TWEET - 'WHITEWASH' BOOK IN 'GREETINGS'
THE REPORT ON THE WARREN REPORT BY HAROLD WEISBERG


Earlier this week, Real Books in Films tweeted the image above, from Brian De Palma's 1968 film Greetings, along with images of the front and back of the book being held to the camera by Garret Graham, Whitewash: The Report on the Warren Report by Harold Weisberg:

'GREETINGS' ITALIAN POSTER ART - AT NEW BEV TONIGHT


Previously:
Italian poster art for Hi, Mom!, at the New Bev Nov. 28th

IMPRESSIONISTIC POINTS & SLICES OF COLOURED LIGHT
COLIN EDWARDS DELVES INTO DE PALMA'S 'GREETINGS'


While I was checking out that Cult Movies Podcast about Greetings yesterday, I happened upon an insightful post about the film by Colin Edwards, from 2019:

Taking inspiration from Jean-Luc Godard and the French New Wave, as well as Richard Lester’s ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, it’s a free-wheeling, hip, youthful third feature by De Palma.

And that’s how it plays out for the first half with sped-up sequences of tomfoolery set to era-appropriate pop music, semi-improvised slacker talk, fourth-wall breaks and a scattershot, comedic vibe like a sort of anarchic sketch show or a cinematic ‘happening’, man. It works, mostly, and is funny, mostly. I was having a good time.

Then De Palma suddenly exerts himself with a couple of set-pieces that could come from no-one else but him, like he’s had a sudden artistic growth spurt caught on camera. The change happens when De Niro’s character delivers an address to camera on the psychology of “peeping” and the sexual aspect of watching. Once all this has been described for us (thanks for the lecture, Brian!) we then see it demonstrated before our very eyes with De Niro filming a young woman whilst directing her for our pleasure and we get to reflect on the process of seeing. It’s nicely done but it’s the “gag” comes at the end with a brief misdirect followed by a double-punch line that’s really cool. Oh, he’s watching it on a screen after a… ah, no he’s not! De Niro walks “through” the camera (“What are you doing coming in through my window?!”) and physically invades her space. It’s clever, funny and very, VERY De Palma.

That’s followed by another cool scene that’s pretty remarkable and pays off an earlier scene which explained how we can identify people and objects from the most minimal points of visual information. The camera is filming a guy at a party as he talks about stoners. We’re listening although De Palma starts playing with the focus and depth of field so we’re drawn to De Niro who is standing in the far background although our attention is then quickly hijacked by a pretty women filling the visual space only to be replaced by another man in the background in a red top inspecting a glass. The focus then shifts back to the foreground and the first man, who is still talking but are we listening? Our attention is still on the background although the people we are watching are now nothing more than points and slices of coloured light, as though we are standing too close to a moving Seurat painting. It is gorgeous and allows De Palma to present to us a beautiful effect of moving colours and shapes that blurrily exist on the edge of coalescence. It’s the sort of shot he would’ve used his precious dioptre for in later films but here, without it, the effect is wonderfully impressionistic. The film has shifted from a youthful romp to something else; something brimming with confidence.

Perhaps too much confidence that’s quivering on the point of over-spilling because although ‘Greetings’ is inventive and smart it is also didactic and arrogant. A number of times De Palma lectures (he might call it “priming”) us on various aspects of filmmaking so he can pull off a big reveal. Fair enough and it helps sells his gag but there’s also a self-congratulatory air about the proceedings, especially when one character (a dirty movie seller) starts telling De Niro (us) how beautiful what we’re watching is. He’s right, it is beautiful, but if someone was to say De Palma is arrogant then, from the evidence here, I’d not object. Likewise, if someone said these were nothing more than film-school formal experiments I would not disagree. But boy, they’re fun and pretty.

If you are a De Palma fan (which I most certainly am) you’ll enjoy ‘Greetings’ simply from seeing a distinctive and talented director demonstrating and exploring his style. What is also fascinating is how much later De Palma is already here, almost fully formed. Characters discuss Antonioni’s ‘Blow Up’ and political paranoia, essentially laying out the entire concept for ‘Blow Out’ before our eyes. Likewise with ‘Casualties of War’ and the horrors inflicted, specifically, on Vietnamese women. And it should come as no surprise that there is so much comedy here as De Palma has always demonstrated an acute sense of humour in his movies, even if it is often covered in a veneer of set-piece sleaze and thrilling voyeurism.

