Film Is a Battleground #15: Semi-Lost Films By the American Godard and the American Renoir (Hi, Mom!, California Split)
HI, MOM! (on DVD)
CALIFORNIA SPLIT (on DVD)
Two great films from the two greatest American directors of the last 35 years I don’t consider it insulting to say you likely haven’t seen. HI, MOM! briefly surfaced on home video in the late ‘90s. I first saw CALIFORNIA SPLIT panned-and-scanned on pay cable a couple of years ago. It’s never been released to video (even now, really, as I explain below).
HI, MOM! (Brian DePalma, 1970)
**** (Masterpiece)
HI, MOM! (originally titled “Son of Greetings”) was conceived as a sequel to DePalma’s 1968 film GREETINGS. It may help to see GREETINGS prior to watching HI, MOM! though it’s not necessary. The original title could have been dropped due to either the limited commercial success of GREETINGS or the great artistic growth demonstrated by the latter film.
Both films are structured haphazardly. Neither has much of a plot. Instead, their overriding thematic concerns drive the characters’ behavior through a series of politically and socially satiric sketches filled with allusions to other films, most often those by Hitchcock and Godard. Robert DeNiro, for example, plays an aimless, perverse film nut named Jon Rubin in both films but the character functions more as series of satirical poses than as an attempt to characterize one man’s existential malaise. The non-specificity of DeNiro’s role presupposes the malaise as universal and generational. DeNiro’s performance, in retrospect, seems a clear preparation for playing Travis Bickle though in these films, appearing as a nebbish voyeur, DeNiro gives no hint of the hardness of the men he would gain fame playing. He does, however, demonstrate in his scenes with Allen Garfield a skill for comic improvisation and a hint of the mania he brings to his performance in MEAN STREETS.
DePalma has always been cool about actors. Three of DeNiro’s first five film roles (and his first starring roles) were in DePalma films, the first of which, THE WEDDING PARTY, also starred Jill Clayburgh. Charles Durning’s appearance in HI, MOM marked only his third film role. John Lithgow’s key supporting turn in OBSESSION was only his second film role. Amy Irving and John Travolta both made their film debuts in CARRIE. DePalma, along with Altman, gave Dennis Franz almost all of his film work in the late-70s and early-80s. Patricia Clarkson made her film debut, and Andy Garcia first gained widespread attention for his role in THE UNTOUCHABLES. John Leguizamo, John C. Reilly, and Ving Rhames were not in-demand character actors until the mid- to late-90s, but DePalma used all three of them in 1989 for CASUALTIES OF WAR.
Gerrit Graham plays ostentatiously serious young men in both films. Where DeNiro’s character attempts to break out of his malaise through sex and film, Graham’s character, no less of a lost loner than DeNiro’s, heedlessly immerses himself into the counterculture without ever belonging. This blind activism for abstract righteousness reveals itself as personally dangerous. Graham’s role isn’t conceptually different, but the character’s name is presumably because the Kennedy assassination obsessive he plays GREETINGS is himself assassinated (a compelling comic rough draft of BLOW OUT).
Ultimately, GREETINGS is interesting mostly for its early manifestation of DePalma’s overriding concerns (sex, politics, cinema) and as the rare example of an explicitly anti-Vietnam film (specifically anti-draft) made during the course of the war. Radical, anti-war satire continues in HI, MOM!, but the later film focuses primarily on race, and, to a lesser extent, class, relations.
DePalma doesn’t examine race relations by placing black radicals in opposition to white reactionaries but rather to white liberals with their homilies about understanding and compassion constantly at the ready, while their behavior remains unchanged.
