Little Melvin Dummar's first words were probably “Let's Make a Deal,” whispered smilingly to his Maker before dropping off to sleep. Television's game shows were made for this kind of buy-now, pay-later American, not a conniver but (as portrayed by Paul Le Mat) a seraphic true-believer who begrudges no one else's winnings, and waits patiently for his own. In the meantime Melvin Dummar swims gracefully through a sea of debts and disappointments, past the loan sharks and repo-men. Melvin and Howard succeeds where all other films fail in picturing television as it is woven into the fabric of an American life (Being There is clumsy by comparison). Melvin does put his wife, lovely Linda Dummar of Anaheim, California (Mary Steenburgen) on television's “Gateway to Easy Street,” where “love is what it's all about” but the proximity to cash makes her jump up and down and speak in tongues. Still, we're talking here not about TV per se, but about the spirit that TV plugs into: the idea that between Milkman of the Month and millionaire Mormon there is only the winning spin, the charmed moment. When old Howard Hughes reached out his bony finger and touched Melvin Dummar, nobody believed it. But Jonathan Demme, like a latter-day Michelangelo, has captured the myth for posterity. (JB)