De Niro: A Biography. John Baxter

       CHAPTER SEVEN The Year of the Turkey

       Miracle Pictures. If it’s a good movie, it’s a Miracle

      Traditional Hollywood studio sign

      Greetings made almost $1 million, though De Niro saw nothing but his salary. For Hirsch and De Palma, it was the breakthrough. Filmways, the company of ex-TV producer Martin Ransohoff, guilty of creating The Beverly Hillbillies, The Addams Family and Mr Ed, commissioned another film from them, this time with a budget of $100,000. As a title, Ransohoff suggested -no surprise – Son of Greetings, but De Palma, as much out of stubbornness as invention, preferred Hi, Mom!, a title that meant nothing to audiences until the last shot of the film, and not much even then.

      History remembers 1969 as the year of Easy Rider, but Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper’s film hadn’t broken when Filmways bought Greetings. Ransohoff saw De Palma as the first American nouvelle vague film-maker, a saleable mating of Jean-Luc Godard and Alfred Hitchcock. To ensure the film’s counter-cultural credentials, he preferred, even insisted, that Hi, Mom! be shot in New York, and with a non-union crew.

      Unacknowledged but implicit was the assumption that Greetings had succeeded not because of its anti-war stance or its cinematically playful discourse, but its sex, of which Ransohoff wanted a lot more in the sequel. De Palma, characteristically, couldn’t wait to bite the Hollywood hand that fed him. Hi, Mom! would have some nudity, but also a core of violence and social comment, and an apocalyptic conclusion. ‘The message of Hi, Mom!,’ said the director cheerfully, ‘was that you can’t beat them so you have to annihilate them.’

      Between Greetings and Hi, Mom!, De Palma filmed a play in which the performers left the stage and mingled with the audience. The idea went back to early stagings of Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty, and even Max Reinhardt toyed with it in the twenties in Vienna, but De Palma added a new wrinkle by filming the play with split screen, half showing the audience, the other half the cast. The logical extension of this idea – that cast and audience become interchangeable – would inspire the last half of Hi, Mom!

      For Hi, Mom!, De Palma encouraged De Niro to both widen and deepen the character of Jon Rubin, back from Vietnam but no less the Peeping Tom than before. In the opening shot, the camera prowls with his point of view through a ruined Lower East Side tenement, finally discovering the janitor, who shows him truculently through filthy rooms filled with collapsing furniture. The place has nothing to recommend it until Jon, pulling back a curtain, sees the picture windows of the block opposite, all invitingly open to his gaze, and that of his camera. ‘I’ll take it,’ he says impulsively.

      One of the gang from Jimmy Ray’s, an almost unrecognisably thin Charles Durning (mis-credited as ‘Durnham’), played the janitor. Another old friend of De Niro’s, Allen Garfield, reprised his Greetings role as pornographer Joe Banner, who hires Rubin to record the activities of his neighbours for a film. The improvised dialogue with Garfield and also the stratagem Rubin uses to meet Judy Bishop, most attractive of the girls opposite – he arrives at her door claiming to have been sent by a computer dating agency – both recall Greetings. And, like Rutanya Alda in Greetings, who herself has a small role in Hi, Mom!, Judy, played by yet another De Palma alumna, Jennifer Salt, becomes a willing, or at least complaisant, subject for his camera.

      After a long and contrived farcical sequence where Jon tries to film his seduction of Judy, only to be frustrated by the weakness of the tripod head, which causes the camera to droop at the crucial moment, he swaps his equipment for a TV set. Its arrival sets up the last part of the film, which De Palma casts as a fake ‘National Intellectual TV’ documentary about black power, featuring a radical theatrical piece called Be Black, Baby, performed by a group led by another neighbour from the building opposite, Gerrit Graham.

      De Palma, framing the image in a fake TV fascia, shot the ‘documentary’ with a hand-held camera in black and white, only reverting to colour when Jon auditions for the role of a policeman in the play. The group, all black except for Graham, are sceptical; he doesn’t look like a cop. De Palma then cuts abruptly to a shot of De Niro, dressed now in New York police ‘blues’, pounding with his baton on the door of a men’s room, and yelling about perversions going on inside. He kicks a garbage can down a flight of stairs, then, still clutching his baton and standing in a narrow corridor, addresses an aluminium ladder and a mop leaning against the wall as if they are a tall suspect and his shorter female companion. A demand to see their street-demonstration permit builds in seconds, through a succession of belligerent questions – ‘You got a permit? … What are you lookin’ at? … You touch my baton? … Make love, not war?’ – into a litany of fury until, overcome with rage, he lashes the ladder with his baton, then turns on the mop and strangles it.

      The scene is a sketch for De Niro’s famous ‘You talkin’ to me?’ conversation with the mirror in Taxi Driver. For the first time, he tapped into the rage that would power his best work. The effect wasn’t lost on either actor or director. De Palma drew on the same sense of barely-suppressed violence in the extraordinary sequence that follows, as middle-class theatregoers, mostly white, attend a ‘performance’ of Be Black, Baby.

      In murky monochrome, they’re hustled onto a tenement staircase, forced to feel up their black hosts, choke down ‘soul food’, and submit to having their faces blacked up, then threatened at gunpoint with robbery and rape. The ‘audience’ seem genuinely terrified, up to the point where De Niro appears in cop uniform to ‘rescue’ them. After that, they spill into the street, praising the show and promising to send their friends.

      Like Greetings, Hi, Mom! doesn’t so much conclude as run out of steam. Married to a now-pregnant Judy, Jon, weary of her demands, reads up on terrorism in a copy of The Urban Guerrilla, plants dynamite in the laundry room of the apartment block, and flees. When the building collapses, he’s one of the crowd which gathers around the TV crews. After delivering a profane tirade against the dangers of New York, he asks to send a message to his mother. ‘Hi, Mom!’ he grins into the camera.

      Once he had finished Hi, Mom!, De Niro felt alarmed by what it revealed of himself. Years later, asked by a London journalist how he felt about a retrospective screening, he confessed he’d avoided watching again a film he found ‘a little scary. I didn’t want to look at it because it would remind me of things – like the first time you ever hear your own voice or the first time I ever saw myself in a film … I don’t need to see it.’ And, in a real sense, Hi, Mom! is the film where we see the real De Niro for the first time.

      Ransohoff’s hopes for Hi, Mom! were never realised. Before it could be released, Easy Rider’s cocktail of civil disobedience and recreational pharmaceuticals jolted independent American cinema onto a new path, away from the nouvelle vague and back towards the Hollywood genre movie – albeit with new and updated concerns: now the cowboys had psychological problems, and the gangsters grappled with questions of national identity. Overnight, the mischievous bohemians of Greetings and Hi, Mom! were out of fashion.

      After Easy Rider, which justified dealing drugs as a means of purchasing freedom, film-makers were suddenly interested in New York all over again, as a stage for drug stories. Hollywood crews flooded into the city, alarming the Californian movie unions, who saw work slipping away to the east coast as it had during the sixties to Europe. They began to enforce the regulation that a production working on location in New York, even with its own technicians, had to hire an additional local crew who would do nothing, but be paid full wages.

      Actors had no such clout, however, and, while New York’s few grips and gaffers were never out of work, local performers like De Niro became accustomed to outsiders getting all the major acting roles.