Hi, Mom!

While collaborations with director Martin Scorsese helped establish Robert De Niro's onscreen persona, his cinematic career began several years before Mean Streets and Taxi Driver ever hit screens. In fact, his early work with director Brian De Palma reveals an actor almost fully-developed from the very beginning, working with the same level of disturbing intensity and charismatic appeal. Simply put: the camera loves him. But in films like Greetings and its sequel, Hi, Mom!, De Palma's camera takes a far more scattershot approach than his later Hitchcock-inspired genre work.

Jon Rubin (De Niro), a wannabe filmmaker and full-time voyeur, returns from Vietnam and hooks up with a sleazy producer (Allen Garfield) who sees the pornography potential. However, Jon's life (and the film) takes a drastic shift into radicalization as he falls in with a left-wing theater group promoting the "Black Experience." From this point, De Palma's film becomes a POV political satire, using the TV documentary format to capture the events as they play out in real time.

Hi, Mom! tracks a clear path towards De Palma’s obsessions as a filmmaker; not only the voyeuristic tendencies used to construct his Hitchcockian thrillers, but the too-often subjugated satiric wit that springs from a culture at war with itself. De Niro is dangerous, unpredictable and often straight-up creepy, full of the quirks and mannerism audiences would take for granted a decade later (there's a lot of Travis Bickle on display here). It’s far afield from the arena of commercial success, but both actor and director are clearly working themselves up to something big.

Previously released on Blu-ray as part of a 3-disc set from Arrow, the new limited-edition from Radiance provides a 4K upgrade from a new restoration featuring Dolby Vision HDR. There’s also a new commentary, behind-the-scenes footage, the Blu-ray premiere of De Palma’s notable Dionysus in '69, a new interview with critic Ellen E. Jones, archival material and collector's booklet with new writing on the film.



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