One of the funniest moments (which I’ll spoil so feel free to skip this paragraph) involves Robert De Niro when his attempt to dodge the draft backfires. After telling the army psychiatrist his most psychotic, racist, murderous, insane, offensive, right-wing, violent, psychopathic thoughts which he hopes will get him rejected for their extreme nature, he’s causally told — “You’re just a little over zealous.” It’s funny as hell and gives a wonderful, subversive punch to that particular anti-war thread.

'GREETINGS' & EARLY DE PALMA ON CULT MOVIES PODCAST
HEATHER DRAIN - "THESE FILMS, IN SOME WAYS, ARE POLIICAL, BUT IN SOME WAYS ARE APOLITICAL"

REMEMBERING JONATHAN WARDEN FROM 'GREETINGS'
ACTOR, WHOSE REAL NAME WAS CHIC CICCARELLI, PASSED AWAY THIS PAST MARCH AT 83


The first figure we see in Brian De Palma's 1968 counterculture comedy Greetings is that of Jonathan Warden. We see his back as the camera follows him down a New York street, and the theme songs plays against the sounds of the city.

Jonathan Warden's birthname was Ernesto Ciccarelli Jr., although when he was doing theater work in the early 1960s, he was known as Chic Ciccarelli. According to an obituary at Tribute Archive, Ciccarelli, who was born in Staten Island, New York on June 18th, 1937, "passed away peacefully at home in West Palm Beach, Florida on March 17th, 2021." He was 83.

A tribute at Empty Mirror Books suggests that Ciccarelli took his film acting name from two stage plays he'd worked on:

'Chi' Osceola

Christened as Ernest Ciccarelli
in Staten Island, N.Y.
during the period of Guernica.

Chi Ciccarelli emerged as an Equity member,
with the Living Theatre whose demise was caused
by too much relevance in an irreverant land.

Reborn as Chi Osceola after
living on the Seminole reservation.

Among
his many enticing performances
Chi played the warden in The Brig
presented by Julian Beck.

Last
as an actor was a film called Greetings
with Robert De Niro, directed by Brian di Palma.
As an actor Chi used the name Jonathan Warden
Jonathan from Oh, Dad, Poor Dad,
and Warden from The Brig.

Before
Chi was with the Becks he was
the macrobiotic chef at
The Paradox on East 7th Street
when he was with the
N.Y. Poets' Theater on St. Marks with
Dianne di Prima & Leroi Jones (Amri Baraka).

In a 1965 memoir by Judith Malina titled Directing the Brig, Malina writes:

Moving with unaccustomed solemnity we learned to share the sense of the ordeal that the Marines felt at Fuji Brig, and that is everywhere felt in the schools of submission, in the fraternities of exclusion, in the clubs of the oppressors.

Drill was taught according to Marine Corps tactics. Chic Ciccarelli, who played the Brig Warden, was a former Marine, and remembered with touching and terrible closeness the cold, hard exhilaration of the drill. Before each rehearsal the company drilled half an hour, after the lunch break, another half hour. We cleared the lobby of The Living Theatre, and there on the tile floors we marched endless hours. Startled ticket buyers often entered in the middle of a drill master's angry scolding. It was not the polite tone of a theatrical director discussing the character with the actor, it was Ciccarelli screaming, "Get your head up, you lousy maggot!"

The drill however had an enlivening effect. The marching is a ritual of great beauty only grown hideous because it stands for the marches towards the fields of death in battle and because it has come to signify the loss of character that ensues when all of life becomes routed into this exactitude. And because you cannot stop, Meanwhile the rhythm of mutuality entices the kinetic senses. The sense of moving in a mutual rhythm with one's fellow man.

(Thanks to Bill!)

