Word: putney
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PETER LUKE'S Hadrian VII is a mediocre play with one outstanding central character. Structured like The Wizard of Oz, with a plot line that could have been borrowed from Putney Swope, this comic fantasy has more possibilites as soliloquy than as drama. Frederick William Rolfe, English recluse and neurotic who imagines himself Pope, has dreams more concrete than Dorothy's and ambitions no less earthshaking than Swope's. In treating the complex syndromes of Rolfe, playwright Luke has sidestepped the Putney-Swope assumption that what is sick must be funny: the Oz alternative (what is sick should be taken...
...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 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...