美国地下电影的早期经典之作.CULT片大师Robert Downey. 和克里斯-马凯的<堤>很相近,用静态的照片组合成的蒙太奇讲故事,但又不完全是. SYNOPSIS: Very bizarre, offbeat and funny underground film from oddball director Downey. Shot in NYC in the mid-60's you see some great vintage shots of the SoHo. Most of the film is Black & White still images cut together very fast. There's also a color sequence. A real lost rarity. Recommended. html ONE of these days, Robert Downey, who wrote, directed and produced the underground movie, Chafed Elbows, which opened at the downtown Gate Theater last night, is going to clean himself up a good bit, wash the dirty words out of his mouth and do something worth mature attention in the way of kooky, satirc comedy. He has the audacity for it. He also has the wit. He just hasn't yet got beyond the kid phase of making fun of people by making them out to be slobs. Everybody in this wacky movie about a busy day in the life of a hyperthyroid moron is an unregenerate mess—from the fellow himself, whose mad adventures include a mistaken hysterectomy, which results in the removal from his innards of 189 $10 bills, to his snaggletoothed, scratchy-voiced mother with whom he is having an incestuous affair, to his bald-headed, viper-tongued psychiatrist who rattles off his words like Groucho Marx. They're all hideous, obscene, repulsive people on the order of some of the slobs in comic strips, only these are much more irreverent and filthy-mouthed than any comic-strip characters would dare to be. And I would hastily overlook them and drop this film with much of the trash in the underground, if it weren't that there is in Chafed Elbows a promising modicum of lively, acid wit. In such things as parodying the jargon of psychodelic psychiatry, or lampooning TV commercials, or having a woman who is made out to be a slob of the lowest order cackle through her hideously lecherous grin, Tell Charlton Heston I'm waiting for him, Mr. Downey shows that he can turn a joke. He obviously has a feeling for humor of a sharp and ribald sort, and he knows how to use a camera to catch the eccentric tempo of farce. He has a cute little trick of stop-start motion that interestingly simulates the frames of frantic but frozen action in the comic-strip magazines. And he has generously let George Morgan and Elsie Downey run away with their roles of the baby-faced hero and all the women in the film, respectively. Like so many juveniles, however, he overdoes everything, including that telltale business of babbling dirty words. Well, maybe some day he will be cautioned by the logic of the fellow in this film who is painting a white line on the pavement. When someone asks him why, he answers: You gotta draw the line somewhere. That's my advice to Mr. Downey.