The Criterion Collection

One of the coolest, craziest, and most consistently inspired comedies ever made, Robert Downey Sr. (a prince)’s Putney Swope was busy blowing minds with its hilarious and unhinged portrait of a Madison Avenue ad agency turned on its ear by the turbulences of the 1960s, back before Don Draper was even a gleam in Matthew Weiner’s eye. An extraordinary send-up of the McLuhan generation’s conviction that the medium is the message, Downey’s 1969 masterpiece loots the entire cornball visual vocabulary of 1960’s television advertising in this non-sequitur-driven, relentlessly surrealist satire about the sudden ascension of a top ad agency’s token African American to chairman of the board. Truth and soul ensue . . . literally: the eponymous Swope promptly rechristens the firm Truth and Soul, Inc., fires all the old, white dead wood, and restaffs the business with black militants, inspired miscreants, and assorted bizarro yes and no men—and women. (“There’s a bunch of lilies shooting a commercial in our studio!”) A nonstop cavalcade of borscht belt zingers and hilariously scabrous racial and political invective, Putney Swope is one of the defining American films of its decade, relentlessly right on and a constant source of comedic inspiration for generations of younger cineastes and filmmakers. (The firecrackers in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights begin here.) With a cast of off-off-Broadway regulars new to film, soon-to-be somebodies, and indelible nobodies from who knows where, Downey’s film deposits us in a world populated by some of cinema’s most delirious creations, a dozen of whom we celebrate here.

A gravel-throated revolutionary and growlingly politicized huckster, Arnold Johnson’s unflappable Putney Swope gives voice to a wide range of late-’60s anxieties and outrages . . . even if it isn’t Johnson’s voice we’re hearing in the film. Downey remembers hiring the New York-born Johnson (1921–2000) for the role of the acerbic and autocratic Swope when the actor he’d originally cast got cold feet about participating in a non-SAG shoot. Johnson looked perfect for the part—wily, a bit world-weary, sly as a sleepy fox—but he began to have some trouble remembering his lines during the film’s frantic shoot. “Don’t worry,” first-time cinematographer Gerald Cotts pulled Downey aside to say. “With that beard, you can dub all his lines in later and no one will notice.” Of course, everyone notices, which is part of Putney Swope’s unnerving magic: Swope’s voice is Downey’s own—grumbling, sardonic, and sometimes sounding, per the filmmaker, “like it’s coming from Canada”—and the film an unparalled act of subversive ventriloquism. Johnson went on to a successful film and television career, even if his next role was a lowly one, as a shoeshine boy in Shaft: he was a regular on Sanford and Son in the ’70s and Family Matters in the ’90s, and last appeared on the big screen in 1993’s Menace II Society.

“How many syllables, Mario?!” Though the origins of the wonderful character actor Joe Madden (sometimes credited as Joe Engler), remain largely obscure to us, his immediately endearing and persuasively senile demeanor as Mr. Syllables, one of the crumbling pillars of the old-white-boys advertising empire that heir unapparent Putney Swope is about to inherit, made him one of the unforgettable fringe dwellers of American over- and underground cinema of the ’70s. Madden, born in Brooklyn in 1892, worked for Downey in the absurdist canine-confinement comedy Pound (as an incomprehensible colonel in search of his lost dog) and the surrealist saddle opera Greaser’s Palace (as a gibbering trail bum toting a framed copy of Leonardo’s Last Supper.) Though we can find no information about Madden’s career before 1969, he was quite busy during the years between Putney Swope and his death in 1976, working for Downey’s longtime best friend, Hal Ashby, in The Landlord; for Herbert Ross in The Owl and the Pussycat; and for Paul Mazursky in Next Stop, Greenwich Village and Harry and Tonto. Beyond that, a mystery, this Madden-Engler: a crusty and altogether adorable enigma from a rapidly vanishing world.

Downey met Stan Gottlieb in a phone booth outside Manhattan’s fabled Bleecker Street Cinema, when the skeletal scarecrow, yet to become an actor, was working for Lionel Rogosin’s Impact Films, a pioneering distributor of Czech art flicks (by Věra Chytilová and others) and American independent documentaries (on Charles Mingus and Vietnam, for example) in the late ’60s; Impact also distributed Downey’s Chafed Elbows (1966) and No More Excuses (1968). Gottlieb’s adenoidal intonations in the opening scenes of Putney Swope (“Swope, you don’t have to accept! It’s a terrible job!”) cemented him in the Downey firmament (watch for him in a gingham dress as Hervé Villechaize’s wife, Spitunia, in 1972’s Greaser’s Palace), and he swiftly became a fixture of ’70s quirky-realist comedies. Norman Lear cast him in his nicotine-withdrawal satire Cold Turkey, then as a regular on his controversial, short-lived sitcom Hot L Baltimore; Sidney Lumet made Gottlieb a part of his ensemble heist caper The Anderson Tapes, alongside Sean Connery and a baby-faced Christopher Walken.

