Putney Swope
I could just say, “there’s 85 minutes of my life I won’t get back”; but I do like to explain what it is that makes me reject a film so forthrightly.
PUTNEY SWOPE actually begins quite strongly. A helicopter carries what looks like a motorcycle gang boss into New York City. He meets an executive at the helipad and then is whisked to a boardroom where he is revealed to be the motivational speaker Dr Alvin Weasley (Bob Larkin?). Weasley presents a rather Freudian account of why American men drink beer. He leaves, and the board members are split between those who think he’s onto something and those who think paying him $28,000 was a waste of money. It’s not subtle, but it is amusing. The boss of the firm, Mario (David Kirk), comes in and in mid-sentence drops dead. The board members, unable to vote for themselves, unintentionally elect Putney Swope (Arnold Johnson), the music director and only black man on the board, the new boss – on the basis that no-one else was going to vote for him.
Having set up so strongly, the film then falls apart. Coming out of the underground tradition of film-making, the film lacks the self-discipline needed to convey its satirical message in an effective manner across 85 minutes. Timing is everything in comedy and all the jokes are held for four or five beats too long, and there is a lot of use of repetition. It also lacks clarity as to what its target is. It could be read as a reversal of the race relations in America at the time, with the black man on top now and the whites treated like a minority. It could be seen as a nihilistic account of how nothing changes except the face of power, a warning against America’s 1968 revolutionary mood. Adjacent to the latter, one could even regard it as a conservative assault on Black Nationalism and the inability of the white power structure as constituted to keep the country in order. (It should be pointed out that one of the earliest images of the film is of an adjacent Confederate battle flag and skull-and-crossbones flag.) The fact that PUTNEY SWOPE’s production fell afoul of organised labour makes me very sympathetic to the idea that this is a libertarian conservative’s satire of the pending disasters of 1960s liberalism. Even if I thought that way, I’d still think it was done badly.
It has a lot of energy, and I won’t fault its ideas. As a distillation of the mood and language of the fashionable youth in the late 1960s, it should be required viewing in university classrooms. It’s just it is too incoherent and chaotic to succeed in its goal. It does give off something of Marx Bros’ atmosphere, with Johnson doing a Groucho; but I don’t actually care much for the Marx Bros, and I didn’t care for this. To put it in the words of one of the boardroom characters, ‘It’s a stiff!’
© 2026 Paul Brewer
PUTNEY SWOPE actually begins quite strongly. A helicopter carries what looks like a motorcycle gang boss into New York City. He meets an executive at the helipad and then is whisked to a boardroom where he is revealed to be the motivational speaker Dr Alvin Weasley (Bob Larkin?). Weasley presents a rather Freudian account of why American men drink beer. He leaves, and the board members are split between those who think he’s onto something and those who think paying him $28,000 was a waste of money. It’s not subtle, but it is amusing. The boss of the firm, Mario (David Kirk), comes in and in mid-sentence drops dead. The board members, unable to vote for themselves, unintentionally elect Putney Swope (Arnold Johnson), the music director and only black man on the board, the new boss – on the basis that no-one else was going to vote for him.
Having set up so strongly, the film then falls apart. Coming out of the underground tradition of film-making, the film lacks the self-discipline needed to convey its satirical message in an effective manner across 85 minutes. Timing is everything in comedy and all the jokes are held for four or five beats too long, and there is a lot of use of repetition. It also lacks clarity as to what its target is. It could be read as a reversal of the race relations in America at the time, with the black man on top now and the whites treated like a minority. It could be seen as a nihilistic account of how nothing changes except the face of power, a warning against America’s 1968 revolutionary mood. Adjacent to the latter, one could even regard it as a conservative assault on Black Nationalism and the inability of the white power structure as constituted to keep the country in order. (It should be pointed out that one of the earliest images of the film is of an adjacent Confederate battle flag and skull-and-crossbones flag.) The fact that PUTNEY SWOPE’s production fell afoul of organised labour makes me very sympathetic to the idea that this is a libertarian conservative’s satire of the pending disasters of 1960s liberalism. Even if I thought that way, I’d still think it was done badly.
It has a lot of energy, and I won’t fault its ideas. As a distillation of the mood and language of the fashionable youth in the late 1960s, it should be required viewing in university classrooms. It’s just it is too incoherent and chaotic to succeed in its goal. It does give off something of Marx Bros’ atmosphere, with Johnson doing a Groucho; but I don’t actually care much for the Marx Bros, and I didn’t care for this. To put it in the words of one of the boardroom characters, ‘It’s a stiff!’
© 2026 Paul Brewer
Mini Review: There’s 85 minutes of my life I won’t get back. For an explanation, see my full review. Or just take 'It's a stiff!' as sufficient.