Word: putney
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...those criteria, he judged tick . . . tick . . . tick, a movie about a black man who gets elected sheriff of a Southern town, superior to Putney Swope, a raucous but innovative film about a black man who takes over a white ad agency. "I know that is heresy," he wrote. "I know Putney Swope is the currently fashionable put-down of the Establishment. I know . . . but just the same, you should have been there in the Roosevelt Theater Saturday night. There wasn't an empty seat. The audience accepted tick . . . tick . . . tick with joy, laughter and applause. And the laughter...
Finally, Jebbie begins to wax dramatic about the smell of death (carbon bisulfide). At that moment, something incredible happens: what appears to be a ten-foot-high black baby wakes up screaming in her crib. Actually she is Carolyn Y. Cardwell, from Robert Downey's Putney Swope, and probably is no more than five and a half feet tall. Bobby wants to eat her and Jebbie does not. The baby then screams, "Rats! rats! rats!" and the lights black out (except the cue was missed on Thursday). Jebbie is left weeping and asking "Why?" If the rats are simply anthropomorphic...
...Downey? I mean Putney Swope is a little sophomoric, but it was pretty good. I wouldn't have been embarrassed to make that flick...
...PUTNEY SWOPE. Recommended for acid heads and those with good peripheral vision, this movie shares with If. . . a distrust of all systems of social order. Robert Downey, an underground ( Chafed Elbows ) filmmaker, wrote and directed Swope, which explains what happens when a group of militant blacks take over a Madison Avenue ad agency...
...Putney Swope is not for people who hate Stanley Kubrick or for those who believe in common decency and/or logic; some of it is filthy, and the whole film practically disintegrates before your eyes, like Alka-Seltzer. But the commercials-within-the-movie will be cherished...