Word: greasers
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...Downey's Messiah is a vaudevillian, his devil is a figure of preposterous melodrama-a glowering, gun-toting saloonkeeper named Greaser (Albert Henderson) who keeps his mother behind bars ("You'll always be my favorite," she reassures him) and who suffers from chronic constipation. His trips to the privy are state occasions, with his retinue of dim-witted subordinates nervously circling outside, awaiting glad tidings of relief that are never forthcoming...
...Greaser also has a son, a sniveling little freak called Lamy Homo (Michael Sullivan), whom he keeps murdering and Jessy (Allan Arbus) keeps raising from the dead. "If ya feel, ya heal," is the way Jessy's laying on of hands proceeds, and others besides Lamy benefit too. A cripple, once healed by Jessy, passes the rest of the movie dragging himself from one scene to another, thankfully crying "I can crawl again...
None of this makes any kind of sense except comic sense. Ebulliently acted, beautifully scored (by Jack Nitzsche), memorably photographed on location in New Mexico, Greaser's Palace has an unrestrained, nutball appeal that is also, finally, its undoing. Downey always goes for a laugh instead of a point. Unlike Luis Bunuel, who also deals in curiously reverential blasphemies, Downey lacks the ruthless, rigorous intellect that gives depth to such flights of fantasy. "Jay Cocks...
Downey also married a model named Elsie (who appears with their two children in Greaser's Palace). He appropriated his wife's fees for TV commercials in order to finance his first movie, Babo '73. "I had to dub all the voices myself on that one," Downey recalls. One day he even shot without film because he was too embarrassed to tell the actors that money...
Then Downey met Manhattan-based Cyma Rubin, the wife of the former owner of Faberge and the fledgling impresario who produced Broadway's No, No, Nanette. She staked him close to $1,000,000 and let him have his head on Greaser's Palace. When the film opened in Manhattan, it was generally lambasted. A couple of critics even suggested that Downey had been borne away by his budget, that his movies were better when their director was a waiter...