Born (and sometimes credited as) Allen Goorwitz in Newark, New Jersey, in 1939, Allen Garfield has well over a hundred movie and TV credits on his four-plus-decade-long résumé, but it is his work in some of the major films of the 1970s New Hollywood that has left his visage forever seared in our brains. Robert Altman-iacs know him as Barnett, the volatile road manager and husband of Ronee Blakley’s batty Barbara Jean in Nashville; Francis Ford Coppola followers remember him as Gene Hackman’s nettlesome spy-tech competitor/nemesis Bernie Moran in The Conversation. A onetime Golden Gloves boxer who went on to study acting under Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan, Garfield—who appears in Putney Swope as the incompetent son of the firm’s suddenly deceased chairman of the board—has worked for directors as various as Brian De Palma (in Greetings, 1968, and Hi, Mom!, 1970), William Friedkin (in The Brink’s Job, 1978), and Wim Wenders (in Until the End of the World, 1991), and on television in everything from Kojak to The West Wing.

As Putney Swope’s attentive (if ultimately fumble-fingered) bodyguard, Buddy Butler (and his entirely impressive afro) does a great deal of quiet scene stealing along the sidelines of Downey’s quick-change social satire: keep your eyes on him whenever he’s in the background, whether he’s slyly flirting with a member of Chinese megamogul Wing Soney’s entourage or sleepily attempting to perfect his mock-nonchalant Dangerous Black Man glare. A Howard University graduate and former member of Cleveland’s venerable Karamu House performing arts center (along with Swope castmates Joe Fields and Laura Greene), Butler was an experienced actor when he came into the Downey family. Though his IMDb filmography doesn’t show it, he’s also in De Palma’s Greetings and Hi, Mom!, Jerry Schatzberg’s The Panic in Needle Park (1971), and Mark Rydell’s Cinderella Liberty (1974). Today a professor of theater at San Jose State University, Butler remains active as a director and educator. We’re especially grateful to Professor Butler for pointing out the appearance of a pre-Super Fly Ron O’Neal in the scene from Putney Swope pictured here (although he’s not visible in this particular shot). You have to look closely: O’Neal is just outside the car window to Butler’s right, briefly visible in a couple of hurried shots, his lines overdubbed by an actor with a Catskills comic’s inflection.

As Jessy, the zoot-suited incarnation of Christ in Greaser’s Palace, Allen Arbus parachutes down from heaven into an Old West filled with constipated land barons and invisible bloodthirsty savages. To every pilgrim he encounters, he offers this ineluctable grace: “If you feel, you’re healed,” his hepcat messiah intones, anointing the wounded and weary alike. Arbus’s personal history seems only slightly less bizarro-miraculous. An army photographer in the 1940s, Arbus and his first wife, Diane—yes, the Diane Arbus—ran a photographic advertising business together until 1956; the couple separated in 1959 but remained married until 1969, two years before Diane’s suicide. Arbus’s official filmography begins with Putney Swope (as Mr. Bad News, Swope’s unflappable troubleshooter and occasional flasher wrangler); he quickly became busy in film and television, appearing in everything from the blaxploitation classic Coffy to episodes of The Odd Couple and The Mod Squad. A decade-long stint as the psychiatrist Major Stanley Freeman on M*A*S*H gave him a household familiarity in the ’70s and ’80s, and an entirely new generation now knows him as Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Uncle Nathan.

Surely the most famous player, stool pigeon, and all-purpose hustler in the history of American mainstream television, Antonio Fargas’s Huggy Bear—Starsky and Hutch’s streetwise informant and sartorially resplendent soul brother—remains one of the icons of ’70s pop-cultural excess, the ghetto gone Hollywood in a floppy denim tam and a pair of precipitously elevated platform shoes. Outrageous though he may have seemed on the Trinitron in your mom and dad’s living room, Huggy was actually one of Fargas’s least florid characterizations. A blaxploitation icon outsized enough to hold his own across from Pam Grier Coffy, and with a do so overdone he could only have been called Doodlebug in Cleopatra Jones (both 1973), Fargas (born 1946) began his screen acting career with a bit part in Shirley Clarke’s The Cool World in 1964. Downey had seen the young actor onstage as ninety-year-old witch doctor in The Great White Hope; as Swope’s “the Arab”—Putney’s moral interlocutor and one-man Greek chorus (“Putney Swoop is a jive cat, man!”)—Downey gave Fargas ample room to improvise. A career was born. Shaft, I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, and The Howling VI: The Freaks; episodes of Charlie’s Angels, The Simpsons, and the venerated daytime soap All My Children—Fargas has done it all, and still active on stage and screen, he keeps on doing it, year after year.

