Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 76

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Popular Culture Review

But you gotta do it later. Don’t waste your energy now getting upset.’ So I would
come in every night.. .we shot most of the film at night.. .and (Arnold) would say
‘I ’ve got the lines.’ And I would say, ‘oh, good,’ and then I knew he didn’t. He
would get pieces of it. But we just kept shooting after that, and then I dubbed the
whole thing in later. But it was my voice all the way through.”
Downey also refined a practice I’ve dubbed “repetition humor” in Putney
Swope, taking certain gags and using them over and over again, essentially running
them into the ground until they stop being funny. After a while, the gags start being
funny again, because they simply won’t quit. When the ad agency CEO in Putney
Swope dies of a stuttering stroke in mid-sentence at the beginning of the film, the
other board members at first think he’s playing charades. Even after he’s clearly
dead, one of the executives (Joe Madden) keeps shouting endlessly “How many
syllables, Mario?” over and over, for no good reason at all. Later in the film, when
Putney is trying to come up with an angle for the Borman Six ads, one of his
assistants repeatedly admonishes the other staff members that “Putney says the
Borman Six girl has got to have soulV" and Downey just hangs on, as his harangue
continues for several minutes.
To play the President of the United States and the First Lady, Downey
cast a brother and sister Vaudeville team of dwarfs (Pepi and Ruth Hermine); “the
president of the United States had to be a midget, for obvious reasons.” The film is
shot in black and white, except for the raucous commercials supposedly produced
by the Truth and Soul agency, which are in suitably electric color. One such ad, for
Face O ff pimple cream, features an interracial teen couple crooning at each other
as if in a Nelson Eddy/Jeanette MacDonald musical about the virtues of the product
they’re pitching, set in an idyllic pastoral landscape. Sample lyrics from the ad:
“You gave me a soul kiss/It sure was grand/You gave me a dry hump/Behind the
hot-dog stand,” concluding with the refrain “my boyfiiend’s really out of sight.. .and
so are his pimples.” An air conditioner ad consists solely of a woman dancing
suggestively down a slum alleyway towards the camera, only to advise the viewer
that “you can’t eat an air conditioner.” An ad for Lucky Airlines depicts a passenger
having slow-motion sex with the flight attendants as part of the regular service.
Tasteless, raucous, vulgar and utterly uncompromising, with a script that seemed
written on a daily basis. Putney Swope was Downey’s biggest hit to date, receiving
national distribution through the now-defunct Cinema V group, and taking the
director’s vision to the American public at large.
Now, financiers and studios flocked to support Downey’s new project,
whatever it might be. Putney Swope had accurately captured the anarchic, often
violent spirit of the 1960s, and producers were eager to cash in on the new trend
that Downey had pioneered. But instead of a topical satire, Downey made the
brooding, fatalistic Potmd {\910) for United Artists, his first major studio film.