If you feel, you heal.

Less frenetic than Downey’s bizarre attack on the New York advertising world, Putney Swope (1969), the laconic peyote western Greaser’s Palace is even weirder. A Christ parable that peters out, the film is set in a one-building town in the New Mexico desert controlled by a man named Seaweedhead Greaser (Henderson). Neither exactly deconstructionist or revisionist in its approach to genre, the film is a hippie send-up akin to Blazing Saddles (1974), but without the punch lines.

With the look and feel of something taking place in a commune, maybe it’s closer to an Ishmael Reed novel: as wild and inclusive as Reed’s fiction, it makes room for Indian maidens, Mexican midgets and cross-dressing old coots. Jabs at patriarchy American-style are scatological and trippy; Seaweedhead is constipated, and he can only learn to let go through his confrontation with the mystical hipster Jesse (Arbus), a zoot-suited Jesus, surrealistically out of place in the Old West, who walks on water and dances to boogie-woogie. – A.S. Hamrah