“The serene classicism of instant legend in Melvin and Howard is not only kind to Melvin Dummar, stand-in for all the game-show prospectors in life hoping for the big strike and unaware that Richard Dawson is kissing their honeys. No, the sweetest thing in Bo Goldman's script and Jonathan Demme's picture is that it is just as tender to the secret dreams of any Howard Hughes. For surely Hughes yearned to become a legend, longed to be the wild-haired reprobate who might be picked up one night off the road between Tonopah and Beatty, and then pay off a small fortune for a quarter stake. Just as we will never quite know whether Melvin was a fraud or a lucky fool, so we cannot tell whether Howard was crazy or a genius. We have to keep faith with all possibilities.
“Here is the true West of today: t.v. and pick-ups, roads and cars, first wives and seconds, filling stations and motels, salesmen and lawyers, Mormons and Milkmen-of-the-Month, actors and real people; no gun-toting violence but the casual, regular fracturing of truth, knowledge and fact. Melvin and Howard is an idyllic ballad of friendship for the famous and the anonymous, made in a benign, amazed spirit of tolerance that is as good and cheerful a testament to the mystical artificiality of the West as Angie Dickinson, the paintings of Ed Ruscha or doing 95 m.p.h. at night on route 95 with the stereo blasting in the car until.... Is that a Joshua tree or an old man out there?” David Thomson