Son of Greetings

Greetings, it may be recalled, was a freaky little low-budget comedy about college kids, the draft and politics that enjoyed some success a season or so ago. Much of it shot wide of the mark, but a few scenes (notably a satire on assassination investigators) hit close enough for Writer-Director Brian De Palma and Producer Charles Hirsch to be called "promising," and to get them a major distributor's financing for a sequel. Hi, Mom/!is the uneven result.

Originally and more aptly titled Son of Greetings, the movie chronicles the further adventures of Jon Rubin (Robert De Niro), one of the stalwarts of the original film. Returned from Viet Nam, Jon gets right into the swing of things by buying a 16-mm. camera and becoming the protege of a pudgy master pornographer. He sets up his tripod in his tenement apartment and plays a Peeping Tom game of Rear Window with the tenants of the massive co-op across the way. He even winds up marrying one of them (Jennifer Salt). By this time his film career has gone sour, his debut in radical theater has been a bust, and his new calling as "an urban guerrilla" seems threatened by the balm of matrimony and impending fatherhood.

There are occasional flickers of satiric hilarity, but too many of the jokes seem feeble and rather desperate. The best episode in Hi, Mom! is a re-creation of a guerrilla-theater confrontation between a troupe of angry black actors and a group of gullible suburban honkies who just have to see what being black is like. The episode is tense, electric, terrifying, and suggests that next time around, Moviemakers De Palma and Hirsch might forsake satire for drama. "Promising" is still the word for them.

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