24 hours in a Los Angeles car wash by hand, owned by Leon Barrow: his son Irwin quotes Mao Zedong and wants to work with the ordinary employees, out of solidarity with the working class... a woman brings her car for cleaning after her son threw up... an African American prostitute with a blond wigg escapes from a cab during a traffic jam without paying, so the taxi driver is after her... Lonnie, an ex-convict father of two and an employee of the car wash, is trying to persuade boss Barrow to reorganize the business to make more money... T.C., an employee with huge hair, wins in a radio call-in contest and gets two tickets for a rock concert... Marsha, the receptionist, gets a date at 6:00 by a customer... Abdullah is fired by Barrow for being absent several days at work. Abdullah wants to take revenge by robbing the cash desk that evening, but Lonnie talks him out of it. In the evening, it’s the end of the shift and every employee goes back home.
A semi-cult film from the 70s, written by future director Joel Schumacher, “Car Wash” is a peculiar anthology comedy overburdened by too many supporting characters, dated by the archaic Jive slang, and lost in the episodic-chaotic story, but it does get better the longer you stick to watching it, until it becomes surprisingly good in the last third. The jokes are a hit-or-miss affair, and a fair share of them are juvenile or lame: for instance, employee Chuco wants to take revenge on Goody, so he borrows Goody’s hat with pig ears on them, puts it over his entire face, and then climbs over the toilet wall to scare a woman urinating on the toilet bowl. Later, Chuco returns the pig hat to Goody, and naturally, the woman pours a bucket of water over Goody, thinking he mocked her a minute ago. George Carlin is wasted as the taxi driver who just searches for a woman who didn’t pay her cab fee. However, some jokes are way better, including a two minute guest appearance 33 minutes into the film by comedian Richard Pryor, who plays an evangelist preaching the “Church of Divine Economic Spirituality” where he is basically showing off for getting paid to do nothing (“Believe in the Lord! And believe in yourself! And most of all believe in federal green!”). In another memorable moment, after Abdullah mocked and belittled him, gay man Lindy gives a perfect response: “Honey, I’m more man than you’ll ever be, and more woman than you’ll ever get!” Some moments of humanity lift the movie up (Lonnie patiently listening to his little daughter showing her kids’ drawing of him in the car wash) and just like Joyce’s “Ulysses” confines the entire story to only 24 hours in the lives of these characters, thereby forcing the viewers to infer everything else about their lives and future based on just this sample they witnessed. Similarly like “M*A*S*H”, “Car Wash” shows its characters joking in order to forget all the problems around their lives, and their escapism has a certain charm, if one is willing to go along with them.
Grade:++
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