Promising, Promising

The Amurrica that we are building would be a threatened nation if we let freedom and liberty dah in Veet Nom.

The speaker is President Johnson, sounding the keynote address for Greetings, an anti-Establishment comedy of draft-age youth. In search of form, the movie pretends to cover the adventures of three men marking time before they get their "Greetings" from the draft board. In fact, the flip sketches never cohere into a whole picture; Greetings' vitality and weakness are both due to its inability to concentrate on any subject for more than a moment.

Despite its title, the film's political segments are negligible. The satires of the TV war correspondent and of the men trying to disable themselves before their preinduction physicals are older than General Hershey. Its satires on sex are far more outrageous--and successful. In a jet-black humorous sequence, a Kennedy-assassination-conspiracy theorist strips a girl--and then marks her body for the entry points of the bullets. The film's peak is a mockery of pornographic films that could laugh Grove Press out of business.

The word "promising" is one of those faint praises damned by artists. Translated, it means "skip this and catch the next one." After all, Producer Charles Hirsch, 26, and Director Brian De Palma, 28, filmed Greetings in two weeks for $40,000. Because their exuberance and talent manifest themselves in frame after frame, their film has to be considered--well, promising.

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