Greetings (1968)

Directed by Brian De Palma. Starring Gerrit Graham, Robert De Niro, Jonathan Warden, Rutanya Alda, Allen Garfield, Peter Maloney, Tina Hirsch, Ray Tuttle, Cynthia Peltz, Richard Hamilton. [R]

This subversive counter-culture put-on has virtually no plot and is too of-the-moment to not feel like mothballed satire today, but it’s still worth a look. Three friends—conspiracy-minded Graham, voyeuristic pervert and amateur filmmaker De Niro, and introverted romantic Warden—get into assorted misadventures. Improvisational and reactionary, their obsessions with sex, the Vietnam War, the JFK assassination, et al keep the vignettes as frisky as they are dated, and some of them drag out the point too long, but too many of the bits are legitimately funny for the film as a whole to get restless. Tighter editing would have been both an antidote and a poison; a crucial part of its identity is the flawed shagginess. Not for everyone, but it ought to tickle the fancy of curious parties. First credited film role for De Niro, and also the first film to ever earn an X rating (which, like most non-pornographic X-rated films from the era, ended up being actually rather tame by today’s standards, and was later re-rated as R).

68/100