Movie Lounge
One for the Books: Greaser's Palace, an Absurd Acid Western
Robert Downey Sr. made Greaser's Palace in 1972. It is a western, an allegory, a comedy, and something else that doesn't quite have a name.
Greaser's Palace was released in 1972. Robert Downey Sr. directed it. The film tells a variation on the Christ story set in a frontier western environment. A man in a zoot suit falls from the sky in the desert. He performs miracles. He sings. The film's tone is absurdist, its visual language is surreal, and its relationship to any single genre is deliberately unstable.
The acid western is a loose category. It describes films from roughly 1966 to 1975 that use the genre conventions of the American western while subjecting them to a psychedelic or countercultural pressure. The landscape remains. The horses remain. The genre logic does not.
The film
The central figure is Jessy, played by Robert Downey Jr.'s father-figure surrogate Allan Arbus. He arrives, he heals, he sings show tunes, he dies and is resurrected. The local despot, Greaser (Luana Anders), operates a saloon and exercises arbitrary control over the community. The film does not work out to a coherent allegory. It accumulates images and situations that suggest meaning without fixing it.
The comedy is dry and dark. The violence is sudden and casual. The musical numbers are genuinely unexpected. Arbus sings his show tunes with apparent sincerity in circumstances that make sincerity absurd.
Why it matters for music
Greaser's Palace is in the Movie Lounge at this site for the same reason Nashville is here: it uses music not as soundtrack accompaniment but as part of the film's subject matter. The musical numbers in the film are about the gap between performance and the environment in which it takes place.
A man in a zoot suit singing a show tune in the desert to an uncomprehending crowd is the film's central image of cultural displacement. The zoot suit does not belong there. The music does not belong there. That is the point.
The acid western context
The acid western as a form peaked in the early 1970s. Films like El Topo, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Zachariah, and Greaser's Palace share a treatment of the American West as a landscape for psychological and allegorical purposes, stripped of the redemptive mythology of the classical western.
These films came out of a period when the mythologies that held American culture together were visibly under pressure. The western, as a form, had always been an ideological container. The acid western cracked the container open.
For more in the Movie Lounge: Movie Lounge: Inside Pop the Rock Revolution and Midnight Cowboy Soundtrack. Full Movie Lounge index.