The bulk of HI, MOM! unfolds as a film within a film, a multi-part public television documentary about black radical activism. This conceit allows DePalma to simultaneously satirize radicalism, white liberals, and the superficial arts (public television, avant-garde theater) which cultivates the delusion for both parties that they’re communicating with rather than past each other. The film climaxes with a prolonged documentary segment about an avant-garde theater production entitled, “Be Black Baby,” wherein black performers in whiteface streak white theatergoers with blackface before subjecting them to racial abuse, police brutality, robbery, and molestation. DePalma pushes this sequence past the point of humor into genuine discomfort before it culminates with the same dark, exasperated humor that closes the minor, underappreciated SNAKE EYES. The white audience members, genuinely abused and terrified during the performance of “Be Black Baby,” upon the play’s conclusion, re-deposited on a city street, still in blackface, rush to deny the reality of their horrible experience, falling back on disassociating liberal pieties claiming to derive nothing other than thought-provoking pleasure from the show. This human instinct is the great source of DePalma’s biting political humor. Brought to the brink of enlightenment we will almost invariably retreat into the comfort of unknowing.
DePalma’s criticism of white liberalism, that they can engage in progressive even radical causes without risk because their privilege allows them to be involved on their terms, presumably becomes meta for HI, MOM!’s audience. The audience can laugh at the older, square liberals satirized in the film without submitting their own assured righteousness to a similarly rigorous standard. Unlike the infantile satire and self-aggrandizing hype of Spike Lee’s BAMBOOZLED, GIRL 6, or 25TH HOUR, the “Be Black Baby” sequence continues to challenge the audience, makes even an effective, compassionate satire such as Hal Ashby’s THE LANDLORD seem tame, and will be important, relevant, and upsetting until the end of time.
CALIFORNIA SPLIT (Robert Altman, 1974)
*** (A must-see)
Traditionally, Altman has been underserved by home video more than any other major American director. That’s changed some in the past couple of years. Criterion has released the long-unavailable 3 WOMEN on DVD, MGM did the same for IMAGES, and Fox Movie Channel has shown both an ugly pan-and-scan version of A PERFECT COUPLE and a letterboxed version of QUINTET.
Inexplicably, Altman’s most accessible post-M*A*S*H films prior to GOSFORD PARK, CALIFORNIA SPLIT and THIEVES LIKE US remain unavailable on DVD.
Yes, there’s a DVD entitled CALIFORNIA SPLIT available for sale and rental right now, but as Brad Stevens valuably delineates in Video Watchdog #116, this version of the film is missing three minutes of footage and features several alterations to the soundtrack due to music rights problems. These alterations significantly alter the quality of the viewing experience.
I off-handedly used CALIFORNIA SPLIT as a stick with which to beat the slight SIDEWAYS in Film Is a Battleground #14. Allow me to elaborate here: whereas Alexander Payne shares his assumed superiority to his loser characters with the audience encouraging uncritical, self-affirming laughter, Altman forces the audience into the world of his characters who, first of all, are in point of fact, losers (as gamblers rather than simply being uncool), exist fully, their compulsions driven alternately by self-delusion and lacerating self-knowledge. Elliott Gould and George Segal play characters no less self-absorbed than those that Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church play in SIDEWAYS. Altman, however, possesses the talent and imagination to manifest this self-absorption in the film as a whole. The original music (partly absent on the DVD) serves as a mix between the off-screen narration of Leonard Cohen’s songs in McCABE & MRS. MILLER and the variable, all-purpose theme of THE LONG GOODBYE. The music of CALIFORNIA SPLIT (often coming from an on-screen source) explicitly comments on--sometimes affirming, sometimes deflating--the actions and/or emotional state of Gould and Segal. The music displays a rare generosity for Altman. Too mature to find his characters’ behavior charming (though the actors often are) or potentially redeeming, Altman does find that their compulsions derive from recognizable human weaknesses. Though extreme, their behavior isn’t aberrant.
Barring the release of a full version of the film, I can’t in good faith discourage people from watching this bastardized version. It ranks just below Altman’s masterpieces (McCABE AND MRS. MILLER, THE LONG GOODBYE, NASHVILLE, and THE PLAYER) and much of the wit and humor of the performances remains. Segal is excellent and Gould follows up his brilliant Philip Marlowe from THE LONG GOODBYE with another virtuoso turn. For about eighteen months he was as good as any film actor has ever been.
