Directed by Robert Downey (senior) in 1966, Chafed Elbows was one the first underground films to actually be seen outside of lofts or basements in Greenwich Village. I saw it when I was 15 at the Key Theater in Washington D.C. I wasn’t sure what the hell was going on but I liked it.

Using still photos, some moving images and comically surreal voiceovers, Downey’s subversive slice of New York bohemian humor would later be amplified in his cult classic Putney Swope.

In his 1967 column for the New York Times, film critic, and square, Bosley Crowther did his best to come to terms with Chafed Elbows to humorous effect:

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.

Here’s the rarely seen Chafed Elbows:
 

 
Previously on DM: Putney Swope.