OPENING SHOT OF BRIAN DE PALMA'S 'GREETINGS'
AND THE OPENING SHOT OF AARON SORKIN'S 'THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7'


Aaron Sorkin's 2020 film The Trial Of The Chicago 7 (below) opens with President Lyndon B. Johnson on TV in 1969, announcing the draft lottery that would begin late that year, which had the effect of turning even more people against the war in Vietnam. Sorkin simply shows a TV screen with no surrounding context. Contrast this with the shot of the television Brian De Palma uses in the opening shot of his 1968 film Greetings (above). The focus is still on a TV showing LBJ giving a rallying speech, but the frame also shows the TV and several items around it. We find out in a later shot that this TV sits on a kitchen table, so the coffee pot, the coffee mug, the book about the JFK assassination sitting in front, and the random book open to the left, allows a bit of additional context regarding the way people (at least, some people) lived in 1968.

ADAM NAYMAN ON 'GREETINGS' AND LBJ-ERA MOVIES
YOUNG DE PALMA "DRAWING DIRECT PARALLELS BETWEEN KENNEDY'S DEATH & AMERICA'S OVERSEAS QUAGMIRE"


"In 2016," Adam Nayman explains at The Ringer, "the Toronto-based author and my friend Kevin Courrier was working on a book proposal based on a lecture series he had started entitled Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors, an examination of the past six decades of American cinema organized by various presidential administrations. Kevin passed away in 2018 after a long illness without writing the book, by which point I had taken over the lecture series. It is out of respect to him and the many long conversations we had on the topic that I’m introducing a monthly essay series at The Ringer that looks at the direct and subtextual representations of U.S. presidents and their social and political impact, beginning in 1960 with the campaign and election of John F. Kennedy and continuing through October to the Age of Trump—ending on a cliffhanger that may or may not have a sequel. By integrating some of Kevin’s film selections with more of my own, it is my hope to simultaneously reexamine a series of classic American movies and call attention to some neglected titles to further the idea of cinema as a fractured funhouse mirror that distorts and reflects in all directions."

The second part in the series, "States of the Union, Part 2: A Failure to Communicate," covers 1964-1967, "as Lyndon B. Johnson took office—just after JFK’s assassination and just before the Vietnam War." Even so, Nayman finds space in there to touch on Brian De Palma's 1968 film, Greetings:

Both box office hits, neither In the Heat of the Night nor Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was necessarily an explicit shot across Johnson’s bow: For that, you’d need to survey the margins of American moviemaking, where subversives were marshalling a belligerent resistance to LBJ’s efforts. The president’s central role in forming the Warren Commission to investigate the Kennedy assassination—and identify Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone shooter—was critiqued in Emile de Antonio’s 1967 essay-documentary Rush to Judgment, an adaptation of a book by lawyer Mark Lane that stands at the epicenter of subsequent conspiracy theories. De Antonio, the son of Italian immigrants who attended Harvard alongside JFK, would grow to be a thorn in the side of two consecutive U.S. presidents, lambasting Johnson via selectively edited clips in 1968’s scabrous In the Year of the Pig, which castigated American involvement in Vietnam, and 1971’s Millhouse: A White Comedy, which the filmmaker claimed earned him an (unofficial) place on Richard Nixon’s famed enemies list. In tackling JFK’s death and Vietnam, de Antonio distinguished himself as a genuinely contentious documentarian, adopting the fragmented, fractious filmmaking language of the French New Wave and applying it to his home turf.

Occupying an even more formally audacious space—and drawing direct parallels between Kennedy’s death and America’s overseas quagmire—was the young Brian De Palma, whose 1968 comedy Greetings was styled as a faux-vérité picaresque about three draft dodgers (costarring an impossibly young, handsome, and game-for-anything Robert De Niro) traipsing around New York City, hooking up, pulling scams, and getting off on their own voyeurism. The film opens with television footage of Johnson proudly addressing the country, proclaiming “I’m not saying you’ve never had it so good, but that is true, isn’t it?”—a dubious claim of prosperity rebuked by the remainder of De Palma’s wild counterculture farce. In the film’s incredible centerpiece sequence, a conspiracy aficionado played by Gerrit Graham pores over a photo spread of the Zapruder film and traces the trajectory of the fatal bullet on his half-conscious girlfriend’s body, a bit of choreography conflating sex and violence (and physics and pornography) in such a full-frontal manner that the movie was branded by the MPAA with a dreaded X rating. In a way, De Palma’s broad, politicized version of sketch comedy anticipated Saturday Night Live by a decade even as its style and tone were closer to the contemporaneous provocations of Jean-Luc Godard, who skewered Johnson and his policies in 1967’s La Chinoise, about a group of young Maoist revolutionaries plotting in Paris.

