Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.5
Audio		3.0
Extras		3.0
Overall		3.5

Car Wash Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Dr. Stephen Larson June 23, 2017

Although Car Wash is technically not a musical, there is a certain musicality to the ensemble's pontifications and the way that the narrative flows. In an extended interview on this Blu-ray, producer Gary Stromberg explains how he tried to use the marketing acumen he acquired through dealing with music clients at his PR firm to sell Car Wash as a quasi-movie musical. One strategy he proposed to Universal was to release the soundtrack double album in advance of the film's premiere. The studio hired Motown's Norman Whitfield to compose the score and R&B group Rose Royce to perform the ballads. This turned out to be a very shrewd move since not only did the soundtrack go on to be an award-winning hit, but so did director Michael Schultz's (Cooley High) second film. According to Stromberg, the production was nowhere near Universal's top priorities (it was made on a shoestring budget of $2 million), but went on to gross $20 million. For a relatively low-profile Blaxploitation work, this was an amazing feat, placing it in the top 100 of the highest grossing US films of all time up to that point.

Stromberg cites Nashville (1975) as a stylistic influence on Car Wash and it's easy to see the Altman imprimatur on screenwriter Joel Schumacher's narrative form. Like Nashville, Car Wash concentrates on the lives of twenty-some characters but instead of a span of five days, it compresses the story into an eight-hour work day. Car Wash comprises a series of interlocking stories involving workers and local residents based at or near the Dee-Luxe Car Wash in Los Angeles. Leon "Mr. B" Barrow (Sully Boyar) is the place's portly owner/manager. He is often at his wit's end to keep up with everything but is an amiable and sympathetic man. His college-age son, Irwin (Richard Brestoff), is a devout Maoist, carrying around the little red book and spouting aphorisms about the plight of the proletariat. Duane - Abdullah (Bill Duke) is a recent convert to Islam who has his own ideas about starting a revolution. Lonnie (Ivan Dixon) is probably the car wash's senior member; he's an ex-con who believes he's learned his lesson and doesn't welcome visits from his parole officer. Lindy (Antonio Fargas) is an unabashed homosexual who flaunts his cross-dressing and isn't afraid to speak his mind. (Schumacher gives him one of the most memorable lines in the film.) A diverting subplot involves a wig-changing hooker named Marleen (played by Lauren Jones, wife of director Schultz) who decides to flee the cab of a loquacious taxi driver (George Carlin) after she determines that she's doesn't have enough to pay her fare. Carlin's character spends the rest of the film in pursuit of her. Another subplot that works well is T.C. (Franklyn Ajaye, sporting a giant Afro) trying to win a radio sweepstakes so he can take luscious waitress Mona (Tracy Reed) out on a date. Mona believes she is above T.C. and it's fun to watch if his ploys can win her over. T.C. dons a T-shirt and has drawings stuck to his locker of a super fly. This is no doubt an intertextual reference to Gordon Parks's Blaxploitation classic, Super Fly (1972). The movie also features appearances by Otis Day, Darrow Igus, Garrett Morris, and The Pointer Sisters (who pose as a variation of themselves as The Wilson Sisters). Richard Pryor shows up midway through as "Daddy" Rich, an evangelist whose the founder/head of the Church of Divine Economic Spirituality. Pryor has been depicted very prominently on DVD editions of Car Wash but fans of the late comedian who haven't seen the film will be disappointed by his screen time as it amounts to only an extended cameo.

A typical scene from CAR WASH.

Not a lot happens in Car Wash but it a has a lot of subtle things to say about both race and gender relations during the seventies. I don't want to divulge too much about its small pleasures for those who haven't encountered it. The movie was very well received by critics and audiences alike. Arthur Murphy of Variety first saw it at a Universal press screening and declared: "[T]he nuttiest auto laundromat ever seen on the screen....this is the second fun film this year to depict a few hours in the lives of people whose activities center around cars. Earlier and throughout this summer, Columbia had Drive-In, a suburban-rural collage of kids and growups flailing around an ozoner." Car Wash was rated PG by the MPAA so it could only go so far with its humor and social commentary. Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times reported that there was one scene that flirts with a violent standoff (which I won't reveal) and when it went in a more favorable (read: anticlimatic) direction, the preview audience with whom Champlin watched it with "burst into cheers and applause." The great film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum saw Car Wash on Christmas, 1976 with a predominantly black audience in downtown Philadelphia. He recounted in Film Comment that spectators responded "at least intermittently in a communal way that suggests mutual recognition-clapping along with the mise-en-scène that's synchronized to the title tune, catching their breath at the editing of the beautifully extended trajectory of the bottle in flight in the silly Mad Bomber episode, and howling with glee when the son of the hysterical matron vomits all over her newly-washed Mercedes. On the other hand, the oblique putdown of the ethics and aesthetics of black capitalism in the Richard Pryor/Daddy Rich sequence, with its subtly integrated photos of JFK and Martin Luther King, causes some restlessness and occasions at least a couple of walkouts."

*Note that while the vinyl album of Car Wash was very popular, the soundtrack has never been released on commercial CD.

Car Wash Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Car Wash arrives on US BD courtesy of Shout Select (#23 in the series) on this MPEG-4 AVC-encoded BD-50. Although not labeled a "Collector's Edition," the film is given pretty deluxe treatment with a solid transfer and two new extras. Shout gives the disc a total bitrate of 41.47 Mbps and video streams on the main feature that average 36000 kbps. The transfer showcases a very bright and sunny Los Angeles in which colors pop out with good detail. The opening main titles (see Screenshot #20) display quite a bit of dirt and smudges on the lens but print flaws diminish after the first reel. Shout didn't perform a new scan but specks only crop up periodically throughout the picture. Occasionally, they are noticeable and I think they could have been eliminated. Grain is more prevalent in the interiors and during the evening scenes. My score is 3.75.

Shout has supplied twelve chapter breaks for the feature.

Car Wash Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Shout encodes the film's original mono track as a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 (1568 kbps, 24-bit). Dialogue, music, and f/x are heavily oriented to the center channel. I received the best amplitude on my Onkyo receiver when I had the sound fields set to either Pro Logic II or Theater Dimensional. Shout does supply optional English SDH for the feature but dialogue was consistently understandable and I didn't feel the necessity to switch it on (but it's great that the label continues to provide subs). I would have preferred that Shout open up the sound track to a DTS-HD MA 4.0 Stereo or even a lossless 5.1 remix to better appreciate the disco tunes.

Car Wash Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Audio Commentary with Director Michael Schultz - a recently recorded (ca. 2015) commentary track with the director of Car Wash that appeared on the Fabulous Films BD in the UK last year. Schultz delivers numerous worthwhile recollections of making the film but the track is negated by several gaps and dead air. In English, not subtitled.

• NEW "Car Wash from Start to Finish" with Producer Gary Stromberg (34:23, 1080p) - a half-hour chat with one of the movie's producers who provides a capsule of Car Wash's production history. In English, not subtitled.

• NEW "Workin' at the Car Wash" with Otis Day (12:14, 1080p) - an interview with the actor who played Lloyd in the film. In English, not subtitled.

• Radio Spots (3:00) - four radio spots that aired during Car Wash's theatrical run.

• Trailer (2:21, upconverted to 1080) - an unrestored full-frame trailer of Car Wash.

Car Wash Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Car Wash is a breezy, tune-filled comedy that should appeal to fans of the Blaxploitation movement as well as the narrative style of Altman. There are a number of actors and comedians in the diverse cast who went on to become more famous so this makes the movie, at minimum, a curiosity worth checking out. Shout has assembled the best overall package on home video that the film has received to date. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.