Brian De Palma (1970)

This wasn’t quite Robert De Niro’s first film or even the first time he had played the character of Jon Rubin.  In Brian De Palma’s previous picture, Greetings (1968), Jon and two other young American men were trying to avoid the Vietnam War draft:  each episode of the movie concentrated on one of this trio of friends.  In Hi, Mom!, though, De Niro is the sole lead – so much the lead that his name appears before the film’s name in the opening titles.  This order of priority is deserved.  Hi, Mom! is often witty and enjoyable.  Twenty-six-year-old De Niro’s talent and versatility are elating.

In Greetings Jon Rubin was a peeping Tom and an aspiring film-maker, and he’s still both things at the start of Hi, Mom!  His attempts to dodge the draft failed:  he’s now a Vietnam veteran, back in New York (anticipating De Niro’s Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver by a few years).  Like Greetings, Hi, Mom! – with a screenplay by De Palma, developed from a story he devised with Charles Hirsch, the film’s producer – is a satirical black comedy.  The chief target is probably American race relations although they take time to emerge as such.  For the first forty or so of its eighty-seven minutes Hi, Mom! feels like a string of sketches, just about held together by the protagonist’s voyeuristic antics and their consequences.  Following a prologue in which Jon, heard but hardly seen, is shown a scuzzy apartment by an even scuzzier landlord (Charles Durning), he’s hired by small-time producer Joe Banner (Allen Garfield) to make a pornographic movie.  Jon spies on Judy Bishop (Jennifer Salt), his neighbour opposite.  He likes the look of Judy enough to seduce her, putting himself into the porn film in the process.  He positions a camera in his apartment window to record their sex together; the camera tilts, the results are hopeless and Banner fires Jon.

While this is going on, there are a couple of sequences involving Gerrit Wood (Gerrit Graham) and his avant-garde theatre group, who are developing a piece called ‘Be Black, Baby’.  Once he falls out with Banner, Jon joins Gerrit’s group.  The first performance of ‘Be Black, Baby’ involves African Americans in the cast wearing whiteface, and terrorising members of the liberal white audience.  The latter, insulted and threatened, are forced to wear blackface and eat soul food.  When they try and fail to escape the show, one of the white women is sexually assaulted by two of the Black actors.  Jon, playing an NYPD officer, then arrives to arrest the white folk, claiming that they’re Black.  After the performance the theatre-goers, including the rape victim, enthuse about ‘Be Black, Baby’, telling a TV reporter that the show really made them think and they’ll be recommending it to their friends.

Jon gets a job as an insurance salesman and marries Judy.  She’s pregnant with their first child when her husband plants a bomb in their apartment building.  He watches the huge explosion from the street outside.  A group of people are interviewed beside the rubble on TV news.  A psychiatrist, midway through telling the interviewer the perpetrator was likely someone who ‘cracked under the pressures of our intensely materialistic society’, is interrupted by Jon, introducing himself as a Vietnam vet and a demolition expert.  He commends the professional job that’s been done on the apartment block but rails, with plenty of (bleeped out) expletives, against the squalor of the country that he and soldiers like him have returned to.  The TV interviewer asks Jon if there’s anything he’d like to add in conclusion.  He turns to camera, grins and delivers the film’s last two words, which are also its title.

The small ad that Jon answers for actors to play police officers in ‘Be Black, Baby’ stipulates impro skills.  These are definitely a job requirement for De Palma’s cast, too.  The improvisations in Hi, Mom! are strong until they start to get a bit relentless, reminding you that, in order to work up rhythm and tension, impro tends to rely too much on engineered disputes between characters:  Jon’s visit to a pharmacy, where the pharmacist (Peter Maloney) launches into a pedantic explanation of the difference between contraceptives and prophylactics, sticks out as an example of this.  De Niro is chameleonic, though; whatever he does is fresh, and often very funny, with Jon’s ‘courtship’ of Judy a special highlight.  De Niro isn’t the only top-drawer performer in the cast:  that superb character actor Charles Durning gets the film off to a flying start.  (As if to confirm its indie credentials, Durning is misnamed as ‘Durnham’ in the cast list.)  Hi, Mom! actually works better as a series of comic turns than as more sustained satire.  The ‘Be Black, Baby’ horrors go on for too long; it’s as well the eventual punchline, when the hapless white audience raves about the experience, is so good – and restores the shameless comic tone.  The parodies of TV, including the NIT (National Intellectual Television) network’s coverage of Gerrit’s play and its themes, are consistently excellent.

Within a few years, Brian De Palma was developing a reputation as a Hitchcock hommagiste:  Obsession (1976) was inspired by Vertigo (1958) and Dressed to Kill (1980) by Psycho (1960).  Hi, Mom!, in which Jon Rubin’s voyeurism evokes Rear Window (1954), is proof that the Hitchcock influence was there even before De Palma moved into mainstream Hollywood.  I don’t think I’ve seen Obsession (if I have, I’ve forgotten it) but I prefer this early effort to the more sophisticated Dressed to Kill.  Hi, Mom!, although chaotic compared with Rear Window, is, like that Hitchcock classic, highly inventive fun.

6 September 2024