“You gave me a soul kiss / Boy, it sure was grand . . .” There’s much more beneath the surface of Downey’s Face-Off pimple cream couple than hidden blemishes. Shelley Plimpton was one of the original off-Broadway cast members of the epoch-defining 1960s musical Hair in 1967. When Hair moved to Broadway in 1968 to begin its four-year run there, Ronnie Dyson joined Plimpton in the cast; Dyson’s voice, singing the opening lines of the show’s opening song and smash hit “Aquarius”—“When the moon is in the seventh house . . .”—became one of the iconic sounds of the decade. Born in D.C. but raised in Brooklyn, Dyson pursued a career as a singer through the ’70s and early ’80s, scoring a top ten hit with “(If You Let Me Make Love to You Then) Why Can’t I Touch You?” in 1970, and a string of lesser pop and R&B successes thereafter. Plimpton (mother of actress Martha Plimpton) had two of the most affecting moments in le cinéma du hippie chick, as an eager Arlo Guthrie groupie in Arthur Penn’s Alice’s Restaurant in 1969, and as one of the titular near-future nudist-dystopians in Jim McBride’s great sci-fi psychedeli-curio, Glen and Randa, in 1971.

“Swope, I’m gonna bend your johnson.” The gorgeous Laura Greene was one of the top actresses in television advertising in the ’60s, appearing in commercials for Campbell’s Soup, Brylcreem, Anacin, and Nescafé. She was also a popular singer and hit maker, with her 1967 northern soul classic “Moonlight, Music and You” leading a series of chart-climbing successes. By the time she appeared in Putney Swope—as the brassy secretary who quickly becomes the new boss’s new bride—Greene was an old showbiz pro, with numerous TV guest spots and talk show appearances to her credit. No wonder she almost sets the screen on fire in Downey’s film: the camera loves every quiver of her eyelashes, every grinning application of her irresistible charm. Laura Greene was a goddess. Go YouTube “Moonlight, Music and You” right now: it’ll be stuck in your head the rest of the day.

Downey met Larry Wolf in 1964, in a bar on Avenue B in the East Village, across the street from the Charles Theatre, where the films the director and his newfound blindingly bald collaborator would go on to make together for the next decade would often have their most successful runs. Born in 1934, Wolf had the motormouthed one-liner reflexes of Henny Youngman and a sense of humor so ultra-black he could make Don Rickles blush. He essayed both a president and a president’s man for Downey, but his greatest role may have been the one he was born, or shorn, to play: the serape-bedraped Mexican Hairless in Downey’s lysergic dogcatcher “comedy” Pound. A headlining star and major collaborator in the warped and wonderful world of Cine-Downey, Wolf seems to have spent to remainder of his career appearing fourteenth-billed in forgotten teen comedies and made-for-TV Revenge of the Nerds sequels—a sad fate for such an acid-tongued genius.

“Are you ready to die?” Vincent Hamill speaks just a single line in Putney Swope, but his silent scowl and Man from Glad wardrobe (translation for kids under forty: an all-white suit, including socks and shoes) say plenty. Black angel of death (or death angel of Black Power), Hamill hovers ever in the background, science-fiction spooky and lethally chill, unflappable until at last—he strikes! Who is this guy? Downey remembers Hamill’s odd on-set habit of asking if, between takes, he could step outside for few minutes; rumor had it he was running a stable of prostitutes on the streets nearby. Visible for a couple of minutes as a street protestor in 1970’s proto-blaxploit Chester Himes adaptation Cotton Comes to Harlem and then . . . invisible on the big screen forever after? Like far too many of the members of vPutney Swope’s sprawling and extraordinary cast, Vincent Hamill’s post-Downey trail grows quickly cold. If you’re out there, Vinnie, please get in touch.

And speaking of “out there”: Vance Amaker.
“Stratosphere, baby, stratosphere. I’m stacked up over LaGuardia, and I’m not comin’ down for nobody.”
Who are you? Where are you? What are you?

Chuck Stephens lives and teaches in Nashville, Tennessee.