Robert Downey Sr.’s No More Excuses (1968) frankensteins together five short films, stitching preexisting footage from Downey’s other projects with newly shot scenes. Despite the piecemeal circumstances of its production, its more than the sum of its parts. The resulting film presents an illuminating cross section of late ‘60s counterculture that is both uproariously shocking and seems all too familiar against today’s backdrop of sexual moral panic and American warmongering.
His film includes a Union soldier who has somehow slipped through time into modern New York; real, mondo-style interviews with young patrons of the uptown singles bars that served as the launching pad for the white urbanite sexual revolution; an impassioned direct address from a representative of a group advocating for the ethical clothing of all nude animals; a sexual encounter that is interrupted by a lusty, smack-talking chimp; and successive failed attempts on the life of President Garfield (Downey’s frequent collaborator Lawrence Wolf) who is seen throughout in various sexually compromising scenarios.
A line from the representative for the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals (played by famous prankster Alan Abel) encapsulates Downey's tongue-in-cheek critique of mass media: “We want you to understand that the moral fiber of our world is at stake. Not because of atom bombs, Communism, or high taxes. Because of animal nudity! There are naked animals everywhere!” Abel spends enough of his speech ranting about horses and dogs that the audience could forget that humans are also animals being told their nakedness is unnatural. The interviews at the singles bars echo the flippant attitude of the era condemned in Abel’s satirical rant. “Came up here to get laid,” a mustachioed man wearing sunglasses at night unashamedly tells Downey outside one of the bars. The scenes of President Garfield elsewhere in the film suggest this sentiment might not be so new despite media sensationalism.
If it’s not already apparent, Downey packs a heaping scoop of material into the film’s 45 minute runtime. Blink and you’ll miss a half dozen irreverent jokes, like a commercial break for Preparation H placed in the middle of a sex scene, or the real newspaper clipping about a man in a Civil War outfit storming the field at Yankee stadium, asking, “Where are those damn Yankees?” The man in said outfit was Downey himself. He was promptly kicked out of the ballfield for his intrusion—for not keeping the past in the past—and returned back to the underground.
No More Excuses screens this evening, August 22, and tomorrow, August 23, at Anthology Film Archives as part of the series “S.I.N.A. Rides Again.”
