This Weekend on Cable: Give the Other Robert Downey a Chance

We all love Robert Downey Jr. for the ironic layer of delicious watercress he manages to slip into the sh*t sandwiches of the Iron Man movies, but he didn't come from nowhere. Downey pere, Robert Sr., is a forgotten wit machine these days, but he's remembered this weekend on TCM.

Putney Swope / Greaser's Palace (TCM, Friday, 2:00 AM & 3:30 AM)

These two psycho circuses are symptomatic American New Wave craziness, jitterbugging the line between vaudeville and surrealism and making impish sport of everything in sight. Anything went in those days -- including full-length satires that indulged outright skits and happily used the Christ story. Putney Swope (1969) is a hippie-era movie about advertising (a black exec takes over the company and turns its TV-spot product into socially radical entertainment) that, true to its creed, essentially dissolves into chaos, refusing to sell us anything, even itself. Greaser's Palace (1972), which stars Allan Arbus (Diane's husband and the Sidney the Shrink from TV's M*A*S*H), is dafter yet, imposing the New Testament narrative onto a Western town that has the logic of a day spent in an episode of Laugh-In. (Is this where the Richard Gere thread of I'm Not There came from?) Rarely shown and not to be missed.

The Swimmer (TCM, Saturday, 12:00 PM)

But don't get too giggly. The loneliest lonely-man movie ever made, based on what you'd think would be an unfilmable John Cheever short story, this 1968 soul-searcher leaves its own special kind of bruise on your memory. Again, anything went in the Johnson-Nixon years, and existentialist fables (often shot in serotonin-depleting black-&-white) were common, because they meant something. Here, in color, Burt Lancaster (also a producer) is a Connecticut family man who, apropos of nothing, appears in a neighbor's yard and dives into their pool. He proceeds to "swim" a long circuit of his rich neighbors' pools, "going home," he says, a journey that reveals along the way what the pool-owners already know: This buoyant, athletic guy has nowhere to go.

High Plains Drifter (Encore Western, Saturday, 8:00 PM)

Clint Eastwood's first real shot at significance - the "anti-Western" had already sliced America's favorite matinee genre for sandwiches, and now here was a western with a taste for cosmic vengeance. Eastwood's Dude You Don't Ask the Name Of comes to an ass-covering frontier town, and acts out a Dantean siege of retribution, painting the town literally blood-red. "Who are you?!" one desperate townsperson shrieks late in the game; a ghost, an avenging angel, or simply a walking-talking deus ex machina? Who can say?

The Last Winter (Encore Mystery, Sunday, 2:45 PM)

Modern American psychotronic maven Larry Fessenden can be righteously obvious and dialogue-clumsy, but the big ideas will out. This overlooked 2006 eco-thriller takes inconvenient truths head on, landing at a small oil-company outpost in the Arctic on the verge of excavation, and gleefully watching as the warming elements (and whatever primeval force is released from under the melting permafrost) takes down the Stagecoach-like crew one by one. The best actors (Kevin Corrigan, James LeGros, Connie Britton) juggle the sometimes stodgy lines, the less-than-best (Ron Perlman) drop them flat, and Fessenden makes great hay with his icy locales and frozen corpses. Both the F/X and the sermonizing are a little groan-worthy, but the mood is helpless and apocalyptic.

Miller's Crossing (Encore Mystery, Saturday, 12:45 AM)

Here's the Coen Brothers masterpiece everybody's forgotten about -- a pop masterpiece, dead serious and completely cockeyed at the same time. It reinvents the '30s Irish gangster epic in a terrarium where the real world doesn't impede and the characters puff and court and fight like lizards. Lifting plot structure from Dashiell Hammett, the Coens hit this rich note in 1990, with only their third film, and it requires re-viewings.

What's Up, Tiger Lily? (TCM, Saturday, 2:00 AM) Famously, Woody Allen in his near-adolescence (in 1966) took a cheesy Japanese espionage film, redubbed it into the desperate search for an egg-salad recipe, and changed the world. OK, nothing changed, but I'm still wondering why this tirelessly hilarious, inexhaustible trope doesn't spawn a TV series: Take bad foreign films, fill the dubbing studios with pros (Patrick Warburton would never be out of work) and voila. I'd watch. This way, Bollywood films would be fun.

Tropical Malady (Sundance Channel, Sunday, 1:05 AM)

As gorgeous and unique and enigmatic as modern Asian film gets, this 2004 Thai masterwork by wunderkind Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a cosmically aligned whatzit that treats ordinary film narrative like toilet paper, captures its landscape and people with an overwhelmingly joyful esprit, and risks everything on a roll of structuralist poetry. It tells two stories, one after the other: one a realistic gay romance, the other jungle fable, but of course they're the same. Sort of -- the film is as tough to describe as it is resist. Myth and reality arm wrestle, call it a draw and finally embrace.