HI, MOM! (72) (second viewing: 69)

Directed by: Brian DePalma (1970)

Starring: Robert De Niro, Allen Garfield, Lara Parker, Jennifer Salt

The Pitch: A young man tries to make porn films by spying on his neighbours.

Theo Sez: Guerrilla film-making circa 1970, taking its cue from its setting - a jumpy, grungy New York of sex-shops, housing projects, broken-down apartments and memorably abrasive inhabitants ("What? You're patronising me? You're putting up with me? I'm putting up with you!"). The centre-piece is a show called "Be Black, Baby", a graphic demonstration of the Black Experience shot like something out of NATURAL BORN KILLERS, featuring black actors in whiteface who browbeat, humiliate, daub black paint on and finally assault their middle-class white audience (who then come out with the usual bromides about how it "really makes you think" about "the sickness in our society"), but there's no actual plot as such, just a series of extended sketches ; DePalma has a sense of comic energy rather than a sense of humour - he thinks it's funny to have a highbrow show called "National Intellectual Television", or a radio program called "Music to Write Cheques By" - and no real politics either, but that's actually his strength. He doesn't side with the black radicals or the Vietnam vets, merely satirising the anger between them - incidentally evoking a time of group-chanting and Che Guevara posters, while all the time the frame-size keeps changing (approximating a photograph, an 8mm camera, a TV set), people improvise, joky music plays and De Niro, going from dorky kid to "urban guerrilla", does a sort of dry run for Travis Bickle. Shapeless, but invigorating. [Second viewing, March 2013: Slightly less enamoured this time, much of the first half being wasted on a couple of flabby comic ideas - the (very tame) REAR WINDOW conceit of the spied-on neighbours, then the date with De Niro's delaying tactics - but it really starts cooking when hero "trades in his camera for a TV set", partly because it's more complicated: the political side gets angrier (starting with "Be Black, Baby") yet the image shrinks to the dimensions of a TV show, our hero implicitly more passive, a character instead of a creator. In the end it might be seen as a series of fantasies - the "urban guerrilla" fantasy as valid, or meaningless, as the bourgeois-husband fantasy or Vietnam-veteran fantasy - DePalma being essentially a brilliant fantasist using political anger as a red herring, his intention being instead to delight in possibilities. Rhythm freewheeling, Allen Garfield hilarious (of a quote-unquote pervert in a porno theatre: "He means well"), Jennifer Salt a babe.]