De Niro: A Biography. John Baxter

Gerrit Graham played Lloyd, the conspiracy theorist, and De Niro, with nothing particular on the horizon, agreed to be the voyeur and De Palma alter ego Jon Rubin. Not yet confident enough to leave his day job, Hirsch waited until his paid vacation, during the thirteen days of which he and De Palma shot the film.

      Greetings announced its topicality from the first scene. Audiences accustomed to the kneejerk patriotism of films like The Green Berets hooted as Paul, hoping to be so badly beaten up the army won’t accept him, walks into a tough bar and demands, ‘Which one of you niggers wants to take me on?’ He escapes with only a few cuts and bruises, however, and Lloyd and Jon urge him to think more imaginatively – pretending, for instance, to be homosexual, or part of the fascist underground.

      In any event, they decide he should arrive at the recruitment office exhausted, to which end they keep him awake for two nights, dragging him around New York city and involving him in their own obsessions, in Lloyd’s case the Kennedy killing and in Jon’s sex, in particular voyeurism. Lloyd chats with an artist about the way in which photographs, enlarged, can reveal unexpected truths, and even uses the nude body of a girl to mark Kennedy’s wounds and argue that a single bullet couldn’t have caused them. Another conspiracy freak contacts him in the bookshop where he and Jon work, warning him that shadowy forces threaten any who discover The Truth. In the end, a sniper’s bullet makes Lloyd the eighteenth victim of the Kennedy conspiracy.

      Meanwhile, Paul tries dating by computer, which matches him with a series of unsatisfactory partners. Jon follows women around New York, filming them. Trailing one to the Whitney Museum, he’s sold a 16mm porn film by a man in the forecourt, who assures him it’s a work of art. He also picks up a shoplifter and persuades her to undress while he films her through a window – supposedly for an art piece. All this ends when he’s drafted, though the last scene shows him as a sniper in Vietnam, less interested in the TV reporter trying to interview him than in the pretty Viet Cong girl glimpsed through his telescopic sight.

      While Greetings did imitate the apparent randomness of the nouvelle vague, large sections were as contrived as any Hollywood film. As the three friends, hanging round a clothing shop, discuss ways of ducking the draft, their hats and scarves change arbitrarily from shot to shot, and the client in the foreground suddenly switches places with the seller on the other side of the counter. Gerrit Graham and English pop artist Richard Hamilton sit in a New York park as Hamilton explains how he used photo enlargement in one of his recent works to create an ambiguous image of reality – music to the ears of someone who spends most of his time staring at the Zapruder film of Kennedy’s death.

      De Palma shuns stylistic consistency. The three men cavort around Manhattan as if in a New York version of A Hard Day’s Night, and De Palma drops in a speeded-up sex scene which may have inspired Stanley Kubrick to insert a similar sequence into A Clockwork Orange. As in The Wedding Party, titles introduce sub-sections. In one, titled ‘Two Views of Vietnam’, the maker of a Vietnam documentary describes how it was shot, and a man at a party explains in lubricious details the sex and drugs available in Saigon.

      But the film’s naïveté is deceptive. Shot by shot, De Palma transforms the audience into voyeurs, luring us, as does Hitchcock in Rear Window, from casual curiosity to an obsessive interest in what’s happening through the window opposite. He opens the film with a TV speech by Lyndon Johnson to the American labour organisation AFL/CIO, urging America to fight in Vietnam to protect the American Way. It’s shot from a TV screen, and in a domestic interior, as if we’re watching over someone’s shoulder (a copy of the book Six Seconds in Dallas sits prominently next to the set). De Palma filmed some scenes with a hidden camera, including the long conversation between De Niro and the pornographer, and others, the framing slightly off-centre, with people wandering in and out of the background, as if the actors weren’t aware of the camera.