Already ensconced as the great modern auteur of French cinema by 1967, Godard had been lobbied by Warren Beatty to direct his upcoming gangster-Western hybrid Bonnie and Clyde; he declined, and Arthur Penn—a devotee of the French New Wave with Hollywood-style chops—stepped in and delivered one of the most influential American movies of the era, if not of all time. No less than the staunch hero of Cool Hand Luke, Bonnie and Clyde’s namesakes (glamorously inhabited by Beatty and the stellar, statuesque Faye Dunaway) took aim at the status quo, albeit as career criminals rather than misunderstood martyrs. What gave the film its power—and marked it as a piece of work closer in spirit to Godard, De Palma, and de Antonio than to In the Heat of the Night or Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner—was its reluctance to flatter its audience.

No sooner has the viewer come to accept the Barrows’ thefts as bloodless, Robin Hood–style high jinks than the senseless, bloody death of a bystander recalibrates our moral compass; by the time the movie reaches its indelible finale, our judgment is once again rerouted by the excessiveness of the pair’s execution by an FBI death squad, a blood-soaked set piece collapsing the gap between Psycho’s shower scene (quoted via Dunaway’s desperate reaching out at the moment of her death) and the Zapruder film, with a little bit of Fail Safe in the form of birds taking flight right before the shots are fired. If it’s possible for a film’s ending to feel at once ambiguous and definitive, Bonnie and Clyde leaves the viewer feeling torn apart without necessarily knowing why. Its mix of lyricism, brutality, and ambivalence would seep into other landmark titles of the late 1960s, as the impending changing of the political guard only deepened the ideological fault lines at the center of American life—and cinema.

'GREETINGS' TURNS 50
OPENED ON THIS DAY IN 1968, AT 34TH STREET EAST THEATER IN NEW YORK
Brian De Palma and Charles Hirsch's Greetings opened at New York's 34th Street East Theater on December 15, 1968. It was the first movie to be rated X by the MPAA. As Glenn Kenny discusses during an audio commentary track included on Arrow Video's new Blu-ray of Greetings, Hirsch pitched the idea for the movie to De Palma as an American version of Jean-Luc Godard's Masculin Féminin. They began shooting on 16mm film, but quickly realized that the format would limit the potential release to very few art houses, according to Laurent Bouzereau, in his book The De Palma Cut. Bouzereau adds that the film initially made three times what it cost (the cost was about $43,100). The film was panned in the New York Times by Howard Thompson, who stated that while De Palma and Hirsch "are determined and camera-minded," they should try next time "for something that matters instead of the tired, tawdry and tattered." A few weeks later, the paper ran three letters from readers in defense of the film, under the headline, "Was That Any Way To Greet 'Greetings'?" William Bayer's letter began, "When a good film is misunderstood and then characterized by Howard Thompson of The New York Times as 'tired, tawdry, and tattered,' it is time to come to the rescue." Kenny quotes more from these letters in his audio commentary.

Greetings follows three young men as they attempt to dodge the Vietnam draft (the film's title directly refers to the first word seen on the page when someone would open up a letter from the U.S. government telling them they've been drafted). Along the way, each of the men, played by Robert De Niro, Gerrit Graham, and Jonathan Warden, grapples with his own personal obsessions (respectively, voyeurism, the JFK assassination, and computer dating). In his commentary, Kenny links the buddies-hanging-out aspect of Greetings to Federico Fellini's I Vitelloni. Aside from a general Godardian influence throughout, there is also direct reference to another Godard film, Vivre sa vie, and, of course, overt references to Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up, the latter of which Chris Dumas has explained (in his book, Un-American Psycho) "was recently in theaters when Greetings was in production; its specific presence here - like Une Femme Est Une Femme in Bertolucci's Before The Revolution* - signifies that the film's logic was, as they say, a topic of conversation."

