Greaser's Palace: The Acid-Western Christ Allegory

A man in a zoot suit descends into the American desert by parachute. He is called Jessy. He can heal the sick and walk on water, and he is doing both in passing, on his way to Jerusalem, where he intends to become a singer and an actor. He has an agent. The agent is God.

That is the opening move of Greaser’s Palace (1972), and it is worth stating plainly at the top, because everything written about this film tends to reach for the word “surreal” and stop there. The film is not vague. It is extremely specific. Robert Downey Sr. has taken the Gospels, transposed them note for note onto a frontier town, and then asked the question that the transposition makes unavoidable: if a man really did wander the earth curing people at random, what would that look like to the people he walked past?

Downey Sr., before the surname meant the other one

Robert Downey Sr. spent the late 1960s making cheap, furious, funny films at the edge of the American underground — Chafed Elbows, No More Excuses, and then Putney Swope in 1969, the advertising satire that became a genuine hit and made him briefly employable. His method was consistent: institutions are absurd, the people inside them speak in fluent nonsense they believe is sense, and the camera should record this with the flat neutrality of a training film.

Putney Swope had a famous production accident that tells you everything about how Downey worked. Unhappy with his lead’s line readings, he dubbed the character’s dialogue himself, in post, in his own voice — so the film’s protagonist speaks with the director’s larynx, a mismatch nobody in the film acknowledges. Downey liked the wrongness and kept it. That instinct, that a seam left visible is funnier and truer than a seam hidden, is the whole aesthetic.

Greaser’s Palace was the money. After Putney Swope, Downey got a real budget — financed outside the studios — and took it into New Mexico to make an anti-religious western. It was, predictably, a commercial catastrophe. It also looks, sporadically, magnificent.

Why it works: the gap between the picture and the jokes

The single cleverest thing in this film is the disparity between how it is photographed and what it contains.

The desert material is shot in widescreen with real landscape sense — sky, distance, the horizontal grandeur that the western has been selling since the silent era. It is handsome. It has weight. And into these compositions Downey inserts a town whose ruler, Seaweedhead Greaser, is defined chiefly by a running gag about his inability to move his bowels, and a Holy Ghost who is a person under a white bedsheet, and a son named Lamy who is killed and revived on a schedule.

That collision is the argument. Play the same jokes in a scruffy, hand-held, obviously-underground register and you get a student film sneering at Christianity. Play them inside the actual visual grammar of the sacred American genre — the grammar of Ford, of the frontier as scripture — and something more interesting happens: the form keeps insisting this is a myth while the content keeps insisting it is a shabby anecdote about a constipated man.

Allan Arbus is the other reason it holds. He plays Jessy with a light, professional, faintly harried courtesy — the manner of a man doing an unglamorous job in territories. Arbus, whose face most people know from a decade of television afterwards, declines every opportunity to signal significance. He performs miracles the way a tradesman performs a callout. That refusal to play a messiah as messianic is the performance the film needed, and it is doing precisely the same work that keeps the desert photography straight-faced.

The blasphemy is not the point

The film has a reputation as a provocation, and I think that reputation has done it damage, because the anti-clerical gags are its least durable component. A Holy Ghost in a bedsheet is a one-second joke. The endless resurrections of Lamy Greaser are a good structural gag about how cheaply the miracle reads once it becomes routine, and Downey milks them past the point of profit.

What survives is the film’s real thesis, which is about arbitrariness. Jessy heals whoever is in front of him. He does not select. He does not weigh merit. He is a dispenser of grace operating on no discernible principle, and the film’s most serious passage — the one that goes quiet, the one that is not funny at all — concerns someone he does not save, for no reason other than that he was not there.

That is an argument, and a real one, delivered by a film that spends the rest of its running time on flatulence. Downey’s satire lands hardest when he stops sneering at the religion and starts taking its central problem seriously: a benevolence with no rule to it is indistinguishable from weather.

The economics of a film nobody wanted

Greaser’s Palace exists because of a brief accounting error in American cinema.

Putney Swope had made money on a budget of almost nothing, and money made by an unclassifiable film is the most dangerous substance in the industry — it convinces people that the unclassifiable is a category you can invest in. Downey was handed a budget that dwarfed anything he had worked with, and rather than moderate himself toward the audience that had found him, he took the cash into the desert and spent it on horses, landscape and a crew, in service of a film with no conceivable constituency.

