Films of Robert Downey Sr.

The bright, masterful, formerly drug-taking, always delightful actor Robert Downey Jr. didn’t need to fall far from his paternal tree. Robert Downey Sr. was a brilliant, irreverent, drug-experiencing, free-spirited, creative observer of the American cultural landscape of the 1960s and early 70s. He wrote and directed a number of short and feature narrative films which prove his talents. The Alamo Drafthouse and Austin Film Society are now going to present four of those criminally neglected films in April.

The first Downey film I ever saw was CHAFED ELBOWS. It was 1966 and this movie with the somehow-salacious title was playing at Batts Auditorium on the UT Austin campus, a place my friends and I saw films (“foreign” and “underground”) at least once a week. Raquel, a friend at the time, and I sat down in those uncomfortable wooden seats and watched the film unwind. The first scene I remember 45 years later is a man in bed with a woman, interrupted by a knock at the door. When he referred to the woman as “mother” and dropped her out the window to escape detection, I think we yelled – with delight – at the irreverence and smuttiness of this filmmaker. Even with the 60s in full swing, even in Austin, we could still be shocked. Now that I read J. Hoberman’s 2008 review, I am thinking maybe the mother was knocking at the door and interrupting her son’s sexual tryst with some other woman: “Blithely transgressive, Chafed Elbows is an episodic Candide story in which a bland young slacker [that was not a word used outside of military circles in the 60s] wanders through Manhattan mixing it up with downtown artists, midtown cops, and uptown sock-sniffers. It ends happily when he marries his mother, moves to Queens, and goes on welfare.” Bedding his mother, marrying his mother, whatever. There was still something shocking about the principal male character doing anything with his mother in the 1960s. The Alamo will present this barely feature-length, mainly black & white comedy along with NO MORE EXCUSES, apparently a pastiche of four of Downey’s pre-CHAFED shorts, which, according to J. Hoberman, cobble together scenes of a Civil War soldier in 60s Manhattan, an advocate for animal couture, President Garfield’s assassination re-enactment, soft-core sex, and singles bars. Somebody had to cover all these themes in 62 minutes before John Waters came along. 

I never saw MOMENT TO MOMENT, so I am really glad that the Alamo programmers, Zack and Lars, added this to the lineup. Aaron Hillis, who certainly knows a thing or two about dark humor, as a co-director of FISH KILL FLEA (2007), wrote this about Downey’s MOMENT TO MOMENT: “This odd bird from 1975 that took him years to finish [is] perhaps the most obscure and personal of the lot. An absurdist, 16mm sketch comedy with jazzy digressions and countercultural wordplay…. A full-manned baseball game is played entirely on horseback, senior citizens pick fights over chicks, yet at some point, a voice in the cacophony sighs, ‘Today’s surrealism is tomorrow’s soap opera.’” There’s even an appearance by a very young Robert Downey Jr. 

Kicking off the 3-evening retrospective will be Robert Downey Sr.’s PUTNEY SWOPE. When it was released in 1969, there was way too much material in it that simply wasn’t funny. We weren’t cynical or ironic—yet. Black Power still garnered a lot of support from the left, and the idea of a Black man taking control of an advertising agency was laudable, not funny. Filling the agency with his friends and relatives smacked too much of stereotyping and so wasn’t funny either. In fact, Putney refused to take on ads for cigarettes, alcohol, or war toys – again, a righteous attitude, though he would eventually succumb for money. Today, the film seems way ahead of its time – not with the ethnic, homophobic, or sexist “humor,” which is now more tiresome than upsetting – but as a satire of advertising and capitalism. Some of the TV commercials are humorous, if belaboured. And, to be fair, no one escaped Downey’s satirical weapons, so it could be said that he was already uncovering the eventual absurdity of many aspects of the 60s. He never saw a sacred cow he didn’t want to eat. This film certainly offers some intriguing plotlines for future seasons of MAD MEN and is well worth seeing as an artefact/mirror of its time. And you might even find it funny in an ironic, 21^st century way.

All screenings at the Alamo Ritz Downtown (320 E. 6th St, ATX), Mondays at 7pm
Tickets

April 4, PUTNEY SWOPE (1969), 35mm print
April 11, MOMENT TO MOMENT (1975), 35mm
April 18, CHAFED ELBOWS (1966) and NO MORE EXCUSES (1968), both 35mm

•  J. Hoberman article on Downey
• Aaron Hillis article on MOMENT TO MOMENT 

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