Car Wash

Another of the movies that I had the chance to record during one of the freeview weekends was Car Wash. It's going to be on StarzEncore Black twice tomorrow, at 12:21 PM and again at 11:49 PM.

The scene is an old-style car wash in central Los Angeles in the mid-1970s, when those old full-service car washes were dying out, to be replaced by the automated car wash that you can find today. The business is owned by a white guy, Mr. Barrow (Sully Boyar), but has a mostly black staff on the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder.

Lonnie (Ivan Dixon) is a parolee trying to make a better life for himself, and has what he thinks are good business ideas that the boss just never seems to have time for. Duane (Bill Duke) has become an Islamic radical, taking the name Abdullah and getting pissed every time somebody calls him Duane. There are also a pair of friends who sing covers of popular songs, and are preparing for an upcoming audition; a guy trying to win tickets from a radio contest; and so on.

I mention all this in passing because Car Wash is one of those slice-of-life movies, looking more at a day in the life of the titular car wash than having a fully developed plot, not that there's anything wrong with that. There are other running stories such as TC (Franklin Ajaye) trying to convince the waitress at the café across the street to go on a date with him, or the owner's Marxist son.

In and around all of this, several people get cameos as they have one comedic interlude. George Carlin actually shows up several times as a cabbie whose fair stiffed him; Richard Pryor is a pastor preaching the prosperity gospel who has the Pointer Sisters, still in their 1940s era, with him; and Irwin Corey plays a man who may or may not be the Pop Bottle Bomber. There's also a whole lot of disco music.

It's all pleasant enough if disco music is your thing. There's nothing particularly earth-shattering here although the finale is surprisingly dark; otherwise, it's just a bunch of people having a lot of fun doing what amounts to sketch comedy, bringing in some guest stars along the way, and it mostly works. One other nice thing about the movie is how it serves as a time capsule of a bygone era.

Car Wash might not be for people who hate disco, but other than for them, I think it's well worth a watch. It seems to be out of print on DVD, but Amazon has it on streaming if you don't have the Encore channels.