CALIFORNIA SPLIT (on DVD)
Two great films from the two greatest American directors of the last 35 years I don’t consider it insulting to say you likely haven’t seen. HI, MOM! briefly surfaced on home video in the late ‘90s. I first saw CALIFORNIA SPLIT panned-and-scanned on pay cable a couple of years ago. It’s never been released to video (even now, really, as I explain below).
HI, MOM! (Brian DePalma, 1970)
**** (Masterpiece)
HI, MOM! (originally titled “Son of Greetings”) was conceived as a sequel to DePalma’s 1968 film GREETINGS. It may help to see GREETINGS prior to watching HI, MOM! though it’s not necessary. The original title could have been dropped due to either the limited commercial success of GREETINGS or the great artistic growth demonstrated by the latter film.
Both films are structured haphazardly. Neither has much of a plot. Instead, their overriding thematic concerns drive the characters’ behavior through a series of politically and socially satiric sketches filled with allusions to other films, most often those by Hitchcock and Godard. Robert DeNiro, for example, plays an aimless, perverse film nut named Jon Rubin in both films but the character functions more as series of satirical poses than as an attempt to characterize one man’s existential malaise. The non-specificity of DeNiro’s role presupposes the malaise as universal and generational. DeNiro’s performance, in retrospect, seems a clear preparation for playing Travis Bickle though in these films, appearing as a nebbish voyeur, DeNiro gives no hint of the hardness of the men he would gain fame playing. He does, however, demonstrate in his scenes with Allen Garfield a skill for comic improvisation and a hint of the mania he brings to his performance in MEAN STREETS.
DePalma has always been cool about actors. Three of DeNiro’s first five film roles (and his first starring roles) were in DePalma films, the first of which, THE WEDDING PARTY, also starred Jill Clayburgh. Charles Durning’s appearance in HI, MOM marked only his third film role. John Lithgow’s key supporting turn in OBSESSION was only his second film role. Amy Irving and John Travolta both made their film debuts in CARRIE. DePalma, along with Altman, gave Dennis Franz almost all of his film work in the late-70s and early-80s. Patricia Clarkson made her film debut, and Andy Garcia first gained widespread attention for his role in THE UNTOUCHABLES. John Leguizamo, John C. Reilly, and Ving Rhames were not in-demand character actors until the mid- to late-90s, but DePalma used all three of them in 1989 for CASUALTIES OF WAR.
Gerrit Graham plays ostentatiously serious young men in both films. Where DeNiro’s character attempts to break out of his malaise through sex and film, Graham’s character, no less of a lost loner than DeNiro’s, heedlessly immerses himself into the counterculture without ever belonging. This blind activism for abstract righteousness reveals itself as personally dangerous. Graham’s role isn’t conceptually different, but the character’s name is presumably because the Kennedy assassination obsessive he plays GREETINGS is himself assassinated (a compelling comic rough draft of BLOW OUT).
Ultimately, GREETINGS is interesting mostly for its early manifestation of DePalma’s overriding concerns (sex, politics, cinema) and as the rare example of an explicitly anti-Vietnam film (specifically anti-draft) made during the course of the war. Radical, anti-war satire continues in HI, MOM!, but the later film focuses primarily on race, and, to a lesser extent, class, relations.
DePalma doesn’t examine race relations by placing black radicals in opposition to white reactionaries but rather to white liberals with their homilies about understanding and compassion constantly at the ready, while their behavior remains unchanged.
