Unholy Trinity

GREASER'S PALACE

Directed by ROBERT DOWNEY Screenplay by ROBERT DOWNEY

The Second Coming has come and gone. Back in the Old West, Christ parachuted to earth. He was dressed in a zoot suit, called himself Jessy and said he was en route to Jerusalem "to be an actor-singer-dancer. It is written that the agent Morris awaits me." His father, an elderly party in clerical garb and a white beard, also walks the earth, meting out violent punishment in the best traditions of the Old Testament. The Holy Ghost, a fellow wearing a bed sheet, flaps after him, grousing "You'll never know what I could do 'cause you never give me a chance."

All this is strictly according to the gospel of Robert Downey, set down in Greaser's Palace, his funniest, most accomplished and most audacious film yet. Downey's lifelong dedication to assaulting the boundaries of good taste still ends too often in dirty jokes that misfire and a kind of varsity show satire. But with its boundless energy and delirious invention, Greaser's Palace is easily the most adventurous American movie so far this year.

If Downey's Messiah is a vaudevillian, his devil is a figure of preposterous melodrama--a glowering, gun-toting saloonkeeper named Greaser (Albert Henderson) who keeps his mother behind bars ("You'll always be my favorite," she reassures him) and who suffers from chronic constipation. His trips to the privy are state occasions, with his retinue of dim-witted subordinates nervously circling outside, awaiting glad tidings of relief that are never forthcoming.

Greaser also has a son, a sniveling little freak called Lamy Homo (Michael Sullivan), whom he keeps murdering and Jessy (Allan Arbus) keeps raising from the dead. "If ya feel, ya heal," is the way Jessy's laying on of hands proceeds, and others besides Lamy benefit too. A cripple, once healed by Jessy, passes the rest of the movie dragging himself from one scene to another, thankfully crying "I can crawl again."

None of this makes any kind of sense except comic sense. Ebulliently acted, beautifully scored (by Jack Nitzsche), memorably photographed on location in New Mexico, Greaser's Palace has an unrestrained, nutball appeal that is also, finally, its undoing. Downey always goes for a laugh instead of a point. Unlike Luis Bunuel, who also deals in curiously reverential blasphemies, Downey lacks the ruthless, rigorous intellect that gives depth to such flights of fantasy. "Jay Cocks

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When Robert Downey, Army private first class, was tossed into the stockade after one of his three courts-martial in as many years, he won a reprieve for one day only. The Yankees had come to Okinawa to play some exhibition games, and Downey had the reputation of being a good fastballer. He pitched three innings. Then Yogi Berra stepped up to bat, swatted one into the ocean, and Downey was back in stir.

So he tells it, anyway. There is always a nagging suspicion when talking to Downey that he is spinning out a new scenario with every sentence.

The troublesome offspring of a hotel manager and a Powers model who lived in Greenwich Village, Downey had already been bounced from a handful of schools before he sneaked into the service at the illegal age of 16. After receiving a dishonorable discharge from the Army, he returned to the Village, where he scrounged jobs as a waiter at Howard Johnson's and a poster tacker at the Bleecker St. Cinema.

Downey also married a model named Elsie (who appears with their two children in Greaser's Palace). He appropriated his wife's fees for TV commercials in order to finance his first movie, Babo '73. "I had to dub all the voices myself on that one," Downey recalls. One day he even shot without film because he was too embarrassed to tell the actors that money had run out.

Funds never have rolled in for Downey. His fourth and best-known film, the ad-game satire Putney Swope, had a modestly profitable return at the box office, but Downey remained less than the hottest ticket in Hollywood. His next film, Pound, was shown in approximately four cities, double-billed with some unsavory horror pictures.

Then Downey met Manhattan-based Cyma Rubin, the wife of the former owner of Faberge and the fledgling impresario who produced Broadway's No, No, Nanette. She staked him close to $1,000,000 and let him have his head on Greaser's Palace. When the film opened in Manhattan, it was generally lambasted. A couple of critics even suggested that Downey had been borne away by his budget, that his movies were better when their director was a waiter.

"I'm ready to go back to waiting," vows Downey, 36. "I hope I don't have to, but if I do, I'm ready." Meantime, he says: "I want to change movies. The people in the industry don't want to. They don't even like movies." There are probably enough people who do, however, to keep Downey safe from pushing clam rolls over the counter at Howard Johnson's.

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