Robert Downey, Sr.’s brazenly unfettered experimental satire

The transgressive “Chafed Elbows” (1966) and “No More Excuses” (1968) both screen at MMoCA as part of Rooftop Cinema’s season finale on September 5.

This year’s Rooftop Cinema series has ventured all over the map. To open the annual summer program’s five consecutive Thursday-night screenings in the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMoCA)’s rooftop sculpture garden, programmer James Kreul presented the French animated family-friendly adventure-comedy Chicken For Linda! (2023) on August 8. Relocating to the MMoCA’s indoor lecture hall under threat of rain the following week, Kreul pivoted to the hip-shaking calypso music documentary One Hand Don’t Clap (1991). The series leapt back up to the MMoCA rooftop for the most well-attended event of the season so far: the sardonic found-footage political fable, Hello Dankness (2022), on August 22. Returning to the vibrancy of opening night, the Rooftop series hosted the animated biopic Buñuel In The Labyrinth Of The Turtles (2018) on its last Thursday in August.

For its post-Labor Day, summer 2024 finale on September 5, at 8 p.m., Rooftop Cinema takes another left turn with the most daring and unorthodox event of the five—a pair of early works, Chafed Elbows (1966) and No More Excuses (1968), by (A Prince, too-young-to-be-a-king) Robert Downey, Sr. Both these iconoclastic comedies and significant black-and-white cinematic experiments belong to the most creatively prolific 1960s New York underground scene, even as they fall slightly short of feature-length flicks at under an hour apiece (58 and 46 minutes).

With his most renowned feature, Putney Swope (1969), Downey fashioned a top-shelf, anti-capitalist satire, anticipating everything from the best Mr. Show sketches to Boots Riley’s Sorry To Bother You (2018). The earlier Chafed Elbows and No More Excuses here, however, get at a rawer essence of Downey’s vision with straight-up gonzo, rough-around-the-edges filmmaking à la John Waters. They each tackle social taboos with unabating absurdist tableaux that are alternatingly rollicking and nonplussing.

And yet, through the films’ transgressive, avant-garde setups, Downey achieves something strikingly on-the-level about mid-late 1960s cultural upheaval with his merry band of misfit cast and crew. The troupe includes the unmistakable voice-dubbing master Lawrence Wolf portraying a wholesale cabbage dealer/shrink and President Garfield (you read that right) across the two films, Downey’s then-wife Elsie Downey as a multi-role chameleon in Chafed Elbows, and even Downey himself as a restless time-traveling Civil War (Union) soldier in No More Excuses.

The former, Chafed Elbows, screening first in this double feature, is constructed similarly to Chris Marker’s immortal La Jetée (1962), largely consisting of a slideshow of static photographs or still 35mm frames with voiceover dialogue. In an opening-scene incest joke that would make the writers of Arrested Development blush, 27-year-old Walter Dinsmore (George Morgan) rolls out of bed with his tooth-decayed mother (Elsie Downey). They head into loony doctor Bing-Bang’s office, where it seems any manner of diagnosis is on the table, including hysterectomy and birthing stacks of $10 bills.

From here, Walter, continuing to suffer from an annual breakdown (as he says), drifts through various venues as a simultaneous unwitting and culpable bit player in the low-brow entertainment world. Much like the film’s initial doctor’s-office visit, these situations are increasingly fraught and wack-a-doo, including a Deviant Records studio session of a twisted jump-blues song with lyrics that evoke The Velvet Underground’s BDSM art-rock anthem, “Venus In Furs.” Eventually, Walter’s impulses lead to murderous scrapes and brawls, but who’s counting. The film’s manic crash-course is hilarious, and almost impossible to look away from, even if deriders could categorize it as an unholy pile-up of perversity.

No More Excuses tones things down, but barely, opting for a different amalgamating approach. Downey and editor Robert Soukis toggle between street interviews and more obviously faux-documentary stagings. Seemingly also inspired by ’60s French cinema, taking a page from the cinéma vérité of Chronicle Of A Summer (1961), No More Excuses revels in exposing the clash of cultures and inherent dilemma of oldfangled and new moralities coexisting amid the sexual revolution.

After candid responses from single folks about lust and liaisons at clubs on the upper east side of Manhattan, the film cuts away to contemporary war footage and historical assassination-attempt reenactments in the late 19th century. And then there’s also a fragmented monologue with the modern (and very fictitious) SINA—Society For Indecency To Naked Animals—Vice President Alan Abel proselytizing about the necessity to clothe four-legged domesticated animals. (Granted, today’s deranged political rants by bottom-feeders like J.D. Vance and Marjorie Taylor Greene make this seem less far-fetched than ever.) No More Excuses is anything but subtle in its spliced verbal, visual, and thematic juxtapositions of restraint and reckless abandon or love and violence; and they even manifest altogether in one particularly disturbing recurring segment about a lecherous priest breaking and entering (and assaulting).

These two works by Downey, Sr. might be a tough sell for a general moviegoing audience (unless, perhaps, you’re pitching them under the guise of the antics that Robert Downey, Jr.’s father got up to). But the sheer innovation and audacious representation of New York and ’60s counterculture is fascinating and essential to the development and identity of American independent cinema. It’s the sort of anarchic art that should be reappraised and reintroduced during a stifled 21st-century period where focus-grouped fan service rules the day and anything slightly ribald might be scrubbed clean for fear of social-media and Reddit backlash. Clearly, Downey, Sr. was unencumbered by such stigmatizing thoughts, and embraced John Waters’ guiding idea of aiming not just to shock people, but also to make them laugh. Chafed Elbows and No More Excuses do both, and then some.

_{Editor’s note: This event preview has been corrected with MMoCA’s revised start time of 8 p.m. instead of 8:20 p.m.}