Brian DePalma’s fourth “experimental” indie feature is a time capsule of New York in decay and political disarray. It’s the movie in which his no budget guerilla filmmaking connected with the zeitgeist, and an audience of the young and the hip, which “launched” him and his first muse, Robert De Niro and put both on the path to bigger and better things.
“Hi, Mom!” (1970) is Tom Wolfe’s “Radical Chic” in cinematic form, a smart yet seemingly slapdash pastiche that’s part parody — in the “Hellzapoppin’,” “The Kentucky Fried Movie,” “The Groove Tube” and more recently “more recently Movie 43” tradition.
We see New York racism and slimy slumlords at their worst. De Palma sends up TV and public radio news, socially conscious documentaries and revolutionary, race-baiting theater. A porn industry on the cusp of “Deep Throat” respectability is ridiculed by the notion that “art” is what these sleazeballs are making and selling.
Uneven, amusingly organized and painfully dated, one can see flashes of De Palma’s bracing, under-your-skin technique and De Niro’s “Taxi Driver” Travis Bickle in between the dark and even disturbing laughs served-up.
De Niro plays Jon Rubin, a Vietnam Vet and aspiring movie maker who figures he’ll break into “the business” by shooting a peeping tom “Rear Window” for motor-mouthed producer Joe Banner (Allen Garfield, hilarious).
“It that art?” Banner wants to know as Rubin tags along with him as he’s watching dailies from others’ peep show pictures. Rubin follows Banner into a porn house cinema, where both men are groped by other men. Banner sees this as a moment where the kid learns respect for his audience — within reason.
“A pervert,” he says of one groper. “Leave him alone. Who knows where he’s been?”
Rubin needs $2000 and a zoom lens to shoot an 8mm silent (sound to be added later) movie. He’ll film from a rented slum, peeking through the windows of an artist putting a model through her poses, a radical (early De Palma collaborater Gerrit Graham) dabbling in activst art and Black theatre and the frolics of a group of single girl roommates who dress and undress and date in front of Rubin’s unblinking lens.
Actually, he does blink…and doze off during his vigil. It’s when he hits upon a way to get his producer the sort of sexual content he craves that we see the DIY nature of indie cinema in an era when cameras, film and everything else was beyond the reach of most and only the most creative, persistent and often ethically flexible could get their movie made.
Rubin will lie and trick his way into that girl group apartment, date and seduce the wallflower of the lot (Jennifer Salt). And he’ll contrive an filming elaborate set-up that entails using a clock radio, a camera, a red light wired to let him know he’s out of footage and two watches to time that footage as he launches into that seduction.
Little does Rubin know that young New York women of the era are a lot more sexually sophisticated and “open” than they might have been before he went off to Vietnam.
Later, we’ll see this “couple” progress into a marriage where he’s still dabbling with revolutionary politics — bombing their high rise’s laundromat as a “statement.” And “Hi, Mom!” will transition into its most riveting segment, a black and white documentary about a movement turned radicalizing theatre production.
“Be Black Baby” begins with man and woman on the street interviews with white New Yorkers who are questioned about if they know what it’s like to be “Black” or “a Black woman in New York City?” It’s for a TV documentary.
That documentary breaks format as Rubin auditions for the role of a New York cop — racist, violent and unaccountable — in a production of an evening of interactive theatre. “Be Black Baby,” for which the radical artist (Graham) has painted a nude model black as an advertising come-on, will put “liberal” white New Yorkers on the ground floor of a radically hip new theatrical experience.
Black activist/actors (Carole Leverett, Bubby Butler, Carolyn Craven, others) will bring the well-heeled in pursuit of a unique “experience” they’ll be the first to see. Theatergoers will be questioned, chastized, talked into surrendering their wallets and purses and dignity as they’re painted in blackface by Black actors in whiteface.
Confused, disoriented, not wanting to come off as racist or unhip, they endure this right through the racist taunting that begins when they’re in sloppy blackface, then assaulted and robbed. And when a cop (De Niro’s Rubin) shows up, he only listens to the folks in whiteface, doubling down on the abuse and dehumanization of the Upper East Side whites in blackface.
It’s far and away the cleverest thing in “Hi, Mom!” and a big reason this movie resonated with underground cinema fans who’d moved on from the amateurish “experiments” of Andy Warhol and others of the ’60s.
De Palma would soon transition to studio-backed horror (“Carrie,” “The Fury”) and thrillers (“Dressed to Kill,””Blow Out,” “The Untouchables”). Through blockbusters, acclaimed thrillers and bombs, he never quite hit “respectability” until people started looking back at his career.
De Niro was soon to break out of “The Godfather: Part 2” into stardom, with “Taxi Driver,” fame and Oscar glory.
Garfield and Charles Durning, playing the building super in a slum in the film’s opening recreation of a TV public service announcement, would go on to become two of the most recognizable character actors of their era.
And “experimental” cinema would recede into the same, out-of-the-public-eye niche that porn was destined to inhabit as Hollywood flirted with ’70s auteurs, blockbusters and mainstream cinema that pushed the boundaries of what was allowed or understood on screen far beyond what “Hi, Mom!” poked at.
Viewed today, this primitive, fitfully amusing “radical” comedy is most appreciated for the history lesson it provides, reminding us of how seedy New York was in its last truly gritty decade, and of how hard it used to be to get any movie made in that pre-film schools proliferation, pre cheap cell phone camera and streaming distribution era.
Rating: R, nudity, violence
Cast: Robert DeNiro, Jennifer Salt, Lara Parker, Carole Leverett, Bubby Butler, Carolyn Craven, Gerrit Graham, Charles Durning and Allen Garfield.
Credits: Directed by Brian DePalma, scripted by Brian DePalma and Charles Hirsch. A Sigma III release streaming on Tubi, Amazon, etc.
Running time: 1:27
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