Blow Out. (15.)
Directed by Brian de Palma. 1981.
Starring John Travolta, Nancy Allen, John Lithgow and Dennis Franz. Out on Blu-ray and DVD from Criterion Collection. 108 mins
The deck of Brian De Palma films are dealt into two packs: the ones for them and the ones for him. The ones for them are usually big-budget studio projects like Mission Impossible, Scarface and The Untouchables. There's been a fair few flops among that stack (Bonfire of The Vanities, Mission to Mars) but often they are films real people enjoy. The ones for him are opulent, stylish, women-in-peril thrillers (Raising Cain, Body Double, Obsession) that endless rework Hitchcock. Or, more precisely, endlessly rework Psycho and Vertigo. Generally, these only find favour with other filmmakers and a particular form of film nerd. Blow Out was the film for him that it was hoped would be successful enough to double up as one for them. That audiences in 1981 shunned it was a disappointment that De Palma arguably never quite recovered from. It is though the one that is generally considered to be his masterpiece. If you had a dollar for every person who has called it underrated you'd probably have enough to have made it a box office hit in 1981. It is one of the least underrated underrated films ever; to my eyes, it continues to be a slightly overrated underrated film, though I keep trying to find in myself the love for it everybody else seems to have.
Conceptually it is staggering: a cultural and political convergence that ties together Blow Up, The Conversation, the Zapruder film and Chappaquiddick into a single thriller. Travolta is a sound recordist working on low budget slasher movies. Out one night trying to get some new nature sounds he sees a car crash into a lake and dives in to rescue any survivors. The driver, a governor who is set to run for President, is already dead. He is though able to save the attractive young female passenger (Allen) who wasn't supposed to have been in the car. He is told to forget about the girl but when photos of the crash appear in a magazine he is able to make a film of it that, when matched with his audio of the crash, shows that the burst tyre was shot out right before the car went into the water. He can prove it was an assassination but who will listen.
This was his follow up to Dressed to Kill, the slasher thriller starring Michael Caine, Angie Dickinson and Allen and, I think, in these two films you probably see De Palma at the height of his powers. These are two immaculate pieces of filmmaking. A health and safety officer would swoon because there are no sharp edges, no jolts, everything just flows. It's almost regal the way De Palma guides you through them. There are the scores by Pino Donaggio, the graceful camera moves, the split screens and split diopter shots that focus on both the fore and background simultaneously. It's giddy and reckless but he plants visual information in each frame with great care. It's almost subliminal, but no viewer gets left behind.
It's magnificent but also skimpy. The vision doesn't seem adequately filled out. There are only really four characters in Blow Out and two of them are caricatures. Franz, as Allen's kind of pimp, is never anything more than a cartoon sleazeball. We are introduced to him wearing a dirty white t-shirt in his mucky apartment and the film is constantly spelling out that he is a scumbag. Allen's character is hardly much better, a cliched ditzy broad, easily exploited and interested primarily in make-up. In her first couple of scenes, Allen's line readings are really quite bad but she grows into the role later, finds a way to give some vitality to her character's two dimensions. But the lack of thought and consideration put into these two characterisations, in sharp contrast to everything else, undermines your faith in it. The technique may be a whizz, but how committed can we be to a film that has such disregard for its major characters?
And when he isn't giving you enough, he's giving you too much. Spoilers: Take the finale, a tense surveillance stalk as Travolta tries to follow a wired up Allen who he has unwittingly sent into the clutches of the homicidal baddy Lithgow. Somehow he manages to slot a massive car chase sequence into the middle of it which destroys the credibility and the tension. Travolta crashes, is knocked unconscious, but when he comes round day had become night and god only knows how much time has passed, yet he is able to pick up the trail instantly. Has Lithgow really been waiting around for hours to find just the right time to kill her off? The most infuriating thing about it is that the negatives for this scene were stolen out of a van but rather than just work around their loss he went back and shot it all again.
The thing about De Palma in general and Blow Out in particular, is that it is audaciously cheeky. Here he is taking on Watergate and the Kennedy assassinations and scandals while trying to best Antonioni, Coppola in one picture. And all the time he is showing the audience his hand, burying them in the laborious practicalities of pre-digital filmmaking, letting them in on how they are being manipulated. Ultimately it's too much, too flippant. For me Dressed to Kill is The great De Palma film because the superficiality of the plot is a perfect marriage with the style. I feel included in the joke. Here I feel I'm being made fun of, that my interest is being mocked.
I don't even hold with the orthodoxy of this being Travolta's best performance. It may be the one that persuaded Tarantino he'd be right for Pulp Fiction but the revelation is more his star quality being used for something more serious than Grease or Saturday Night Fever, than the actual acting. He's good but not special, apart from his delivery of that classic last “it's a great scream,” which is a whole other level and is so Vincent Vega.
Extras
Restored digital transfer, supervised and approved by director Brian De Palma, with DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
Directed by Brian de Palma. 1981.
