Word: film
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...hasn't happened and we must survive. Putney Swope -a film literally bursting at the seams with irrelevancies, obscenities, improvisations and illogical editing-tells us how. To avoid systems, we must act as if they don't exist; we must see how funny all that supposed logic is. We should wear lampshades on our heads, urinate in the kitchen, say "Fuck you" to any system that tries to encroach on our humanity. James Thurber would understand this kind of approach to life. And so would acid heads, people with good peripheral vision, and Lenny Bruce...
PUTNEY SWOPE is a fantastic movie, but people who still believe in the alphabet and political movements are going to have a lot of trouble with it. While the film does have some moments of pure comic entertainment value (like a lot of obscene commercials made by the militants' "Truth and Soul" advertising agency), it is not enough of a comedy to hold an audience for laughs alone...
Robert Downey, though, is not new to films. He is known to underground film audiences for such earlier, shorter works as Babo 73 and Chafed Elbows . He fought for the chance to do Swope for two years, carrying the script around to backers...
Once he got the money (from a fertilizer magnate), he worked an exhausting schedule to get the movie done. All of the sequences set in ad agency offices had to be filmed at night in closed office buildings. (The board room of the agency in the film is actually the board room of David Rockefeller's bank...
...cool-calm computer turns into a cool-calm homicidal maniac, Kubrick pulls the rug out from under seemingly sound systems in the same manner as Downey does in Swope. And the people who called 2001 plotless and pointless are bound to say the same thing about Downey's film...