it charming, a source for whimsy and humour, rather than something which exists as a powerful affront to the potential of human beings. Like Melvin Dumarr himself, the film never chooses to go beneath the surface and it possesses the kind of easy humour which glances off such surfaces. Just as the picture of Howard Hughes is absurdly sentimental, so the picture here of urban poverty is a romantic one. Everything is all right really — it tells us — as long as there are good guys like Melvin to add a little human decency and a touch of naive fun to the great game show of life. I found this melancholy, however, rather than inspiring. Melvin and Howard ends with Melvin consoling himself with the fact that, once long ago in a truck bound for Las Vegas, 'Howard Hughes sang Melvin Dumares song'. This is supposed to be touching but It struck me that, in other and more powerful hands, it might have had the authentic note of tragedy — the tragedy of human aspiradons which are laid waste, and the tragedY of a culture which offers nothing except a cloudy image of the riches which a feW people have amassed at the expense of the others, the Dumarrs who inhabit the planet and who will have experienced nothing of it.
Previous page