At one point in the film, Lloyd (played by Graham) asks pop artist Richard Hamilton (playing himself) if he's seen Blow-Up. Shortly after that, Lloyd brings a photo of Dealey Plaza to Tina, a photo assistant played by Tina Hirsch (at the time of filming, her name was Bettina Kugel-- by the time Greetings was released later in the year, she had married Charles Hirsch and changed her name). While this scene makes overt visual reference to Blow-Up, it was Tina Hirsch who insisted on adding a verbal reference in this scene. As she told William Chamberlain a few years back, "Brian and Chuck [Charles Hirsch], the producer and co-writer, wrote the scene. As originally written, Gerrit Graham was, you know, he played a Kennedy assassination buff, and he wants me to blow up a picture taken on the grassy knoll to prove that officer Tippet is Oswald’s accomplice. And that he’s hiding behind a tree. I was supposed to answer that if he blew it up, all you’d see is the grain. I mean a funny side story is that that literally was a studio in which I was working as a photographer’s assistant, and I actually blew up those shots that are shown at the end. I told Brian that I couldn’t say that line, that the movie Blow-Up was all about that. I didn’t feel comfortable saying it without crediting the other movie. So my answer became something like, 'You’re not going to be able to see anything. I’ve seen Blow-Up, I know how this turns out. You’re not going to see anything but grain the size of golf balls.' Years later, Pauline Kael, the movie critic for the New Yorker, quoted the line as one of Brian’s great citations. [Laughing] But, in fact, I was the one who cited Blow-Up. That’s the way it goes."

*Incidentally, Dumas' essay about Greetings in the booklet of Arrow's new disc set is titled, "Before The Revolution."

VIDEO - ARROW TRAILER FOR DE PALMA-DE NIRO BOX
RELEASED LAST WEEK IN U.K., UPCOMING WEEK IN NORTH AMERICA

GERRIT GRAHAM DEBATES VIETNAM ON '69 TV PILOT
WFLD CHICAGO'S 'JERRY G & COMPANY' PILOT INCLUDES CLIP FROM DE PALMA'S 'GREETINGS'


Last week, Rick Thomas posted to YouTube a pilot episode of WFLD-TV's Jerry G & Company. The episode, taped in Chicago on July 26, 1969, featured Gerrit Graham as a guest, with a clip (not featuring Graham) from Brian De Palma's Greetings. The segment begins at about the 33-minute mark, with host Jerry G saying, " I may be wrong, but this may be the first war in the history of this country, or any other, that is opposed by a significant vocal segment of the population, perhaps a war opposed by a majority-- and I say, perhaps..." Jerry G. introduces Graham by first presenting a clip of Robert De Niro from the end of Greetings, as a shorthand way to say that Graham is involved in this new film that shows America's youth opposing the war in Vietnam. Briefly discussing the film, Graham says, "Well, the director and the producer had a screenplay, scenario, and they knew more or less what they wanted out of the film. But we, the actors, wrote the script, if you like-- we improvised it. We made up the dialogue."

Jerry G. then introduces Loren Smith, a Northwestern University Law School Graduate (who would go on in later years to become a federal judge). Jerry G. reads a quote from Smith that states his position on the Vietnam war: "A hawk: a not-totally extinct bird." Graham tells Jerry G. that he is not by nature a political person. Even so, later on in the segment, Graham cannot help but passionately speak up when Smith states that "part of the solution has to be to tell the communist world that we will use force to gain political objectives"...

Gerrit Graham: Now you see, that's just where I disagree, and I just don't buy it. I don't suppose there's any political rhyme or reason to it-- as a matter of fact, I'm sure there isn't. But it just seems to me that the United States has taken upon itself an obligation which most of the world's peoples would just as soon they hadn't taken upon themselves. And I just... there doesn't seem, to me, to be any need for the United States to impose its political ethos on a country which up to that point was not a capitalist bastion.

Loren: What?

Gerrit: Which is what they're trying to make it into.

Loren: I don't think we're trying to do that...