Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 77

Robert Downey, Sr.

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which was also Robert Downey Jr.’s debut as an actor. In Pound, a group of dogs,
played by human beings without makeup, wait in the city animal shelter for adoption,
or execution. The film is a melancholy meditation on the nebulousness of
contemporary existence, and did little business at the box office. Ironically, one
measure of Downey’s "’hot” status at the time was that no one at UA had bothered
to read the script. When Downey turned in the first cut of the film, he was stunned
to discover that UA executives has expected him to turn out a “feature-length
animated cartoon.” Disappointed, UA finally put the film out as the bottom half of
a double-bill with Federico Fellini’s Satyricon (1972), but the project’s failure
tarnished Downey’s bankability with mainstream studios.
Fortunately, help for Downey’s next project came from the private sector,
in the form of a literal blank check from patron of the arts Cyma Rubin. “[She]
came to me, and said, ‘what do you want to do next?’ and I said ‘well, I have this
thought about Christ coming back in a Western,’ and she said ‘I’ll finance that,’
and she did, the whole budget. When the film was completed, she gave it to Cinema
V to distribute. They didn’t give her any money for it, but they took it over, and put
it in theaters, and ran this huge ad in The Village Voice for the film, with one letter
per full-page, spelling o u t G R E A S E R S P A L A C E.”
Greaser's Palace deals with the exploits of Jessy (Alan Arbus), a Christfigure who appears in the Wild West of the 1880s America. He meets Vernon Greaser
(James Antonio), a corrupt land baron, and his band of cutthroats, who hold court
at Greaser’s Palace, the local saloon Vernon owns. Vernon runs the town with an
iron hand; anyone who commits even the most minor infraction is shot to death by
Vernon or his hired guns. The film opens with Vernon’s wife, Cholero Greaser (the
underappreciated Luana Anders), singing a dirge-like song praising virginity and
condenming adultery, which her husband, Vernon Greaser, loudly applauds. To
impress Vernon and his gang, Jessy (who tells everyone he’s working for "Ihe
Agent Morris”) performs a few pathetic miracles. Dressed in a zoot suit, Jessy
walks on water, and heals the blind and the lame with the off-hand phrase “if you
feel, you’re healed"" Yet when Jessy finally does his climactic song and dance
routine for Vernon and his boys, no one is impressed until he displays stigmata on
his hands. Ultimately, Downey gives us Christ as a confused, two-bit showman.
The Holy Ghost (Roland Nealy) is presented as a nondescript man wearing a derby
hat in a white sheet: his sole advice to Jessy is “OK, kid, you’re on.” Vernon’s son,
Lamy “Homo” Greaser (Michael Sullivan), keeps getting fatally shot, knifed and
drowned by his father, only to be repeatedly raised by Jessy, Lazarus-like, from
the dead. Toward the end of the film, Downey stages a touching father-and-son
bonding scene where Vernon finally accepts Lamy, and tells him, “you’re not a
homo', you’re a greaserV" The film concludes with the chronically constipated
Vernon finally having a successful bowel movement, which blows up his desolate