Seen in retrospect, there doesn't seem to be much to recommend Michael Schultz's flimsy mosaic comedy about a Friday at the Deee Luxe Car Wash in Los Angeles, a huge box-office hit of its time with a virtually all-black cast soundtracked by Norman Whitfield's groovy disco score. In fact, though, "Car Wash" paints a peculiarly disenchanted portrait of race relations in America in the mid-seventies: although there's no racism invoked throughout, the car wash is owned by Jewish entrepreneur Sully Boyar but almost entirely staffed by ethnic minorities (the exceptions are Texan pump attendant Jack Kehoe and suburban receptionist Melanie Mayron), and the mostly black staffers comprise nearly every single stock black character of American movies - the aspiring soul singers (Darrow Igus and DeWayne Jessie), the gay (Antonio Fargas), the ex-con (Ivan Dixon), the radical Muslim (Bill Duke), the clumsly loverboy (Franklyn Ajaye), the aged shoeshine (Clarence Muse). Unlike most other movies, though, the great ensemble cast manages to turn these stock characters into living, breathing people, with pride, dignity and joy, within the very limited frame. And Joel Schumacher's (yes, that Joel Schumacher) script actually avoids some of the race pitfalls - the drop-out bong smoker of the lot is the white owner's son (a hilarious Richard Brestoff), given to quote from Mao's Little Red Book at every instance but totally unaware of the actual significance of the theories, and the "villains" of the piece are black people: the policeman that "checks" on ex-con Dixon, the televangelist of the "Church of Divine Economics" (Richard Pryor) that gets rich off the oh so many gullible brothers. As a motion picture, it's only slightly above TV movie level (as most of Universal's mid-seventies B-level pictures, mostly made by directors trained on TV, were); but as a sociological document of an era in American society, it's flawless.
