Putney Swope (1969)
Directed by Robert Downey Sr.
Swope—the only black man on the executive board of an advertising firm—is accidentally put in charge after the death of the chairman.
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What critics compared Putney Swope to
If Mike Judge’s “Office Space” and Robert Downey Sr.’s “Putney Swope” hooked up after a night of bingeing on hallucinogens, Marxist theory and the novels of Paul Beatty and Colson Whitehead, the offspring might look something like this.
Things go completely haywire once the drug-addled CEO of RegalView (Armie Hammer) arrives with the idea of using Cassius’s gift for selling to push his latest nightmarish venture through—instead of treating this notion as a clever one-off joke, the entire last third of the film hinges on it and transforms what was once smart and biting into a less successful version of those go-for-broke social satires that Robert Downey Sr. used to make back in the day like the immortal “Putney Swope.”
Two years before filmmaker Riley was born, Putney Swope filtered into urban cinemas as a dead-accurate send-up of most of the same attitudes Riley pillories in Sorry to Bother You, with remarkably similar rapid-fire putdowns and cool-but-outraged cultural analysis.
Aspiring to a kind of 21st-century Putney Swope vibe, Riley’s freewheeling comedy doesn’t lack for ambition in either the gag or ideology department; this is a film with ideas about upward mobility, cultural assimilation, and the enduring hilarity—going back to Richard Pryor at least—of black guys doing their best nerdy white dude.
The directorial debut of hip-hop artist Boots Riley reaches into the stratosphere of creative inspiration with utterly bonkers results that are nonetheless crystal clear in their intentions: “Putney Swope” by way of “Dear White People,” Riley’s wacky odyssey fires a zillion different wacky ideas at once, and more often than not, hits its targets.
Mixing the droll comedy of Office Space with the race-backed satire of Putney Swope, and adding an imaginative dash of Michel Gondry (who gets a parody shout-out in an animated bit), at least something in Sorry to Bother You will surely strike a chord with any viewer, even if it doesn’t fully cohere.
Here’s one off the bat; Robert Downey Sr.’s 1969 “Putney Swope,” wherein African-Americans take over the running of an advertising corporation, hire one white guy for diversity, and show how they would change the culture we expect of the Fortune 500.
Get Out does not rank with America’s notable race comedies — Brian De Palma’s Hi, Mom!, Ossie Davis’s Gone Are the Days! (Purlie Victorious) , Robert Downey Sr.’s Putney Swope , Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback, Hal Ashby’s The Landlord, Rusty Cundieff’s Fear of a Black Hat, Skin Game or any of the genre spoofs by the Wayans family, particularly the ingenious Little Man, or the recent Eddie Murphy films ( The Klumps, Norbit, Meet Dave, A Thousand Words ) that are so personal and ingenious, they transcend racial categorization.
Safe sex, baby -- think of how further Downey's dad went three decades ago with Putney Swope , and without looking back to make sure audiences were still with him.