Event Details

Presented by Kier-La Janisse, co-editor of the book Truth & Soul: A Robert Downey, Sr. Reader (2025) – Books will be available at the screening

Robert Downey Sr. occupies a singular place in the American cinema; while he emerged from the East coast underground scene of the 1960s, he was always too unserious for the avant garde and too experimental for the mainstream – “a filmmaker out of time,” as my co-editor Clint Enns wrote. His trajectory is like one long Marx Brothers in-joke, subverting tropes, taste and even the tenets of comedy itself.

With Greaser’s Palace, Downey followed up the resounding success of Putney Swope (1969) and the tragic absurdity of Pound (1970) – in which a young Robert Downey, Jr. made his first screen appearance – with his own take on the then-burgeoning micro-genre of the messianic acid western.

The titular palace is the rickety saloon centerpiece of a windswept desert town ruled by the mercurial and constipated land baron Seaweedhead Greaser. Into this dusty terrain parachutes Jesse (Allan Arbus, M*A*S*H), a zoot-suited Christ figure with amnesia, slinging the slogan “If ya feel, ya heal” and searching for some sort of meaning beyond his own doomed destiny. The film’s colourful cast of characters include bald-pated Downey staple Lawrence Wolf as a French Padre, Luana Anders (Easy Rider) as Greaser’s daughter and burlesque entertainer, a neighbouring frontier couple played by Hervé Villechaize and Downey regular Stan Gottlieb in drag, cult favourite Don Calfa (Return of the Living Dead) as a platform-heeled talent agent from outer space, a nearby Indigenous tribe whose members include graphic design legend Pablo Ferro (not Indigenous) and “Hey Mickey” songstress Toni Basil (also not Indigenous), a rather literal Holy Ghost, and Greaser’s son Lamy Homo (yes, he actually named a character that), who dies and is resurrected multiple times in the film. Downey’s love of employing repetition to irritating effect is in full force here, with certain lines said over and over until they pass through annoyance and into hilarity.

With his first million dollar budget courtesy of Broadway producer Cyma Rubin and scored by rock iconoclast Jack Nitszche (who had most recently provided an electrifying score to Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s burnout staple Performance (1970)), Greaser’s Palace subverts even the era’s existing western revisionism, its resistance to interpretation distinguishing it from the choreographed symbolism of El Topo (1970) or the high emotion of Patrick McGoohan’s Catch My Soul (1974), anticipating the western parodies of the decade’s latter half. It is one of the most divisive films in Downey’s catalogue and a stupefying spectacle that is best enjoyed on the big screen. (Kier-La Janisse)