In theory, Robert Downey Sr. should have been the perfect man to bring Mad magazine to the silver screen. At their dizzyingly inventive best, Babo 73 and Chafed Elbows suggest Jean-Luc Godard directing a live-action adaptation of the magazine. As a young iconoclast, Downey radiated cheerful contempt for a corrupt materialist world he seemed to feel was desperately in need of a lemon meringue pie in the face and a swift kick in the ass, possibly at the same time. Like Mad, Downey was an anti-authoritarian whose righteous contempt knew no bounds. Downey’s freewheeling social satires took aim at politics, pretension, religion, corporations, manners, sex, relationships, propriety, racism, race, and societal iniquity. But, again like Mad, which nobly eschewed advertising for much of its duration (and lost much of its soul when it finally relented), he was especially vitriolic about the world of advertising. Yet it was that world that both employed him—the liner notes for his Eclipse box set mention that Downey was paid handsomely to write and direct wild, original ads that never aired—and served as the subject for what is widely held as his masterpiece, 1969’s Putney Swope, which admirer Louis C.K. has publicly hailed as the film that made him want to become a filmmaker. Yet when Downey was actually afforded an opportunity to direct a Mad magazine movie, 1980’s Up The Academy, the result was so dire that the satirical institution actually paid Warner Bros. $30,000 dollars to take its name off it for the video release. Then again, Up The Academy was a studio project penned by other screenwriters, and Downey always worked best without restrictions.
In 1964’s Babo 73, Downey and his co-conspirators seem to be making up the rules as they went along. Along with Kenneth Anger, Russ Meyer, Shirley Clarke, Andy Warhol, Jim McBride, and the cinéma vérité movement, Downey operated on the fringe of the fringe. He was forging his own path as much by necessity as intention. In the early days, Downey didn’t have money for anything, let alone such bourgeois niceties as sets, professional actors, color, synchronized sound, polished scripts, and professional dubbing, so he transformed liabilities and restrictions into strengths. Downey cast himself, his buddies, and most notably his ex-wife Elsie (the mother of his greatest creation, Robert Downey Jr.), essentially wrote his films through post-dubbing and editing, and shot his films wherever and whenever he could. Partly because he couldn’t afford to make movies like everyone else, his films looked, sounded, and felt unique, with their impressionistic and sometimes comic use of dubbing, highly caffeinated pacing, and extensive, intensive use of still photographs.
What Downey’s early films lacked in polish they made up for in energy, ingenuity, and manic inspiration. Babo 73 is ostensibly about the disastrous reign of a president (Taylor Mead) so milquetoast and ineffectual he resembles a cross between Adlai Stevenson III and a jelly doughnut, but it’s less a conventional narrative film than a rapid-fire succession of blackout sketches, absurdist gags, and random silliness. Like his kindred spirits in the French New Wave, Downey was casually reinventing cinema with a street-level approach, plugged into both tumultuous cultural zeitgeist and the rebelliousness of a rising counterculture. Nearly a half century later, Babo 73 still feels fresh and original, especially the daftly charming lead performance of Mead, a New York fixture with the angelic face of Stan Laurel and the voice and delivery of Emo Phillips. (Mead was so inherently fascinating as an actor and human being that Gary Weis made short films about him for Saturday Night Live in the ’70s, and Andy Warhol literally made a film about his ass—the cleverly titled Taylor Mead’s Ass, released the same year as Babo 73.)
1966’s Chafed Elbows follows faithfully in Babo 73’s zigzagging, purposefully meandering footsteps, only this time the protagonist is a New York neurotic undergoing the latest in an endless series of nervous breakdowns in a city that resembles an open-air mental hospital more than a proper metropolis. Like Babo 73, Chafed Elbows straddles formats and genres. Where Babo 73 at times recalls a radical, experimental spin on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh In, Chafed Elbows anticipates early Saturday Night Live at its funky, New York-centric best combined with the dyspeptic cleverness of Woody Allen. Downey didn’t set out to make grand cinematic statements; he made goofy, ramshackle larks to amuse himself and his buddies, and his earliest efforts benefit from the freedom that comes with disregarding commercial considerations of any kind.