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| Images courtesy of Radiance Films |
Years before gaining notoriety with Sisters and Carrie,
briefly dubbed the new Alfred Hitchcock before veering over into the crime
subgenre with Scarface, writer-director Brian De Palma first emerged in the
late 1960s with the X rated dark comedy Greetings starring Robert De
Niro as Jon Rubin. An aspiring as well
as perverted young filmmaker who ends up in the Vietnam War, the film appeared
as an anarchic take-no-prisoners form of protest comedy. Made for the production company West End Films
and released by Sigma III, the film produced and co-written by Charles Hirsch
garnered enough success that two years later they reunited for Hi, Mom! A direct sequel to Greetings picking
up where Robert De Niro’s pornographer Jon Rubin left off, it serves as a
continuation of sorts while providing an experimental theatrical platform
leaving ample room for De Palma to introduce more transgressive shock horror
elements that would late him in hot water with the ratings board many years
later.
Jon Rubin (Robert De Niro) has just returned from a tour of
duty in Vietnam and is hired by smut producer Joe Banner (Allen Garfield) to
make a porno film. Stationed in a shabby
apartment complex managed by a scuzzy superintendent (Charles Durning in a
sneaky cameo), Rubin hatches the idea to spy on his neighbors to make a
porno. Eventually approaching his
neighbor across the street Judy Bishop (Jennifer Salt) in an effort to seduce
and film them having sex together from afar on a drab 8mm camera, the plan sours
when the camera tripod inadvertently tilts down as the money shots are about to
begin. Fired on the spot and looking for
a new line of work, Rubin catches wind of an experimental militant Black
theater group mounted by one of his neighbors hosting a play called Be
Black, Baby! Taking on the role of a
cop, the play commences where a group of White patrons are subjected to ‘the
Black experience’ where they eat soul food and are forced to don blackface
while the Black actors don whiteface and proceed to terrorize and abuse the
patrons.
At once hilarious and shocking, cartoonishly satirical and
scathingly harrowing, touching on many of the countercultural anarchic
possibilities of New Hollywood embarked upon by Robert Downey Sr. and
particularly his film Putney Swope, Hi, Mom! is an anarchic,
electrically charged dark comedy that is as much about post-Vietnam Americana
as it is about the tightrope walk between horror and hilarity that was making
up the American landscape at the time.
Despite being largely plot free, De Palma’s eclectic overqualified cast
and many of the themes of protest and repulsion keeps the pure cinematic endeavor
an engaging labyrinthine rabbit hole of misadventures. A provocative satire that could only have
erupted onscreen at a time when New Hollywood thorniness began seeping into the
mainstream consciousness, it represents De Palma debatably at his funniest and
most horrifying. An acerbic, still shocking
exercise and important forward thinking work of the eventual grand master, the
film also features a variety of unexpected character actors including Gerrit
Graham and the legendary countercultural Eating Raoul director Paul
Bartel.
Initially released on Blu-ray in 2018 on a now out-of-print
collector’s box from Arrow Video De Niro & De Palma: The Early Films
alongside The Wedding Party and Greetings, the films were given 2K
restorations from the original camera negatives for all three pictures and also
included audio commentaries and a collector’s booklet. Now while that edition goes for exorbitant costs
from third party sellers at present, Radiance Films have swooped in and rescued
Hi, Mom! from its moratorium in a new 4K UHD Dolby Vision/HDR special
edition. Despite not including the other
two features in the OOP De Palma box, it makes up for their absence with two
more feature length pictures: Dionysus in 69 a live experimental theater
production filmed in split-screen by De Palma and Jacob’s Ladder writer
Bruce Joel Rubin and a feature-length behind-the-scenes making of documentary
entitled Sons of Greetings offering a rare look at the production of the
film including the rehearsal for its most infamous sequence.
Radiance Films continues to knock their releases out of the
park, but with Hi, Mom!, effectively offering three complete features in
the same set, the boutique label has outdone themselves. With Dionysus in 69 featuring a
spectacular William Finley in the titular role cavorting around the floor half
naked bare-assed swooping in and out of writhing body performance art and
dialogue heavy monologues delivered with flair and dynamo, it becomes plainly
obvious why he was Brian De Palma’s go to actor for several years. De Palma’s own aesthete, content and style
would evolve into an even more overarchingly provocative affront and his use of
cinema verite would come up again decades later in his wartime drama Redacted. Those who only know De Palma for his erotic
thrillers Dressed to Kill or Femme Fatale or his Al Pacino driven
crime sagas ala Scarface or Carlito’s Way are in for a real shock
with Hi, Mom!, a New Hollywood underground rebel yell that is every bit
as riotously funny and terribly disturbing now as it was when it first hit
moviegoers in 1970.
--Andrew Kotwicki