The result did the business you would expect. It played to confused audiences, closed, and went into the long half-life that this era’s failures all share: television at three in the morning, unlabelled tapes, and the slow accumulation of people who saw twenty minutes of it once and never forgot the man in the parachute.

You can be sour about this or you can notice what it demonstrates. For roughly four years the American film business was so uncertain about its own audience that a genuinely uncommercial satirist could get a western financed on the strength of one hit and no plan. Every director now celebrated from that decade walked through the same door. Downey walked through it and made something almost nobody could sit through, which is a use of the freedom as legitimate as any other, and considerably more honest than most.

The real ancestor

The film everyone reaches for is El Topo, and the resemblance is real — the desert, the parable structure, the violence, the midnight-circuit afterlife. Jodorowsky had shown two years earlier that a western could be conscripted into someone’s private theology and that audiences would sit through it after midnight.

The truer ancestor is Buñuel. Simon of the Desert had already worked out that the way to attack sanctity is to be scrupulously literal about it: put an actual ascetic on an actual pillar and let the logistics of holiness become the joke. The Milky Way had already run doctrine through a road movie and discovered that heresy plays better as deadpan than as outrage. Downey is doing Buñuel with a bigger sky and worse manners, and where Buñuel has the patience of a lifelong apostate, Downey has the energy of a man who has just realised something and cannot wait to say it.

Its sibling is Zachariah, released a year earlier — another attempt to use the western’s furniture for a spiritual argument, and a far more timid one. Zachariah wanted to be liked. Greaser’s Palace is prepared to be hated, and it is the better film for it, even though it is the worse-behaved one.

The lasting inheritance is tonal. Downey’s flat, unhurried delivery of the intolerable — the camera holding, nobody reacting, the absurdity treated as Tuesday — runs directly into the American comedy that followed. Anyone who has watched a modern comic scene refuse to acknowledge its own outrage is watching a technique that Downey Sr. was operating in a desert in 1972 with almost nobody in the cinema.

The case against

It is baggy, it is repetitive, and the shock material has aged into wallpaper. Roughly a third of Greaser’s Palace is Downey pursuing a gag past the point where it was funny in the belief that persistence is itself a joke, which is sometimes true and mostly not. Several performances are amateur in the unhelpful sense. The film has no second act to speak of; it has a first act and then a series of incidents.

And the picture’s attitude to its own characters is colder than it needs to be. Downey’s satire has no affection in it, which is the difference between him and Buñuel — Buñuel finds the believer fascinating, Downey finds him stupid. That contempt puts a ceiling on the film. You leave admiring the nerve and unmoved by anything except the one sequence where the sneering stops.

Where to find it

It circulates through the specialist labels and the repertory circuit, where it belongs, in front of a crowd — this is a film that is measurably better with fifty people around you deciding in real time whether they are allowed to laugh. Alone on a laptop it curdles.

Spoilers below

The passage that redeems the film concerns a woman in the desert whose family is destroyed and who is left with nothing. Jessy is elsewhere. There is no miracle. Downey — casting his own wife, Elsie, in the role — plays it entirely straight, without a gag anywhere near it, and the tonal whiplash is deliberate and devastating. A film that has been treating resurrection as a running joke suddenly shows you a death that stays dead, and the joke retroactively becomes the point: Lamy Greaser gets raised over and over because his father is powerful and present, and this woman gets nothing because nobody was passing.

That is the argument the whole film has been building without admitting it. Grace, as depicted here, is a distribution problem.

The ending follows the Gospels closely enough that its shape is predictable and strange anyway. Jessy’s ministry in the town concludes; the accounts are settled; and Downey delivers a final image of the settlement that refuses both the western’s redemptive dawn and the Passion’s transfiguration. What he lands on is an ordinary place, emptied, with a bureaucratic afterlife implied for everyone in it — a heaven administered with the same competence as everything else in the film.

Seaweedhead Greaser’s bowel problem is resolved in the last act. It is the only prayer in the picture that is unambiguously answered, and Downey being Downey, it is the closing sacrament — the one miracle the film delivers cleanly, awarded to the worst man in it, for nothing.