Brian De Palma has been accused of many things as a filmmaker, from being a Hitchcock copyist to a rampant sexist, whether accurately or not. Outside of the outliers, however, there’s a pretty standardised image of what one of his movies is, from its narrative concerns to the way he adopts flowing, imaginative cinematography to tell stories. His peak in the 70s and 80s, while full of problematic representations of women, offered up some of the most flamboyantly lensed thrillers and horror movies of their era. But what about before that, back when the director and alleged “master of horror” made his first steps as a filmmaker? After its initial release through Arrow Video – as part of a boxset completed by Greetings (1968) and The Wedding Party (1969) – lapsed into out‑of‑print status, Radiance Films stepped in to showcase De Palma’s earliest work with the most interesting movie from that release, Hi, Mom! (1970). Not only have they re‑released it with their typical impressive vision, they have also given the movie a focus it could never enjoy as part of a boxset.
Fronted by a frighteningly young Robert De Niro, Hi, Mom! belongs to the revolutionary outsider cinema of the 1960s, complete with its overt politics, Beatles‑like jaunty theme song, and exploits that would also serve as an introduction to themes that would form a bedrock of De Palma’s work throughout his career, albeit in a supremely different package. It has more in common with the two aforementioned movies from that Arrow release than it does with his work just two short years later – Sisters. That movie feels like the birth of his style, whereas Hi, Mom! is an episodic and deeply politicised takedown of the ideology of the 1960s free‑love and hippy movements.
The constant of these segments is De Niro and as the movie moves into its first major episode, his character moves into a rundown apartment block as a wannabe filmmaker who wants to join the world of pornography. His way into this world is through a camera peeping on his neighbours across the street, and whatever he records he plans to sell to a raconteur operating out of a Manhattan 42nd‑Street‑style smut house. This plot thread sees De Niro adopt a persona to woo the girl from across the street (Jennifer Salt) to make his work more substantial for the porn crowd than the mere voyeurism his character was clumsily “directing” beforehand.
“While the movie is raw, fiercely low‑budget, and naïve in its racial politics, it speaks volumes of the young De Palma that he was willing to shoot for the sky like this.”
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The second episode – the centrepiece – sees De Niro get involved with an experiential theatre programme operating out of the streets, designed with the single intent of shocking middle America by subjecting them to an extreme version of the day‑to‑day treatment Black Americans receive. In a fascinating extra fronted by American critic Ellen E. Jones, she discusses how this piece of street theatre was influenced by De Palma’s experience filming Dionysus in ’69 (also featured on disc) – an experimental theatre production of Euripides’ The Bacchae – where the lines between audience and actor were non‑existent to the point where actors interacted with the audience on a very physical level. We aren’t talking about the basics of an actor running through the crowd here; this goes far further. Admittedly, De Palma takes his inspiration further than he should have. Jones highlights, in her interview piece, that he didn’t rehearse like he usually would in these sequences as he was intimidated by the Black actors he’d cast, which makes what happens in this found‑footage‑like segment feel very near the knuckle. Shot through a spectator level angle with a very crude consumer camera, we see how this group of Black activists – at the peak of the civil‑rights and Black Panther movements – black up a group of middle‑class white New Yorkers and subject them to police brutality, rape, and a general level of intolerance and racism that Black Americans experience. While crude, daring, and a justified puncturing of the façade presented by liberal Americans in the 1960s, it is more reductive than it was perhaps intended to be, with it offering no opportunity for empathy – just punishment as a form of satire, in which De Niro appears as a caricature of a racist policeman.
The third and shortest episode sees De Niro in a level of suburban nicety with Jennifer Street, a woman he previously put on a façade in order to trick her into sex to sell images of her body as a pornographer for hire. Guess he didn’t tell her about that. Nonetheless, this segment is interrupted abruptly by a huge explosion, at which point the movie transitions into a news report, with a journalist on the street asking people about their thoughts on this horrific incident. This presents another opportunity for De Palma to present De Niro’s character – who has pursued a life as a revolutionary‑cum‑anonymous married working man dressed up in Vietnam‑vet paraphernalia – ranting about the state of the country before he oversteps the journalist’s patience, ending the movie with the immortal line that blurs fiction and reality: “Hi, Mom!”. This segment is much more erratic and scattered in its presentation and ideas, but that is quite representative of the production’s tone, which displays an reliable inability to sit still for long.
De Palma made this film in his late 20s, and to see such a reflexive and fluid movie with such an unflinching political heart really sells the idea of the director being a satirist who holds few punches regardless of who it may or may not upset. Fans and champions of De Palma’s later work always maintained that his work was that of a satirist, even when accusations of sexism fiercely dogged him. Thankfully, at this point in his career, Hi Mom! displays a level of thinking and formal experimentation showcasing a young director who was equally parts fearless and potential. While the movie is raw, fiercely low‑budget, and naïve in its racial politics, it speaks volumes of the young De Palma that he was willing to shoot for the sky like this. It’s also satisfying to see a different ideal of a director beyond the patterns and loops that came to define his career for the next 30 years – a reminder that before the self-parodic provocateur came an experimenter, and thanks to this Radiance release I can confidently state that this version of De Palma perhaps deserved more time in the spotlight.
HI MOM! IS OUT NOW ON RADIANCE FILMS BLU-RAY
