It’s refreshing to watch films of actors before they turn stars
For a movie buff, few experiences can be as fresh or revealing as watching an early film made by a now-celebrated director, or an early film starring a highly decorated actor — in other words, before the personality in question was beatified or turned into an icon of pop culture.
This occurred to me the other day while watching Brian DePalma’s Hi, Mom! and Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets. Both are relatively early movies made by directors who would become giants of American cinema. Both films also, coincidentally, star Robert De Niro before he became Robert De Niro, if you know what I mean; when he was still a fresh-faced young man whose face hadn’t been twisted into a trademark sneer, with raised eyebrows and sardonic grin permanently in place.
Which is not to say De Niro doesn’t sneer in either of these films — he does, quite a bit. In Hi, Mom! he plays a sly, would-be movie-maker who sets up a camera at his window to videotape people in the building across the street. In Mean Streets, he plays the unruly Johnny Boy, getting himself and his friends in trouble by taking loans and being unable to repay them. Both parts afford plenty of scope for cocky, sardonic expressions, but they also provide a glimpse of the actor before his screen persona was set.
Today, when we see De Niro in a comic role like Meet the Parents (where he plays a middle-aged man suspiciously appraising his daughter’s boyfriend), the humour comes largely from our knowledge that this actor has played so many violent gangsters and angry men of the street in the past — we can understand why his potential son-in-law would be nervous. But Hi, Mom! has the young De Niro doing a less self-conscious, more improvised sort of comedy. At the same time, the performance has traces of the major roles he would do later in his career, such as the disaffected Vietnam veteran Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. The effect is a bit like watching Amitabh Bachchan’s explosions of anger in his pre-stardom movies like Anand or Parwaana — where, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see the roots of the “Angry Young Man” persona that would dominate Hindi movies later in the decade (and also hypothesise about the alternate direction in which Bachchan’s career — and Bollywood in general — might have gone if he had continued playing second leads or character roles).
The career arcs of the directors are equally revealing. Martin Scorsese had already made a couple of low-budget features before Mean Streets, but it was with this film that his very special gifts as a director — his careful use of music, his intelligent referencing of the films he was inspired by, and his themes of Catholic guilt and redemption — burst to the surface. On the other hand, Hi, Mom! is a reminder that Brian De Palma was a very political director at the start of his career (a hard-hitting documentary within the film has a group of black people trying to show white people what it feels like to be black, and it gets quite nastily radical). This aspect of his work is often forgotten because most of his later films were thrillers, but in recent years, with movies like Redacted, he’s been treading that path again — and it’s interesting to contrast a 60-year-old filmmaker’s approach to political filmmaking with what the same director was doing in his 20s.
In a sense, watching these old movies — after already being familiar with the directors’ later masterpieces — is like looking at a detailed blueprint of the house that you’ve been living in for years. You can see how a particular stroke, a choice of shot-composition, set the foundation for an acclaimed career, and you can appreciate the edifice more fully.
[Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based freelance writer]