The bulk of HI, MOM! unfolds as a film within a film, a multi-part public television documentary about black radical activism. This conceit allows DePalma to simultaneously satirize radicalism, white liberals, and the superficial arts (public television, avant-garde theater) which cultivates the delusion for both parties that they’re communicating with rather than past each other. The film climaxes with a prolonged documentary segment about an avant-garde theater production entitled, “Be Black Baby,” wherein black performers in whiteface streak white theatergoers with blackface before subjecting them to racial abuse, police brutality, robbery, and molestation. DePalma pushes this sequence past the point of humor into genuine discomfort before it culminates with the same dark, exasperated humor that closes the minor, underappreciated SNAKE EYES. The white audience members, genuinely abused and terrified during the performance of “Be Black Baby,” upon the play’s conclusion, re-deposited on a city street, still in blackface, rush to deny the reality of their horrible experience, falling back on disassociating liberal pieties claiming to derive nothing other than thought-provoking pleasure from the show. This human instinct is the great source of DePalma’s biting political humor. Brought to the brink of enlightenment we will almost invariably retreat into the comfort of unknowing.
DePalma’s criticism of white liberalism, that they can engage in progressive even radical causes without risk because their privilege allows them to be involved on their terms, presumably becomes meta for HI, MOM!’s audience. The audience can laugh at the older, square liberals satirized in the film without submitting their own assured righteousness to a similarly rigorous standard. Unlike the infantile satire and self-aggrandizing hype of Spike Lee’s BAMBOOZLED, GIRL 6, or 25TH HOUR, the “Be Black Baby” sequence continues to challenge the audience, makes even an effective, compassionate satire such as Hal Ashby’s THE LANDLORD seem tame, and will be important, relevant, and upsetting until the end of time.
CALIFORNIA SPLIT (Robert Altman, 1974)
*** (A must-see)
Traditionally, Altman has been underserved by home video more than any other major American director. That’s changed some in the past couple of years. Criterion has released the long-unavailable 3 WOMEN on DVD, MGM did the same for IMAGES, and Fox Movie Channel has shown both an ugly pan-and-scan version of A PERFECT COUPLE and a letterboxed version of QUINTET.
Inexplicably, Altman’s most accessible post-M*A*S*H films prior to GOSFORD PARK, CALIFORNIA SPLIT and THIEVES LIKE US remain unavailable on DVD.
Yes, there’s a DVD entitled CALIFORNIA SPLIT available for sale and rental right now, but as Brad Stevens valuably delineates in Video Watchdog #116, this version of the film is missing three minutes of footage and features several alterations to the soundtrack due to music rights problems. These alterations significantly alter the quality of the viewing experience.
I off-handedly used CALIFORNIA SPLIT as a stick with which to beat the slight SIDEWAYS in Film Is a Battleground #14. Allow me to elaborate here: whereas Alexander Payne shares his assumed superiority to his loser characters with the audience encouraging uncritical, self-affirming laughter, Altman forces the audience into the world of his characters who, first of all, are in point of fact, losers (as gamblers rather than simply being uncool), exist fully, their compulsions driven alternately by self-delusion and lacerating self-knowledge. Elliott Gould and George Segal play characters no less self-absorbed than those that Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church play in SIDEWAYS. Altman, however, possesses the talent and imagination to manifest this self-absorption in the film as a whole. The original music (partly absent on the DVD) serves as a mix between the off-screen narration of Leonard Cohen’s songs in McCABE & MRS. MILLER and the variable, all-purpose theme of THE LONG GOODBYE. The music of CALIFORNIA SPLIT (often coming from an on-screen source) explicitly comments on--sometimes affirming, sometimes deflating--the actions and/or emotional state of Gould and Segal. The music displays a rare generosity for Altman. Too mature to find his characters’ behavior charming (though the actors often are) or potentially redeeming, Altman does find that their compulsions derive from recognizable human weaknesses. Though extreme, their behavior isn’t aberrant.
Barring the release of a full version of the film, I can’t in good faith discourage people from watching this bastardized version. It ranks just below Altman’s masterpieces (McCABE AND MRS. MILLER, THE LONG GOODBYE, NASHVILLE, and THE PLAYER) and much of the wit and humor of the performances remains. Segal is excellent and Gould follows up his brilliant Philip Marlowe from THE LONG GOODBYE with another virtuoso turn. For about eighteen months he was as good as any film actor has ever been.
Labels: brian depalma, california split, elliott gould, hi mom, robert altman, robert deniro, sideways
posted by Bret LaGree at 09:53
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