Starring John Travolta, Nancy Allen, John Lithgow and Dennis Franz. Out on Blu-ray and DVD from Criterion Collection. 108 mins
The deck of Brian De Palma films are dealt into two packs: the ones for them and the ones for him. The ones for them are usually big-budget studio projects like Mission Impossible, Scarface and The Untouchables. There's been a fair few flops among that stack (Bonfire of The Vanities, Mission to Mars) but often they are films real people enjoy. The ones for him are opulent, stylish, women-in-peril thrillers (Raising Cain, Body Double, Obsession) that endless rework Hitchcock. Or, more precisely, endlessly rework Psycho and Vertigo. Generally, these only find favour with other filmmakers and a particular form of film nerd. Blow Out was the film for him that it was hoped would be successful enough to double up as one for them. That audiences in 1981 shunned it was a disappointment that De Palma arguably never quite recovered from. It is though the one that is generally considered to be his masterpiece. If you had a dollar for every person who has called it underrated you'd probably have enough to have made it a box office hit in 1981. It is one of the least underrated underrated films ever; to my eyes, it continues to be a slightly overrated underrated film, though I keep trying to find in myself the love for it everybody else seems to have.
Conceptually it is staggering: a cultural and political convergence that ties together Blow Up, The Conversation, the Zapruder film and Chappaquiddick into a single thriller. Travolta is a sound recordist working on low budget slasher movies. Out one night trying to get some new nature sounds he sees a car crash into a lake and dives in to rescue any survivors. The driver, a governor who is set to run for President, is already dead. He is though able to save the attractive young female passenger (Allen) who wasn't supposed to have been in the car. He is told to forget about the girl but when photos of the crash appear in a magazine he is able to make a film of it that, when matched with his audio of the crash, shows that the burst tyre was shot out right before the car went into the water. He can prove it was an assassination but who will listen.
This was his follow up to Dressed to Kill, the slasher thriller starring Michael Caine, Angie Dickinson and Allen and, I think, in these two films you probably see De Palma at the height of his powers. These are two immaculate pieces of filmmaking. A health and safety officer would swoon because there are no sharp edges, no jolts, everything just flows. It's almost regal the way De Palma guides you through them. There are the scores by Pino Donaggio, the graceful camera moves, the split screens and split diopter shots that focus on both the fore and background simultaneously. It's giddy and reckless but he plants visual information in each frame with great care. It's almost subliminal, but no viewer gets left behind.
It's magnificent but also skimpy. The vision doesn't seem adequately filled out. There are only really four characters in Blow Out and two of them are caricatures. Franz, as Allen's kind of pimp, is never anything more than a cartoon sleazeball. We are introduced to him wearing a dirty white t-shirt in his mucky apartment and the film is constantly spelling out that he is a scumbag. Allen's character is hardly much better, a cliched ditzy broad, easily exploited and interested primarily in make-up. In her first couple of scenes, Allen's line readings are really quite bad but she grows into the role later, finds a way to give some vitality to her character's two dimensions. But the lack of thought and consideration put into these two characterisations, in sharp contrast to everything else, undermines your faith in it. The technique may be a whizz, but how committed can we be to a film that has such disregard for its major characters?
And when he isn't giving you enough, he's giving you too much. Spoilers: Take the finale, a tense surveillance stalk as Travolta tries to follow a wired up Allen who he has unwittingly sent into the clutches of the homicidal baddy Lithgow. Somehow he manages to slot a massive car chase sequence into the middle of it which destroys the credibility and the tension. Travolta crashes, is knocked unconscious, but when he comes round day had become night and god only knows how much time has passed, yet he is able to pick up the trail instantly. Has Lithgow really been waiting around for hours to find just the right time to kill her off? The most infuriating thing about it is that the negatives for this scene were stolen out of a van but rather than just work around their loss he went back and shot it all again.
The thing about De Palma in general and Blow Out in particular, is that it is audaciously cheeky. Here he is taking on Watergate and the Kennedy assassinations and scandals while trying to best Antonioni, Coppola in one picture. And all the time he is showing the audience his hand, burying them in the laborious practicalities of pre-digital filmmaking, letting them in on how they are being manipulated. Ultimately it's too much, too flippant. For me Dressed to Kill is The great De Palma film because the superficiality of the plot is a perfect marriage with the style. I feel included in the joke. Here I feel I'm being made fun of, that my interest is being mocked.
I don't even hold with the orthodoxy of this being Travolta's best performance. It may be the one that persuaded Tarantino he'd be right for Pulp Fiction but the revelation is more his star quality being used for something more serious than Grease or Saturday Night Fever, than the actual acting. He's good but not special, apart from his delivery of that classic last “it's a great scream,” which is a whole other level and is so Vincent Vega.
Extras
Restored digital transfer, supervised and approved by director Brian De Palma, with DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
- Hour-long interview with De Palma, conducted by filmmaker Noah Baumbach in 2010
- Interview with actor Nancy Allen from 2011
- De Palma’s 1967 feature Murder à la Mod
- Interview from 2010 with cameraman Garrett Brown on the Steadicam shots featured in the film within the film
- On-set photos by photographer Louis Goldman
- Original theatrical trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by critic Michael Sragow and, for the Blu-ray edition, Pauline Kael’s original New Yorker review
