Sinking the Boat

By accident, a black adman (Arnold Johnson) becomes boss of a lily-white Madison Avenue agency. At his first executive meeting, he looks coldly around a conference table filled with apprehensive underlings. "I'm not gonna rock the boat," he promises. Then he proceeds to fire all the white men at the table and replaces them with soul brothers. "Rockin' the boat is a drag," the bearded man yells. "I'm gonna sink it. From now on, this ad agency is gonna be called the Truth and Soul Agency. That's right--T.S.!"

The speech is a fairly good indication of the general level of wit to be found in Putney Swope, a frenzied, almost desperate comedy by a barely emerged underground film maker named Robert Downey. Downey--who bills himself in the credits as "a prince"--has got it into his royal head that what America really needs at this point in its history is another put-down of the advertising business. Accordingly, he has come up with the not totally unpromising notion of a group of black militants taking over an ad agency and bombarding the country with race propaganda concealed inside TV commercials. That seems to have been the idea, anyway, but only traces of it have survived Downey's scattershot direction. He spends most of his time on puerile parodies of TV commercials, like one with a comely adolescent hawking pimple solution by crooning "He gave me a soul kiss/Boy, it sure was grand/He gave me a **/Behind the hot dog stand." When he does occasionally manage to work out a good gag, it is all but smothered in unilevel, quadriliteral farce.

Satire is currently in such short supply that Downey has acquired a small but vocal following, who seem to regard him as a kind of cinematic Rabelais. The title is his strictly by default. In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Or at least some kind of prince.

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