Dull Finish

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

CAR WASH

Directed by MICHAEL SCHULTZ

Screenplay by JOEL SCHUMACHER

There is, occasionally, a certain funky charm about Car Wash. One wishes that somebody had really thought about the thing and shaped it into what it might have been--a genuinely affecting, amusing slice of lower-depths urban life. Instead, the picture tries to get by on an unassuming, throw-away air--and ends up as an inoffensive disappointment.

The movie purports to do nothing more than record a day in the life of the title institution, from a few minutes before opening to just after closing. The owner is a white man, hard-pressed by automated competition and a radical son who tries to talk revolutionary politics to the befuddlement of most of the black employees and to the great contempt of the one among them who is politically committed. A few incidents occur to liven things up as the cars roll through the soap and spray: a hooker stiffs a cab driver for his fare and hides out in the ladies' room; a black evangelist (Richard Pryor) and his entourage splashily tool up to get a bird dropping removed from his customized limo; one of the polishers wins a prize on a radio contest and gets a date with a waitress he has been lusting over; the radical attempts to liberate the contents of the cash register. In short, there is a tad more excitement crammed into this eight-hour period than one might expect, but not so much as to strain credulity.

The trouble is that no incident achieves its full measure of comedy or melodrama, just as none of the characters hanging about the car wash are given sharp definition. A film that might have been an interesting curiosity, some thing quite novel on today's movie scene, turns out to be much less engaging in execution than it is as an idea. Car Wash does suggest, though, that there are unsuspected film possibilities in observing closely the daily lives of ordinary black people. Despite the movie's devitalizing casualness, it is a relief to see urban blacks neither as superstuds nor as sociological case studies. One only wishes that Car Wash fully lived up to its good intentions.

Richard Schickel

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