Hi, Mom! (USA, 1970) 87 min color DIR: Brian De Palma. PROD: Charles Hirsch. SCR: Brian De Palma, Charles Hirsch. MUSIC: Eric Kaz. DOP: Robert Elfstrom. CAST: Robert De Niro, Allen Garfield, Jennifer Salt, Lara Parker, Paul Bartel, Charles Durning, Gerrit Graham. (Sigma III Corp.)
Robert De Niro reprises his role of Jon Rubin in this sort-of sequel to his and Brian De Palma’s hilarious underground film Greetings, although with a looser narrative, oscillating from the juvenile to the terrifying. Gerrit Graham has a different role here, but Allen Garfield’s porno film producer could be a logical extension of his previous hilarious turn as the smut puddler. The voyeurism evidenced in De Palma’s later Hitchcockian thrillers is already present in Rubin’s attempts at being an adult filmmaker. Amusingly, he likely attends the same theatres later patronized by Travis Bickle before filming the unsuspecting people in the apartment building across the street, eventually including himself in the action by seducing Jennifer Salt while the camera whirrs from his window.
The film is largely a series of sketches, each escalating in Rubin’s social conscience, but still feel like sequences that don’t hang together. Several scenes are filmed in POV or framed in a TV screen, right up to the tacked-on shaggy-dog joke ending that references the film’s title. The viewer becomes an unwilling participant, from the opening with Charles Durning as the greasy, sweaty landlord who shows De Niro the dumpy apartment for rent, to the infamous “Be Black Baby” sequence (presented in black and white). Trendy swingers attend a “Happening” where they are humiliated by black performers: soul food is stuffed into their mouths, and one girl practically gets raped in an effort to show the stereotypical black “buck”. They leave the performance shaking their heads over amazement at the experience, little realizing the pain inside the actors, or for that matter, how the spectators have similarly been exploited. This scene is hard to stomach, but should it be otherwise? This film is not as overtly humourous as Greetings, though buoyed with a wonderful song score by Eric Kaz. It has an angry agenda as for its oppressed individuals, counterculture is a last resort, not a commodity or a choice.
Greg Woods
Greg Woods has been a film enthusiast since his teens, and began his writing "career" at the same time- prolific in capsule reviews of everything he had watched, first on index cards, then those hardcover dollar store black journals, then an old Mac IIsi. He founded The Eclectic Screening Room in 2001, as a portal to share his film love with the world, and find some like-minded enthusiasts along the way. In addition to having worked in the film industry for over two decades, he has been a co-programmer of films at Trash Palace, and a programmer/co-founder of the Toronto Film Noir Syndicate. He has also written for Broken Pencil, CU-Confidential, Micro-Film, and is currently working on his first novel. His secret desire is for someone to interview him for a podcast or a DVD extra.