Putney Swope (Robert Downey, 1969) (Patreon)

BY REQUEST: Robert Davis

"Where have you been?"

"Laying back in the cut."

Ah yes, what to do about Putney Swope? It has a fairly sturdy premise but then Downey fills it in with a "Laugh-In" sketch comedy approach that pretty much jettisons any editorial impulse. He throws anything and everything at the wall, and while some of it sticks, a lot of it is just juvenile and calculatedly transgressive in a manner that probably sparked the imagination of Trey and Matt way back when. Downey's use of montage and sudden bursts of color (the commercials themselves) both display a sensibility that's very much in keeping with the late-60s avant-garde -- especially Robert Nelson, but with occasional splashes of Kuchar and even Conner -- and this anarchic style keeps Putney Swope watchable.

And yet, apart from the infamous zit cream ad, I never found it especially funny. Inasmuch as the film has an overriding concept -- there's not really much of a story per se -- it's a fairly obvious one. Swope (Arnold Johnson, whose gruff voice always seems incongruous with his facial expressions) is the one Black man on the board of an ad agency, and when he is unexpectedly elected chairman of the board, he creates the Truth and Soul company, intending to foment a capitalist revolution. Alas, change is not possible from the inside, and Swope ends up replicating the power structures he opposed, only with superficial racial shift.

So Putney fires most of his co-workers and then steals their ideas. He betrays his agency's one firm moral stance -- no ads for cigarettes, alcohol, or war toys -- and then acts like this betrayal was a way to test the integrity of his staff. In other words, Putney is a "jive ass" and a "cop-out," but the film can't really be bothered to examine this problem or the overall institutional straitjacket that would produce a faux-revolutionary like Swope. It's not that Downey doesn't care; there is a generalized, undisciplined anger that pervades this film. But the director operates as if we would see through Putney Swope if he ever slowed down to give as a good look at what it's doing. As such, it often feels like intellectual three-card monte.

Maybe a feature film wasn't the best way for Downey to explore these ideas? It's not just that it's meaningful only in fits and starts. Some of his stabs at outrageousness don't pass muster even for 1969. Is it really supposed to be funny that the president and first lady (Pepi and Ruth Hermine) are both little-people from the circus? Or that they are controlled by a Reichsprechen German (Lawrence Wolf) who jokes, "it's cold in here! Throw another Jew on the fire"? I know I sound like a stick-in-the-mud, although I care less and less about that as I get older. But Putney Swope's primary aesthetic mode is "all over the place," and that can get you just so far. Given that by all accounts Swope is Downey's most fully realized film, he just may not be the filmmaker for me.