PUTNEY SWOPE — THE CRITERION COLLECTION

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Mike and I drink FLYING DOG NUGGET IMPERIAL IPA and discuss Robert Downey Sr.'s best known film.

 

Robert Downey Sr.’s best-known film is a stunning piece of transgressive racial, political, and anti-capitalist satire. Downey’s contrasting use of black-and-white (for the film’s core narrative) and color sequences (for sardonic commercial episodes) accentuates the picture’s unprejudiced point of view.

“Putney Swope” is a '60s cinematic Molotov cocktail thrown equally at the establishment and the anti-establishment during an era when the hippies took on the suits with a vengeance.

The droll allegory is set in the late ‘60s advertising world of Manhattan’s Madison Avenue. Arnold Johnson plays the title character, a token black on the board of a big ad firm. Unable to vote for themselves, and disbelieving their fellow directors will vote for Putney, the board vote in our soul brother anti-hero after the reigning chairman dies on top of the boardroom desk.  

Robert Downey Sr. dubbed Johnson’s voice with his own, purportedly because Johnson couldn’t memorize his lines. The disorienting effect of hearing Downey’s appropriately gravely voice coming from the poker-faced Johnson, adds an eerie tonal layer to the movie.

Naturally, our number-one-soul-brother Putney Swope renames the company “Truth and Soul, Inc. the tyrannical boss mandates that the agency will not create ads for “war toys, cigarettes, or alcohol.” Still, his newly discovered power goes straight to Putney’s head even as the company produces some truly inspired interracial commercials, including an especially ribald one for an acne cream called “Face Off.”

Considered a cult film, “Putney Swope” resonates in 21^st century America, where racial tensions have exploded, and corporatization has turned modern culture on its head. Downey has a blast flipping racial stereotypes, all the while exposing a plethora of hypocrisies built into the American capitalist system.

Downy Sr. throws so many thematic and ideological darts that you need to watch the movie a few times to catch them all. This is one zingy satire. Come caffeinated. 

Rated R. 84 mins.

MEPHISTO — CLASSIC FILM PICK

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Klaus Maria Brandauer gives the performance of a lifetime as Heinz Hofgen, a passionately leftist stage actor, Bolshevik theatre director, and communist activist living in Germany during the country’s cataclysmic shift to Nazism from the ‘20s to the ‘30s.

Antiheroes don’t come more flawed or charismatic than Brandauer’s puppet-like character, as based on Klaus Mann’s novel of the same title.

This legendary film, directed and co-written by Hungarian director Istvan Szabo, is a Nazi cousin to Bernardo Bertolucci’s Fascist-themed “The Conformist.” There are notable corollaries between Jean-Louis Trintignant’s fascist assassin under Mussolini, and Brandauer’s survivalist / opportunist actor attempting to live a double life under increasingly hostile conditions.

Heinz’s dedication to his craft is certain. He lives to perform. Heinz studies dance with Juliette (Karin Boyd), a black mistress he keeps on the side. This shallow man may be a “provincial” actor but his winning portrayal of Mephisto in a large-scale production of “Faust,” captures the imagination of Nazi dignitaries.

In combining the myth of Mephistopheles with the legend of Faust, Istvan Szabo takes us through every step of Heinz’s gradual suspension of personal beliefs. It is, after all, the Nazi prime minister who is playing Mephisto to Heinz’s Faust. When the two men shake hands for the first time, His Excellency comments on Heinz’s weak handshake. “It seems the secret of acting is to portray strength, yet one is weak. Tabornagy studies the difference between Heinz’s personality and the one he creates on-stage as Mephisto. Like Hitler, Tabornagy (patterned after Hermann Göring) borrows from the theatre to create his own public and private image.  

Although Heinz does his best to insure the safe exit of his non-Nazi friends, he refuses to let go of his personal fame and occupation under his Nazi masters. Heinz loves admiring himself in mirrors. Once installed as the manager of the Nazi State Theatre by the German Prime Minister Tabornagy (Rolf Hoppe), Heinz gets a peak at his limited sphere of influence.

“What do they want from me now? After all, I am just an actor.” Heinz maintains a deception of self that goes deeper than even he can comprehend. While far from innocent, Heinz has a childish quality that allows us to empathize with his predicament if not with his choices.   

Eventually, when the opportunity presents itself, Heinz is able to repurpose the noble rhetorical ideas he once used to advance leftist ideals, this time in the service of Nazi ideology. The scene speaks to the liquid nature of political and ideological rhetoric.

Cinematographer Lajos Koltai captures the thick atmosphere of wartime Berlin and Hamburg with a naturalistic approach that compresses the drama into a pressure cooker of seething unrest. Disillusionment takes on a tragically melancholy appearance. What masks are “Mephisto’s” audiences wearing today?

Not Rated. 144 mins.

JFK — CLASSIC FILM PICK

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SMART NEW MEDIA PRESENTS

ColeSmithey.com

Oliver Stone’s “JFK” (1992) is a milestone filmic achievement based on New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s investigation into the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Garrison’s tireless inquiry resulted in the indictment and 1969 trial of Clay Shaw — known as “Clem Bertrand” in the New Orleans gay underground where he held court with the likes of Lee Harvey Oswald during the summer of 1963.

With the aid of co-screenwriter Zachary Sklar, Oliver Stone builds the fact-based drama toward Bertrand’s trial to complete this film’s appropriately tempered thematic arc.  

In the best performance of his career, Kevin Costner expresses Jim Garrison’s keen sense of personal integrity to shed essential light on a carefully orchestrated murder whose executioners will likely only be discovered long after the last one has died.

Jim Garrison’s book “On the Trail of the Assassins,” and Jim Marrs’s “Crossfire: The Plot that Killed Kennedy,” provides the source material that Oliver Stone deftly manipulates with cinematic finesse.

A clip from Eisenhower’s famous 1961 farewell address, during which he warns of the military-industrial complex, sets the tone. The unknown distances between conspiracy theories and conspiracy facts create a wormhole that would have easily have swallowed a lesser filmmaker.

Stone shores up a veritable sea of conspiratorial facts (linked to the C.I.A., the F.B.I. the Secret Service, the U.S. military, and the Dallas Police Department) with a condensed cinematic rendering that does much more than just put names to faces.

The filmmaker contextualizes a “coup d'état” that was as devastating to American foreign policy as the murder of their 35^th President was to its citizens.

Gary Oldman’s spot-on portrayal of Lee Harvey Oswald shows the nimble CIA operative to have fit the bill of a patsy, the word that Oswald used to describe his detention to television cameras.

Systematic mishandling of evidence by the CIA, the Secret Service, the F.B.I., and by Dallas Police recur at a staggering rate. The CIA’s rerouting of Kennedy’s procession path at 11pm on the night before, to go past the crow’s nest-ready book depository reeks like week-old tuna.

Having served in battle in Viet Nam, the veteran soldier Stone has explained from his own experience in the military, it would take four cells of eight “mechanics” (a total of 32 agents) charged to carry out a mission they don’t comprehend until the last possible second. As with firing squads where all but one are firing blanks, none of the could-be assassins would even know if he fired the kill shot.

As more facts become known about the Kennedy assassination — through investigations such as the one performed in the documentary “JFK: The Smoking Gun” Oliver Stone’s “JFK” remains an important touchstone. Stone pulls out every trick in his arsenal of cinema vocabulary. The result

is a fitting cinematic tribute to John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and to Jim Garrison, two men cut from the same cloth of personal accountability.

Rated R. 189 mins.