The missing link between the “sick” humor of the early 1960s and John Waters’s early 1970s outré antics, Robert Downey Sr.’s low-budget farces, “Chafed Elbows” (1967) and “Putney Swope” (1969), trafficked gleefully in the tasteless. Made once he found a producer, Downey Sr.’s “Greaser’s Palace” (1972), a million-dollar “western,” was something else — not tasteless so much as what the Russian Futurists called “a slap in the face of public taste.”
Rarely shown since its release, Downey Sr.’s magnum opus has been preserved by Anthology Film Archives, where it screens for a week in new digital and 35-millimeter restorations starting Friday.
“Greaser’s Palace,” set mainly in its titular frontier saloon, the domain of a murderous, constipated tyrant known as Seaweedhead Greaser (Albert Henderson), features spectacular New Mexico scenery and a cast of scuzzy varmints. On one hand, it’s a hippie anti-western in the tradition of “Little Big Man,” “The Last Movie” and “El Topo,” which, as an incomprehensible parable about a showbiz messiah, “Greaser’s” appears to parody. On the other hand, it’s a movie that flaunts gags so daringly unfunny it might have been Andy Kaufman’s bible.
Moreover, as befits a project bankrolled by Cyma Rubin, a neophyte producer who conquered Broadway with her 1971 revival of the 1925 show “No, No, Nanette,” “Greaser’s” is also a musical. Sort of.
Boss Greaser exploits and occasionally shoots his subjects, including his son Lamy, known as Homo (Michael Sullivan), while his daughter Cholera (Luana Anders) taunts the saloon’s sex-starved customers with a ballad called “The Harlot’s Bed.” The star entertainer arrives after a pioneer family is killed by a hooded character later identified as the Holy Ghost. Jesse (Allan Arbus, resplendent in a snazzy pinstriped zoot suit, his luxuriant Jewfro crowned by a flat-brimmed hat) paraglides down to perform miracles-cum-party tricks, among them an unconvincing tap dance on water.
Arbus (later a regular on the TV show “M*A*S*H”) delivers his lines with a nasal New York accent. Uncertain about his mission, his character declares that he is bound for Jerusalem where “it is written that the agent Morris awaits me.” (Morris eventually appears, wearing a space helmet, short shorts and wedgies.)
The hep cat, Jesse, might have been invented by the underground cartoonist R. Crumb. Further establishing its counterculture bona fides with two veterans of “Easy Rider,” Anders and the “go-go goddess” Toni Basil (as a winsome Native American scout who converses in pseudo sign language), “Greaser’s” peaks when Jesse counters Cholera’s combined striptease and fiddling demonstration with a boogie-woogie shuffle. “I got the hubba-hubba in my soul,” he chants in prelude to flashing his stigmata. The initially incredulous crowd goes wild.
Critics did not, although “Greaser’s Palace” had its defenders. Time magazine’s Jay Cocks called it “the most adventurous American movie” of 1972 while, in a critique Downey Sr. might have taken for a gag, the New Left journal Jump Cut published a lengthy analysis of his movie’s “subversive” qualities. Still, the New York Times critic Vincent Canby, a fan of Downey’s earlier work, was aghast, bracketing “Greaser’s Palace” with George Stevens’s hyperinflated New Testament drama “The Greatest Story Ever Told.”
The comparison is not inapt. In its sly-boots way, “Greaser’s Palace” desecrates two religions: Christianity and the movies.
Greaser’s Palace
Oct. 17-23 at Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan; anthologyfilmarchives.org.
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