Putney Swope

I heard about this movie when it came out but never got to see it. It must have played on the weekend I was busy. It finally was released to DVD and I bought a copy.

There is no way to rate this film. I have no way of predicting how anyone will respond to it: love, hate, detest, indifferent. Should you watch this movie your response will be somewhere in there.

I would have to say that it is a film for its time. A great deal of what it was satirizing at the time has changed so much that it no longer has any relevance in that sense. I remember at that time one of the demands of young movie goers was that films, indeed everything involving the culture, should be relevant. That was the 'buzz word.' This film was relevant alright, but almost forty years later I have to ask, "relevant to what?" I'm glad I finally got to see it. This film is touted as a comedy. I didn't laugh once while viewing it, though I did appreciate the acerbic wit. Some of it I found downright crude, though I'm sure that was intentional.

I will wait awhile and view it again some time. I have a feeling that I will get different things from it. I may even laugh at the stuff that's intended to be funny.

Would you enjoy this film? I don't know. Should you watch it? Oh yes, you should.

Mad-magazine style put down of various late 60s US institutions, companies, groups and the advertising business in particular. It starts well in a board room meeting where the new chairman is chosen - a black guy with the title for a name. But the whole black jive stuff that follows is less sharp, and much of the humour was over or under my head. I liked certain Catch 22 moments, like the black boss telling the white guy he can't get a raise to equal his black colleagues' pay because then they will want a raise too. 'I didn't think of that', says the white guy. 'That's why we don't pay you as much. You don't think'. The repetition of certain lines and the repeated appearances of certain characters works on occasion too - like a photographer called Mark Focus who keeps failing to get work, or a pervert who abuses a 13 year old. 'At least he isn't superstitious'. But overall, despite some funny bits and some interesting b/w photography, my attention frequently wavered - aside from the actual ads, filmed in color, which kept you watching and we're mostly memorable. I'm sure at the time this was offensive to the establishment, but now it seems kind of muted.

I can't say how many times that one line has made me laugh or how often I've described that scene to folks not familiar with this film. I saw it the year it was released, I was 19. I don't think there were a dozen people in that East Village theater that night. For years I thought we were the only ones who saw it. Nice to see here that others found it as hysterical as I had, and see it's lasting value despite the time gone by. Rent it, buy it or steal it.... a must see.

When someone refers to the independent cinema realm in the United States it's often inferred that it means the filmmaker or people behind the project had much more creative freedom and did what they wanted. This, today, is not really always the case unless someone is a solid "auteur" and creative freedom still comes with the caveat that one has to find distribution with one of the independent divisions of major studios or by getting picked up somehow for some kind of low-level deal at a worthwhile film festival. But Putney Swope, Robert Downey Sr's film about a tough-as-nails African-American accidentally promoted to head advertising guru at a production company, *is* independent cinema, the kind of work that went right along with the likes or Romero's Night of the Living Dead and Cassavetes Faces at the same time of getting no real typical studio distribution but causing waves, kicking ass and taking names in the cinema world. For all its moments that are rough and crude, it's unforgettable.

It's also a film that is funny, very and excruciatingly funny. Sometimes the sense of humor is just so ridiculous it's nearly impossible not to laugh, from the mere appearance of the President Mimeo with his wife to lines of dialog from the advertisements Swope's team puts together like "I can't eat an air conditioner" in a real "soul" voice. It is as smart as the audience it is aiming at, which is anyone with two brain cells to put together who can see that this work isn't offensive or *too* shocking because it's meant to rattle the cage, and it does this pretty well in the first five minutes. Once that's past Downey Sr goes on his blitz of sorts as far as being a filmmaker with nothing to lose: his protagonist is part Fidel Castro, part Isaac Hayes circa 1972 (and yes it's 1969 in the film) and part hard-assed ad exec with a firing streak to make Mr. Spacely on the Jetsons look kind. And don't forget those side characters, dear God.

There's so many memorable lines and moments that it's hard to keep track. From maybe the most hilarious botched assassination attempt in any movie to the one ad for "Face-Off" skin cream that includes lines that would give South Park a run for its dirty-mouth money, to just little asides with the one guy from Jack Hill's movies playing the Muslim who keeps giving lip to Swope and that one boy with the the nun who curses up a storm and impresses Swope in a swift stroke. It's a pretty direct message about media and advertising, but there's also a lot of powerful moments where it just hits the nail on the head about racism in America, sometimes without having to do more than a gesture and sometimes with doing something HUGE like having black panther types going this way and that around Swope's advertising regime. And for a low-budget production (I mean super low, hence the comparison to Night of the Living Dead and Faces) Downey got some really good actors, all non-union, and it's hard to imagine that some of them might have had their first time on camera here.

It should be mentioned that Downey's style doesn't make it perfect: it is crude and sometimes too crazy and dated for its own good, and I'm sure I didn't get some of the underlying humor of a couple of the ads since I'm from a full generation after these ads were aired (albeit the "Miss Redneck Jersey" was definitely not lost on me). In general though this is one of the finest of its time period, a satire that stings and a feature with a predominantly black cast that is all too knowing of what comes from an excess of power, regardless of skin color. It is, as someone might say, "good s***."

This movie shows that the free enterprise system and the quest for the almighty buck transcends all racial and ethnic barriers. Ultimately the market place determines the message that is sent to the public. This movie dramatizes that point. A conservative white-collar advertising company is taken over by a group of street-wise African Americans chaired by a no-nonsense black man who wants to make a buck and believes he can sell products by telling the the truth. But the movie shows that no matter how hard he tries to do something different, the market place and the political system demands that he conform, rendering him no different than his predecessors. Interesting, off-beat movie.