Are you for surreal? Putney Swope and the passing of Robert Downey, Sr.

With the recent passing of Tony Stark’s father, I thought a lot of how Downey, Sr.’s genre of guerrilla filmmaking is pretty much gone. There was a time when agitprop films would sprout like mushrooms and while many were pretty ham-fisted and outright bad, you couldn’t say that about Downey’. 

He will be known (and rightly so) for “Putney Swope” and “Greaser’s Palace”, but he kept a steady stream of sometimes on-the-nose, often off-kilter works that I hope will re-enter the public consciousness in his wake.

When I read his son’s memorial tweet, I had to concur: Downey was a true “maverick”. I don’t know that he ever sold out and if the two films mentioned here remain his best known works, then I have to argue that he never did.

I also thought about who his immediate descendants, cinematically, are. And oddly, no one comes to mind right away. Those that do are incredibly seriously minded and the only one of his younger contemporaries that had a similar approach to filming a barrage of sequences and watch what sticks would be, well, John Waters. 

Admittedly, Waters is a provocateur with a slightly agenda and where his approach became more refined and tailored for a broader audience, you couldn’t say the same for Downey. 

In his honor, I watched “Putney Swope” right away. It’s a glorious work of “sticking it to the man” and for the most part, a solid deconstruction of marketing, consumerism, race relations, and political motivations. At the time, it was considered one of the most offensive movies ever released and you can see why, if you grew up during the period. It might still be considered offensive for a couple of different reasons now.

One reason is that you do have a white filmmaker writing dialog for a predominantly African-American cast, but the dialog is honest and the movie is pointing up to the co-opting of Black people by a capitalist system; our hero Putney (Arnold Johnson, “Hutch” from Sanford and Sons) becomes absorbed and corrupted by the very industry he was attempting to change. 

The first half-hour is remarkably tight but the film does start to sag around the second act as Downey attempts to show the centrality of advertising in American society and politics. Putney undergoes a transformation from a righteous reformer who’s fired almost the entire board of the firm that elected him as chairman to yet one more co-opted cog in the machine (the President of the United States himself does much of the work…and no, it’s not Richard Nixon in the flick; his stand-in is President Mimeo - and yes, I love that name - a little person with ravenous appetite.) Quick! Name another movie with a three-way between two midgets and a photographer! 

In any case, the movie “Putney Swope” and its namesake character does get kind of bogged down or waylaid by trying too hard. The saving grace is that it’s a beautifully shot film; it’s also telling that while the narrative sequences are in rich black and white, the advertisements that comprise the Truth and Soul, Inc. firm’s productions are all in color and the movie is worth watching just for them. What’s more real? The fabricated dreams of an advertising firm or daily life?

The upshot is that too many people are staying home just to watch the ads and no one is out actually buying anything! President Mimeo steps in to get Putney to see things his way; this is a matter of national security! Of course, Putney’s original mandate was that the firm would no longer create ads selling booze, cigarettes, or toy guns.  

Idea Man: Putney! I've been supervising the war toy account for 12 years. And let me tell you something: deny a young boy the right to have a toy gun, and you'll suppress his destructive urges. And he'll turn out to be a homosexual. Or worse.

Eventually, Swope craters to the forces of the market. He tells his board that they’ll have it both ways; his peeps stand by him and go along with whatever he wants and he decides to dissolve the firm. He tells the men guarding the cash assets for Truth and Soul, Inc. (literally, cash, in a ten foot tall cube of bills and sacks of money) to give him his cut and then divide the rest equally among the rest of the company. Except the Arab.

The Arab was one of the weak spots in the story, for me. He seemed to provide comic relief, praying to Allah and more mercenary things, but overall, the shtick wore thin. In any case, The Arab shows up demanding his cut, is denied, asks for a light, and sets the column of money aflame. End film.

It’s a giddy ride to get to that point and there are ample high-jinx along the way. And honestly, even in its weakest moments, there is an anarchic spirit that in many ways is equal to the Marx Brothers in “Duck Soup”. 

It isn’t an angry film, by any stretch. It’s a funny evisceration of how the opiate of the masses in a consumer society is advertising. Make something alluring enough, and consumption will drive a nation. 

Interestingly, Swope authorizes and makes an ad for the Bauman-6, a “death trap” of a sports coup and one can’t help but sense a direct hit at Detroit at the time. Downey remains fairly clear-eyed in his targets and even if his attention wanders or the narrative strays down some pointless lanes and pathways, it remains the closest analog by an American filmmaker to similar films by Godard. There’s a shared anarchy here in attempting to deal in the immediacy with the elements of living in a capitalist society and it shows in the cinematography and the pastiche of boardroom drama, blacksploitation, office place comedy, and more. 

When asked about the thematic aspects of the film, Downey said he just wanted to have fun. 

There is also the backstory of the film wherein Downey didn’t want to hire SAG actors (he could pay them scale) and since the film was cast for 200 or more Black actors and SAG didn’t even have that many in membership, the union was found to be exclusionary and any punitive measures levied toward Downey ceased. As it was, if I recall correctly, those actors who were SAG (like Alan Arbus, and I assume Mel Brooks and some others) were compensated later once the movie made back its investment. The balance of scale wages was paid out in addition to whatever the actors were paid by Downey at the time.

There is also the well-known tale that Downey had to read Arnold Johnson’s lines over in post because Johnson couldn’t remember them. What’s kind of fantastic about that is that a) Johnson turns in a pretty badass performance - admittedly, it’s not much, but he comports himself with a near Richard Roundtree swagger that generally works for the film and b) Downey started a family tradition: almost forty years later, his son would play and Australian actor playing a Black actor in “Tropic Thunder”. This might well be the other major cultural offense for contemporary audiences; “black voice” as opposed to “black face”.

Downey did set out to make a film that would offend just about everyone. However, I believe his larger point is that we should all be offended by the powers that seek to exploit us at every level, reducing us to mere consumers to feed the capitalist dream of “more” and that systemically pits us against one another on the societal level. Much of this critique lands and if not all of it is successful, it is more so than many later filmmakers who came after Downey were capable of. 

Again, there aren’t many directors in the mainstream who come to mind who would be comparable to RDS. I suppose Oliver Stone in “Natural Born Killers” might be an example of someone who takes a broad approach to the inherent nonsense of validating celebrity culture in the extreme is one example. Maybe Michael Moore? Moore is a more disciplined filmmaker than Stone, but both have used a kind of let’s try this and see what happens approach. 

To be sure, it is unfair to assume that Downey took that approach. Much of what appears to be improvised is scripted but the spirit of the script remains anarchic. 

I hope that at some point Downey pere receives wider acclaim. He was very much one of the bad boys of underground cinema when I was coming up and “Putney Swope” became a modern classic of the repertory and midnight movie circuits. 

There was a kind of flying by the seat of the pants in a lot of comedy in the late sixties and early seventies that we don’t see much of these days. It often plays as dated and as I alluded to above, trying too hard to be “wild and crazy” to a fault.

However, part of the charm of movies like this is that very quality. RDS certainly could be a tighter filmmaker; his craftsmanship is not in question, by a long shot.

By the time I was old enough to see “Putney Swope”, enough years had passed that even by the mid-seventies, there was a quality of an earlier time attached to it. But good satire is still good satire. And if nothing else, for much of this film, regardless of how it might sag in the second and third acts, this is good satire.

R.I.P. Robert Downey, Sr. (a prince)