Critical Reception
In his review in the New York Times, Vincent Canby called the film a "sharp, engaging, very funny, anxious comedy" and commented, "Mr. Demme is a lyrical film maker for whom there is purpose in style . . . Melvin and Howard is commercial American movie-making of a most expansive, entertaining kind."
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times described it as "wonderful" and added, "This is a slice of American life. It shows the flip side of Gary Gilmore's Utah. It is a world of mobile homes, Pop Tarts, dust, kids and dreams of glory. It's pretty clear how this movie got made. Hollywood started with the notion that the story of the mysterious Hughes will might make a good courtroom thriller. Well, maybe it would have. But my hunch is that when they met Dummar, they had the good sense to realize that they could get a better – and certainly a funnier – story out of what happened to him between the day he met Hughes and the day the will was discovered. Dummar is the kind of guy who thinks they oughta make a movie out of his life. This time, he was right."
Variety said, "Jonathan Demme's tour-de-force direction, the imaginative screenplay and top-drawer performances from a huge cast fuse in an unusual, original creation."
Pauline Kael gave the film a very positive review in The New Yorker : "Jonathan Demme's lyrical comedy Melvin and Howard which opened the New York Film Festival on September 26, is an almost flawless act of sympathetic imagination. I doubt if Jason Robards has ever been greater than he is here. Mary Steenburgen's Lynda Dummer has a soft mouth and a tantalizing slender wiggliness, and she talks directly to whomever she's talking to – when she listens, she's the kind of woman a man wants to tell more to. Demme shows perhaps a finer understanding of lower-middle-class life than any other American director."
In one episode of SCTV, the film was parodied with Rick Moranis as Melvin and Joe Flaherty as Howard Hughes. Along the way they meet and pick up Howard Cosell (Eugene Levy), Congressman Howard Baker (Dave Thomas), and Curly Howard (John Candy). At the end of the sketch the film is called "Melvin and Howards".
Melvin and Howard currently holds a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
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