Insomnia File #80: Greetings (dir by Brian De Palma)

What’s an Insomnia File? You know how some times you just can’t get any sleep and, at about three in the morning, you’ll find yourself watching whatever you can find on cable or streaming? This feature is all about those insomnia-inspired discoveries!

If you were having trouble getting to sleep last night, you could have jumped over to Prime and watched 1968’s Greetings.

Greetings tells the story of three friends, all of whom live in New York and all of whom are dealing with the possibility of being drafted. Paul (Jonathan Warden) gets his “greetings” from the U.S. Government and tries to avoid being drafted by pretending to be a gay Neo-Nazi. Lloyd (Gerrit Graham) deals with the stress of being young in the late ’60s by obsessing over the JFK assassination, to the extent that he even uses a felt-tip pen to illustrate JFK’s wounds on his girlfriend’s naked body. Jon Rubin (Robert De Niro) tries computer dating, hits on every woman he meets, and tries to launch a career as an adult filmmaker. The great character actor Allen Garfield has a brief cameo as “the smut peddler,” and his scene with De Niro feels largely improvised.

Technically, Greetings was not Brian De Palma’s directorial debut. His first film was The Wedding Party, which he shot in 1963 (and which featured a 19-year-old De Niro making his film debut) but which wasn’t released until 1969. However, De Palma was one of three directors who worked on The Wedding Party, and De Palma himself has dismissed it as essentially being a student film. De Palma’s second film was Murder à la Mod, which was his first thriller but which was also little-seen. Greetings was De Palma’s first film to actually gain attention for both the director and co-stars De Niro and Graham. (Warden, sad to say, never makes much of an impression.)

Seen today, it’s definitely a product of its time. After a note telling us that the film has been slapped with an X rating, Greetings opens and ends with footage of Lyndon B. Johnson asking viewers if they’ve ever had it “so good.” Warden, Graham, and De Niro are all playing familiar types: the 1960s urban pseudo-intellectual. De Palma often directs in a semi-documentary style. In the scenes on the streets of New York, it’s not unusual to see bystanders stopping to stare directly at De Palma’s camera. There are a few scenes that are distractingly sped up, which is a bit annoying, but it’s also a sign of De Palma’s love for experimenting with what exactly can be done with a camera. The humor is pure De Palma: dark, paranoid, and occasionally deliberately provocative. I certainly find Greetings to be a funnier film than its sequel, Hi, Mom!. If Hi, Mom! was clearly De Niro’s film, Greetings feels like it belongs to Gerrit Graham. De Niro may have been the more versatile actor, but Graham had a more natural comedic timing.

The most interesting thing about Greetings is how political it actually is. De Palma is often described as being more about technique than anything else, but Greetings reveals him to have been far more sympathetic to the counterculture than contemporaries like Martin Scorsese or Steven Spielberg. The film itself is largely plotless by design. Instead, the film is De Palma’s attempt to capture the attitude of a very specific time and place. Greetings is a film that probably could have only been made in New York in the late ’60s. If nothing else, it’s a time capsule from a very different age.