ONE VIEWIING OF PUTNEY SWOPE WILL NOT DO...

"So a middle-aged squaw with a cleft head and an axe in her back comes running out of the woods..."

It's the best movie ever made. There are no other films quite like it. No joke...

Putney Swope was made in 1969 by Robert Downey Sr., father of the actor. He and his friends used to work for advertising companies in NYC at the time and would steal equipment to make short films on the weekend and Swope was the eventual result of these experiments when Downey decided to do a proper independent feature. He got a little bit of money from an independent film distributor and the Guggenheim Foundation, made a crew out of his film school friends, got a bunch of local actors and did pretty much everything else himself. The same people who distributed the film More (the one that Pink Floyd did music for) liked Putney Swope and got it out to colleges and on to cult stardom.

"Your father was a horse's ass."
"Yeah, but he dug you very much."

So what's it about? The American advertising world and how it aims to manipulate the desires of people for no redeeming purpose other than the possibility of coaxing money out of their pocket. It also has a great deal to do with race in America at the time, most notably black people and the residual racism from the decades prior. But it's not brooding, dour, hard-to-digest, artsy, pretentious, depressing or anything of the sort. In fact, it isn't serious at all. The world the film has created is entirely its own, filled to the brim with absurdity, surrealism, irony, visual/audio gags, and so many small brilliant moments that you will find yourself seeing new shit all the time.

"Putney, brothers in the black room."

Putney Swope is the only black guy on the board of a powerful ad agency (as music director) who accidentally gets voted in as CEO after the unexpected death of its president. Since they cannot vote for themselves, all the board members assume nobody else will vote for Swope, thus "throwing" their vote away in a power grab. Putney fires everybody, changes the name of the agency to "Truth and Soul", hires all black people, and begins making subversive commercials that are extremely popular. That's really it, although there's a lot more weirdness later in the film that form the conflict...Mainly the fact that the president of the USA is a heroin-addicted midget who consults an evil Nazi businessman in his dealings with Swope. Seriously amazing...

"Putney says the Borman 6 girl is got to have SOUL!"

So here's some clips to get you started, but you'll wanna see the whole thing. Rhino reissued the dvd a few years back, so that might still be available. The soundtrack (by Charley Cuva) is all killer no filler, check the reissue of that too. I should really have a big Putney Swope viewing party some night, for all the uninitiated and the already obsessed.