      De Niro worked on the role of Jon with the zeal that became his trademark. ‘It was make-up and clothes that changed his look,’ said De Palma, ‘but it was more than that. He had inhabited the character, and become different physically.’ Picking up on De Niro’s enthusiasm, Alan Goorwitz, a friend from the Village who’d joined the Actors Studio and changed his name to Allen Garfield, agreed to come up to the Whitney Museum and improvise the scene as the pornographer. De Niro also improvised most of his scenes with Rutanya Aida as the shoplifter who strips on film for him. As she peels, he keeps up a running commentary that is also a parody of Strasberg’s Method, explaining that this is a ‘private moment’ and that she should behave naturally, as if unaware of an audience.

      Unexpectedly, Greetings was a commercial success, in part because its nudity won it an X certificate, which brought people flocking. Its sarcastic view of Vietnam also harmonised with the prevailing cynicism. The film opened on 16 December 1968. Four days earlier, the embarrassed incoming administration of Richard Nixon, who’d squeaked to a narrow election win in November, announced that American fatalities in Vietnam, now the longest war in American history, numbered 30,007, almost ten thousand of them killed in the first six months of that year.

      To De Niro, Greetings didn’t look like the kind of film likely to launch him in movies, even if that had been his ambition. Like Pacino and his other friends and competitors, he thought of himself as pre-eminently a stage performer. The best theatre on the east coast was being done by regional repertory companies like the Long Wharf and the Boston Theater Company, and in 1969 De Niro signed up to work with the latter under its innovative producer David Wheeler – only, paradoxically, to receive almost immediately an invitation to make his first Hollywood film.

      1967 had been the year of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, and half of Hollywood seemed intent on trying to repeat its enormous success. Among the first out of the gate was Roger Corman at American-International Pictures, the king of exploitation movies, who announced Bloody Mama, based on the exploits of 1930s gangster ‘Ma’ Barker and her four homicidal sons. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway had re-invented Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow as star-crossed lovers driven by sexual passion and a lust for fame. In case anyone missed the point, the poster copy read, ‘They’re Young. They’re in Love. They Rob Banks. They Kill People.’ The teenage drive-in cinema audience that was AIP’s biggest market lapped it up. James Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff, AIP’s owners, instantly understood the lesson of Bonnie and Clyde – that some Hollywood stars would now appear in what had formerly been ghetto genres. Known until then almost entirely for biker pictures and cheap science-fiction and horror films, particularly a series of Edgar Allan Poe fantasies directed by Corman, the company branched out into crime films. In 1967, Jason Robards Jr, then reviving his career between bouts of alcoholism, let himself be miscast as Al Capone in Corman’s The St Valentine’s Day Massacre. The following year, someone at the company saw Shelley Winters playing in two episodes of the spoof Batman TV series as ‘Ma Parker’, a twenties-style gang boss. AIP made her an offer she couldn’t refuse.

      With Don Peters, Oscar-nominated for his screenplay for Cornel Wilde’s 1966 The Naked Prey, Robert Thorn, an AIP regular, wrote a treatment based on the Barkers’ career, but Corman found ‘some of the sequences … simply crazy’.

      The writers erred by sticking too closely to the unglamorous facts. Notwithstanding the notice at the start of the film that ‘Any similarity to Kate Barker and her sons is intentional’, Thorn’s revised screenplay had little to do with reality. The real Arizona Clark Barker was anything but a criminal mastermind. ‘The old woman couldn’t plan breakfast,’ complained one gang member. ‘When we’d sit down to plan a bank job, she’d go in the other room and listen to Amos and Andy or hillbilly music on the radio.’

      Nor was her family the tight criminal unit shown in the film. Her eldest son, Herman, killed himself in 1927 after being wounded by police. Both Lloyd and Arthur, alias ‘Dock’, drew long jail sentences in the late twenties. Lloyd, the character De Niro played in the film, stayed in jail until 1938, after which he managed a bar and grill in Denver, Colorado, until 1949, when his wife murdered him. He wasn’t anywhere near Lake Weir, Florida, where Freddie, Ma, Arthur Dunlop and Alvin ‘Creepy’ Karpis died in a furious machine-gun battle in January 1935.

      Determined to