With a story inspired by Antonioni's Blow Up and a style informed by the high-gloss suspense of Hitchcock, DePalma's Blow Out is raw, politically informed, and littered with film references.
With a story inspired by Antonioni's Blow Up and a style informed by the high-gloss suspense of Hitchcock, DePalma's Blow Out is raw, politically informed, and littered with film references.
Brian De Palma's homage to Michelangelo Antonioni's classic art movie Blow-Up (1966) blends suspense and political paranoia when a Philadelphia soundman inadvertently records a murder. Former police technician Jack Terri (John Travolta) makes his living doing sound for slasher flicks. While recording new outdoor effects one night, Jack witnesses a couple's car careen off a bridge into a river, but he can save only the female occupant, Sally (Nancy Allen). Jack begins to suspect something when he
learns that her dead companion was a Presidential hopeful. Re-playing his tape over and over, Jack thinks that he hears a gun shot before the crash-causing tire blow-out. When sleazy photographer Manny Karp (Dennis Franz) comes forward with photos of the accident, Jack discovers the real reason that the naïve Sally was in the car -- and also a way to prove his auditory suspicions through motion pictures. Even with all his surveillance talent, however, Jack cannot see (or hear) how dangerous the big picture really is until it's too late. Taking a break from horror films, De Palma turned his interests in technology and voyeurism toward more politically loaded subject matter at the dawn of the Reagan era; the film's red, white and blue mise-en-scène, "Liberty Day" celebration climax, and conspiracy surrounding political "dirty tricks" suggest that American politics are still rotten, seven years after Watergate. Although Blow Out earned some favorable notice, particularly for Travolta's first "adult" performance, De Palma's downbeat film did not go over well with 1981 summer audiences. Rather than blockbuster escapism, Blow Out instead harks back to 1970s political thrillers like The Parallax View (1974), using cinematic fireworks to tell an unsettling story about one man's struggle against unstoppable corruption. ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi
Perfectly contrasts movies that reveal the truth against those which avoid it - a blood-drenched yet stake-free slasher vs. the far more insidious horrors of all-American living.
This 1981 release is one of Brian De Palma's more interesting and better-made thrillers, though it's even more abjectly derivative than his Hitchcock imitations.
A movie which continues [De Palma] practice of making cross-references to other movies, other directors, and actual historical events, and which nevertheless is his best and most original work.
Blow Out is the work of a high-spirited, irrepressible director who takes the effects movies can produce far more seriously than he takes the characters they seem to be about.
The final moments of Blow Out are among the most shocking and powerful of De Palma's oeuvre, tacking a final note of irony onto a story that is in every other way a straightforward denunciation of power run amok.
Criterion continues to prefer their De Palma relatively humorless, but there's no denying Blow Out's importance in the underrated director's filmography.
Whatever happened to one of the most interesting efants terribles of the American Nouvelle Vague? Having had the chance of watching this and "Carrie" on the big screen, one can marvel at his impressive domain over framing, colour, sound and movement to create twisted cinematographic symphonies. While DePalma might have
sold his art to the industry, at least he found a worthy successor in the form of Quentin Tarantino.
Blow Out is a pretty decent thriller from the early 80's staring John Travolta. Travolta plays a movie sound effects technician who accidentally records the assassination of a governor, and has to expose the truth while protecting himself and another witness from the people who don't want the conspiracy uncovered. The
best parts of the movie were some pretty cool camera angles, a nice sense of tension - courtesy of writer and director Brian De Palma, and a chilling performance from John Lithgow as a disturbed killer. If you were surprised by his murderous turn as a serial killer on the TV show Dexter a few years ago, this movie will show you that he's been good at playing that kind of a character for quite a while. Fans of De Palma, conspiracy films, or John Travolta would be doing themselves a favor by checking this out.
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