In the late l960s, the few films that alluded to the Vietnam War usually dealt with the draft. They were mostly comedies, using bittersweet humor, rather than anger and protest.
Brian De Palma began his career with the small, independently made Greetings (1968), a film that captured the irreverent mood of the time, described by one critic as “an overground sex-protest film.” Ironically, the film, made specifically for younger audiences, received an X rating, limiting admission to older viewers.
De Palma on Vietnam
Robert De Niro plays Jon Rubin, a naughty youngster who, despite efforts to avoid the draft, goes to Vietnam and winds up starring in a television newscast. Episodic, Greeting contained several sketches about military conscription, computer-dating, adult movies, jogging in circles around policemen in Central Park, and even the Warren Commission whitewash. One member of the clique spends his time shooting holes at the Commission report. In “Sooth-the-Nation” television address, President Johnson tells Americans: “I’m not saying we’ve never had it so good, but that is a fact.”
A Bronx secretary, who goes on a date via computer services, lists everything she’s wearing for the date and what it cost, down to her nail polish. The funniest sequence describes an encounter with a salesman of “dirty” movies (the title of the film is “The Delivery Boy and the Bored Housewife”), who sells his product in a Coca Cola package, because “dirty” movies go better with Coke.
The mad, disarming, but inoffensive, Greetings was followed by a more skillful sequel, Hi, Mom! (1970), also by De Palma. In this one, the De Niro character is back from Vietnam, attempting to pursue his “Peeping Tom” art career with a new kind of porno film. Unsuccessful, he gets an acting job in a “total theater” production about the black experience–as interpreted by white suburbia.
Hi, Mom! contained black humor, particularly about the art of making and selling pornography; its sharpest jabs were about sex. But the film also explored the militarization of Washington Square; some viewers criticized dynamiting in light of the recent self-immolations in the Village. Still, there were many insights, such as one about the white “black power” activist who demurs before painting his body entirely black. Or the pornographic impresario, who wants to make “the first children’s exploitation film, but nothing dirty, nothing smutty.”
Made independently on a shoestring budget, by the then unrecognizable De Palma and De Niro, and lacking the sponsorship and advertising of a major studio, both Greeting and Hi, Mom! had limited commercial appeal.
Penn’s Alice’s Restaurant
A much more important film was Arthur Penn’s Alice’s Restaurant (l969), inspired by Arlo Guthrie’s popular talking-blues ballad, “The Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” a summation of a generation that was anti-establishment and anti-Vietnam. An experiment in collectivist life, the film begins by celebrating the virtues of communes. Set in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, a surrogate family, headed by the married Alice (Pat Quinn) and Ray Brock (James Broderick) includes hippies, college dropouts, and other “deviants” who can’t conform to mainstream society.
Its hero is Arlo Guthrie, son of the legendary folk singer, who connects among the film’s disjointed sequences. Arlo wears long hair, smokes dope, and gets in trouble with any form of authority: the college, police, and military. In one sequence, Arlo is at a Draft Registration Center, surrounded by youngsters who pretend to be rapists, homosexuals, and psychopaths, all trying to escape the draft. The military is ridiculed for its narrow bureaucratic procedures and commitment to destruction; Arlo shrieks to the military shrink, “I wanna kill!” The incomprehensible military forms serve as a metaphor for “red tape” bureaucracy. When Arlo is arrested for illegally dumping garbage, he’s subjected to advanced police technique, a metaphor for the technology used in Vietnam.
The film sides with the youth counterculture, using the ballad of its title to chronicle social ills (bureaucratic hypocrisy, repressive authority, rigid police) of the time. But it also contains criticism of and disillusionment with youth culture. At the end, after attempts at an alternative lifestyle to the nuclear family, the commune collapses. Ray believes that buying a farm in Vermont would solve the problem. “If we’d a just had a real place,” he says, “we’d all still been together…without buggin’ each other…we’d all be some kind of family.”
Ray is a dreamer who has not lost his naivete, but he also understands the tension between private and collective life. He envisions a utopian commune, “where everybody can have his own house, and we could all see each other when we wanted to, or not see each other, but all be there.” Ironically, the members leave the commune shortly after Ray and Alice’s second marriage, a ritualistic ceremony designed to promote integration.
