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PUTNEY SWOPE (1969)
“Funny, sophomoric, brilliant, obscene, disjointed, marvelous, unintelligible and relevant. If anybody tries to improve it, they should be sentenced.” -Vincent Canby, The New York Times
Mad Men meets Mad Magazine meets complete and utter madness in PUTNEY SWOPE, Robert Downey Sr.’s riotous satire on race, advertising, the counterculture, the overculture and everything in between. When the chairman of a Madison Ave. ad firm dies, its executive board must elect someone to fill the position. Each member, unable to vote for himself, casts a secret ballot for Putney Swope (Arnold Johnson, dubbed over by Downey himself), the firm’s only black executive, assuming he wouldn’t receive any votes from the other members. Once in power, Swope makes radical changes to the firm — like keeping only one white employee and refusing to advertise harmful products — all under the firm’s new moniker, “Truth and Soul, Inc.” Downey peppers the film with outrageous, taboo-busting TV commercials which are strewn throughout the film like satirical landmines. Take for example, a musical ad for pimple cream that opens with a young man singing to his sweetheart the immortal couplet, “It started last weekend, at the Yale-Harvard game. Girl / I saw your beaver flash, and I’ll never be the same.”
Admired by Jim Jarmusch and Paul Thomas Anderson, the latter of whom dubbed him “one of our great American directors,” Downey was recently the subject of the documentary Sr., in which Downey’s superstar son paid tribute to his cult-filmmaker father. Though a quintessential product of the 1960s, Downey’s films remain peerless, fearless attacks on American culture, throwing haymakers all along the political spectrum. Putney Swope may well be the most incendiary work ever to be selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.
Courtesy of All Channel and the American Genre Film Archive. Putney Swope was restored by the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation, with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.
A pre-show featuring groovy ads of the 1960s precedes the film, starting at 6 pm.
This film is screening as part of Arkadin’s September-long series ENVELOPE PUSHERS, spotlighting extreme cinema, convention-flouting surrealism and radical comedies that push the boundaries of content, narrative and sometimes good taste.
Event Links
Tickets: https://go.evvnt.com/2624157-0
Website: https://go.evvnt.com/2624157-2
