Greetings (15.)
Directed by Brian De Palma. 1968
Starring Jonathan Warden, Robert De Niro, Gerrit Graham and Allen Garfield. 88 mins
Or A Very Hard Day's Draft Dodge. Teaming up with producer Charles Hirsch, De Palma's first real piece of cinema is a very late 60s artefact, but with enough distance to keep it relevant. Shot in twelve days, it follows three friends Warden, De Niro and Graham as the latter two try to work out strategies for Warden to get out of going to Vietnam. (The title is the first word in a draft letter.) This involves pretending to be gay or being excessively racist and right wing. In light of him becoming the leader of the Thespian Trump Resistance, it is odd seeing De Niro launching into a tirade about the queers, spics and niggers.
The film mixes up various Godardian tricks – freeze frame, 4th wall breaks, title cards etc with a few silent movie pastiches. When the three are together the film wants to be a counter-culture version of a Richard Lester Beatles movie. There are a lot of scenes of them being wacky and running or walking speeded up around New York.
After the first act, the three principles split up. Warden gets stuck in some dull computer dating vignettes. De Niro becomes obsessed with voyeurism and his concept of Peep Art, filming people's private moment. Graham is a Kennedy assassination nut and he has perhaps the defining De Palma scene, in which he uses the body of a semi-conscious naked woman to illustrate the inconsistencies of the bullet wounds explanations in The Warren Report.
As I've already mentioned the music is tremendous especially the theme song and its refrain “Greeting, Greetings, Greetings, would you like to go away?” The band is called Children of Paradise though I suspect they are not real hippies but a very subtle pastiche. Which is probably the case with the film as a whole in that it adopts a trendy counterculture outlook but with just enough of a distance to leave it a little wiggle room. As a result, it looks as good today as it did then.
Politically I was taken by how new and surprising everything seemed to them. There is a scene of a radical newspaper seller trying to spread the revelation that the US is a colonial power. Watching it you need to remember that this was less than a decade after a departing President Eisenhower warned about the influence of the military-industrial complex. For them, the American betrayal was a shock that had yet to fully reveal itself.
Directed by Brian De Palma. 1968
Starring Jonathan Warden, Robert De Niro, Gerrit Graham and Allen Garfield. 88 mins
Or A Very Hard Day's Draft Dodge. Teaming up with producer Charles Hirsch, De Palma's first real piece of cinema is a very late 60s artefact, but with enough distance to keep it relevant. Shot in twelve days, it follows three friends Warden, De Niro and Graham as the latter two try to work out strategies for Warden to get out of going to Vietnam. (The title is the first word in a draft letter.) This involves pretending to be gay or being excessively racist and right wing. In light of him becoming the leader of the Thespian Trump Resistance, it is odd seeing De Niro launching into a tirade about the queers, spics and niggers.
The film mixes up various Godardian tricks – freeze frame, 4th wall breaks, title cards etc with a few silent movie pastiches. When the three are together the film wants to be a counter-culture version of a Richard Lester Beatles movie. There are a lot of scenes of them being wacky and running or walking speeded up around New York.
After the first act, the three principles split up. Warden gets stuck in some dull computer dating vignettes. De Niro becomes obsessed with voyeurism and his concept of Peep Art, filming people's private moment. Graham is a Kennedy assassination nut and he has perhaps the defining De Palma scene, in which he uses the body of a semi-conscious naked woman to illustrate the inconsistencies of the bullet wounds explanations in The Warren Report.
As I've already mentioned the music is tremendous especially the theme song and its refrain “Greeting, Greetings, Greetings, would you like to go away?” The band is called Children of Paradise though I suspect they are not real hippies but a very subtle pastiche. Which is probably the case with the film as a whole in that it adopts a trendy counterculture outlook but with just enough of a distance to leave it a little wiggle room. As a result, it looks as good today as it did then.
Politically I was taken by how new and surprising everything seemed to them. There is a scene of a radical newspaper seller trying to spread the revelation that the US is a colonial power. Watching it you need to remember that this was less than a decade after a departing President Eisenhower warned about the influence of the military-industrial complex. For them, the American betrayal was a shock that had yet to fully reveal itself.
