Car Wash (1976)

(On TV, February 2020) Instantly dated yet curiously timeless, Car Wash is the kind of comedy that takes you back to a day in mid-1970s Los Angeles to hang out with a bunch of eccentric characters clustered around a… car wash. It’s very literally a day-in-the-life film, as it follows an ensemble cast from morning to evening as they wash cars, play out their own dramas, meet interesting clients, and josh each other like employees in the trenches do. The soundtrack is really good (having an earworm of a theme song certainly helps), and while much of the cast is made of now-unknowns, the exceptions are certainly remarkable: seeing George Carlin, Richard Pryor and the Pointer Sisters in the same film is certainly worth it—and fortunately, this is exactly the kind of film that deserves the video credits it has at the end. Car Wash is not a film of big ideas (although there’s a recurring theme of class solidarity that punctuates it all) but of small moments, and that’s quite meaningful by itself. The sense of ersatz community is very strong here. Part of the reason why the film has aged very well, despite taking up things like a largely black cast and a flamboyant homosexual character, is that it’s written in such a way that everyone comes across in a sympathetic fashion, even if they’re marginalized. (And for all of us Joel Shumacher skeptics, he’s the one responsible for the script.) The sympathy-for-the-underdog thing supports a great atmosphere, good comic gags and moments that are occasionally silly but still meaningful and heartfelt. Car Wash is both a film that could only have come from 1970s Hollywood, and a film that has aged far better than many of its contemporaries. Comedy, respect, meaning—you can always go far with those three elements.