Hi, Mom! movie storyline. Vietnam vet John Rubin (Robert De Niro) returns to New York and rents a rundown flat in Greenwhich Village. It is in this flat that he begins to film, ‘Peeping Tom’ style, the people in the apartment across the street. His obsession with making films leads him to fall in with a radical ‘Black Power’ group, which in turn leads him to carry out a bizarre act of urban terrorism!
Hi, Mom! is a 1970 American black comedy film by Brian De Palma, and is one of Robert De Niro’s first movies. De Niro reprises his role of Jon Rubin from Greetings (1968). In this film, Rubin is a fledgling “adult filmmaker” who has an idea to post cameras at his window and film his neighbors.
The film’s most memorable sequence involves a black radical group who invite a group of WASPs to feel what it is like to be black, in a sequence titled Be Black, Baby. The sequence is both a satire and an example of the experimental theatre and cinéma vérité movements. Shot in the style of a documentary film using a hand-held camera and grainy black and white film, it features a theater group of African American actors interviewing white-skinned Caucasians on the streets of New York City, asking them if they know what it is like to be black in the United States.
Later, a group of white theater patrons attend a performance by the troupe. First they are forced to eat soul food. The white audience is then subjected to wearing shoe polish on their faces, while the African American actors sport whiteface and terrorize the people in blackface. The white audience members attempt to escape from the building and are ambushed in the elevator by the troupe. As two of the black actors rape one of the white audience members, Robert De Niro arrives as an actor playing an NYPD policeman, and arrests members of the white audience under the pretense that they are black.
The entire sequence plays with natural sound, is acted to appear unrehearsed, and apart from several cuts plays in “real time”. De Palma’s familiarity and collaboration with experimental theatre informs the sequence and exerts considerable emotional impact upon viewers, simultaneously engaging their personal responses to racism and commenting on the deceptive and manipulative power of cinema.
The sequence concludes with a thoroughly battered and abused audience raving about the show, showering praise on the black actors, crowing “Clive Barnes [New York Times theater critic] was right!”
Hi, Mom! (1970)
Directed by: Brian De Palma
Starring: Robert De Niro, Charles Durning, Allen Garfield, Lara Parker, Bruce D. Price, Ricky Parker, Andy Parker, Jennifer Salt, Paul Bartel, Gerrit Graham, Floyd L. Peterson
Screenplay by: Brian De Palma, Charles Hirsch
Production Design by: William Daley, William Medsker
Cinematography by: Robert Elfstrom
Film Editing by: Paul Hirsch
Art Direction by: Pete Bocour
Music by: Eric Kaz
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Sigma III Corp.
Release Date: April 27, 1970
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