Hi, Mom!

The young Brian De Palma hustled his way from film student to film maker by a series of unlikely film adventures, most of which have now been released on good Blu-ray encodings. Film student prodigies were a new thing in the second half of the 1960s. Brian De Palma’s name recognition seemed neck-and-neck with Paul Bartel and ahead of Martin Scorsese.

De Palma’s first official feature  Murder à la Mod may have begun shooting as early as 1964, but is officially listed as a 1968 film. A grab-bag of experimental techniques tied to exploitative elements, the B&W shows a film student working on overdrive, doing riffs on Alfred Hitchcock and playing around with multi-screen ideas and the concept of the subjective camera.

Perhaps filmed in 1966 first but not released until 1969 is the somewhat weak The Wedding Party. A comedy about an afternoon on a fancy Long Island estate, it introduced actor Robert De Niro but remains an iffy collection of improvisations, only a few of which are funny. The reason to see it is an impossibly young and endearing Jill Clayburgh; she’s not to be missed.

Also in 1968, De Palma teamed with producer Charles Hirsch to ‘break in to the youth market’ with an off-the-wall color feature, a comedy about draft dodgers.  Greetings is a collection of skit-like scenes in which three friends (Gerrit Graham, Jonathan Warden & Robert De Niro) work their schemes on the Selective Service registration system, and pull off even more elaborate ruses to try to seduce women. Graham’s slacker talks a young woman into letting him make magic marker lines all over her naked body, to prove a JFK consipiracy theory about entrance and exit wounds. The enterprising De Niro talks a shoplifter (Rutanya Alda) into disrobing, to help him with his attempt to create a new art form, ‘Peep Art.’ Also making an impact in his first movie is actor Allen Garfield, as a thoroughly slimy smut peddler. Greetings concludes with a none-too-convincing scene in Vietnam, where De Niro’s conscripted soldier, having captured a Vietnamese woman, tries his ‘Peep Art’ routine on her as well.

Originally meant to be titled Son of Greetings, 1970’s  Hi, Mom! is the movie that might convince a studio exec to invest in Brian De Palma as a future moneymaker, to bring in, you know, ‘the kids.’  It didn’t hurt that 1970 was the year of a giant industry shakedown, when  Easy Rider gave selected long-haired outsiders creative access previously denied.

Hi, Mom! picks up right where Greetings left off, continuing the wayward adventures of Robert De Niro’s character, the mischievous Jon Rubin. Having returned intact from molesting women in Indochina, Jon now pursues his ‘Peep Art’ concept full-time. This may be the first film in which De Palma’s cinematic indulgences bear fruit, as the film feels greater than its parts. Besides the scattershot satire, it makes some surprisingly challenging, radical statements about the American scene in 1969, particularly the theater scene.

With his pals from the previous show killed off, Robert De Niro carries Hi, Mom! alone, which is a good thing. Various scenes make the film now seem like a comedy prequel to  Taxi Driver. De Niro’s Jon Rubin even wears his army fatigue jacket at one point. He finds a crummy apartment that happens to have an excellent ‘Rear Window‘ relationship with an adjoining apartment building, for his telephoto lens. The view gives him a peeping vantage point at four strangers. One of his targets is Judy Bishop (Jennifer Salt), a correlative to the ‘Miss Lonelyhearts’ tenant in the Hitchcock movie.

Allen Garfield returns, having graduated from smut peddler to an equally sleazy porn producer, which gives us a peek into an X-rated New York movie theater. Garfield’s entrepreneur hires Jon to film a sex movie, but Jon only wants to advance his personal Peep Art crusade. He throws himself bodily into the funny, misogynistic situation of seducing Judy Bishop. Ms Salt is great as a man-hungry wallflower, who on her comic date regales Jon with her take on the psychology of the movie David and Lisa. Jon sets out to seduce Judy for his Peep Art movie camera back in his apartment, which is already trained on Judy’s couch. The Big Seduction must play out on a strict schedule, because the camera has been clockwork-set to start rolling at a specific time.

Provocateur: Someone Looking for Trouble 

The picture’s second half plunges into heavy-duty satire that will probably still make the average white audiences cringe. Jon auditions to play the ‘pig cop’ in a revolutionary play.  “Be Black, Baby” is an hilarious lampoon of the kind of living theater experiments in which actors draw the audience into the performance. The cast of blacks (and the white Gerrit Graham) put on whiteface and subject the paying audience to several hours of terror, so they can share in the black experience. ‘Being black’ is to have greasepaint smeared on one’s face, to be verbally and physically abused, and finally to be robbed, beaten and in one case raped. Art imitates life, get it?

Filmed handheld in grainy B&W, the sequence is uncomfortably convincing, even frightening. The performance concludes in a monumental sardonic joke. When finally released, the terrorized upscale white audience gives the play high marks as a life-changing experience, high art.

A second level of satire is present. The performance is also being documented by a B&W camera from the public television show N.I.T. Journal, aka “National Intellectual Television.”  Jon watches as an N.I.T. announcer says, “This concludes our program of ‘music to write checks by.’ Thank you for your generous contributions.”  It’s the best satire-redux of PBS I’ve ever heard.

The “Be Black Baby” sequence is filmed in a guerrilla cinema style that’s suddenly quite convincing, even scary.  The rape is frighteningly staged. The black satire continues. N.I.T.’s cameras cover the machine gun- toting revolutionaries as they invade an apartment block, just like the Marxist radicals in Robert Kramer’s Ice.

De Palma and Charles Hirsch manage a satisfying conclusion for their off-balance black comedy, with Jon Rubin settling into a bourgeois home life with Judy Bishop … but not really.  N.I.T. programming motivates Jon’s conversion to committed radicalism. Almost as in Taxi Driver, he knocks his TV over and shoots it with a pistol. The movie has already played the ‘how far will you go?’ game once or twice, with surprising results — full frontal Gerrit Graham, anyone?  With its use of taboos to provoke the audience, Hi, Mom! has a good grip on the creative anarchy of filmmaking in the late 1960s.

De Palma’s direction in Hi, Mom! is becoming more adept and flexible. Scenes are no longer flat-minimalist, even those covered in just one angle. The improvisations are less amateurish. The show begins with an odd scene with actor Charles Durning — so young! — which will only make sense to New Yorkers of the late 1960s. We love it anyway. Allen Garfield and Jennifer Salt are marvelous when verbally sparring with De Niro, and Ms. Salt’s love-crazy performance is so funny and charming, it disarms the sick-o aspects of Jon Rubin’s Peep Art deception. Some of the dialogue is inspired: “You know, tragedy is a funny thing.”

Hi, Mom! simply hangs together better than De Palma’s other early films. It ventures beyond the influence of the New Wave, and it has more on the ball than most youth comedies attempting imitations of Richard Lester. It engages with its revolution theme with more wit than anything produced in Hollywood, and it doesn’t try to soften its genuinely dangerous content. We haven’t much use for some of Brian De Palma’s later exercises in exploitative misogyny, but the sophomoric hijinks here seem liberating.