Director: Brian De Palma
Screenplay: Brian De Palma
Starring: John Travolta, Nancy Allen, John Lithgow, Dennis Franz
Country: US
Running Time: 108 minutes
Year: 1981
Brian De Palma has always seemed to me to be a bridesmaid of a director. Rarely the bride, his long career was nevertheless peppered with some truly great films. You’ll note the past tense, which hardly seems fair as he is still releasing films. They’re not exactly Scarface though. In Blow Out, now released in gorgeous 4K by Criterion, we find some compelling reasons as to why he couldn’t quite stick the landing both in this film, and many others. It is possibly his darkest work, his most personal and challenging, in good ways and bad.
First, the opening sequence lays bare De Palma’s misogyny for a start. A film within a film, it’s supposed to be a pastiche of the grottiest giallo, but De Palma had already dallied with exploitation without his tongue in his cheek (Body Double, for one, bits of Dressed for Kill for another). Here, he’s having his cake and eating it. Dario Argento, also influenced by Hitchcock, revolutionised the slasher genre, but both he and De Palma have made films worse than this sequence.
And then we have the ending of Blow Out. A Vertigo tribute one step too far, the subtlety of that masterpiece lost along with the plot, is a final, misplaced indulgence. While undeniably powerful, the finale is by turns dark, cruel and cheap. I’ve seen Blow Out several times, willing to overlook the problematic start, willing the ending to make sense; but it doesn’t.
Well, that at least is up for debate, and I’m thankful for that. Blow Out provokes a reaction no matter what side of the fence you’re on. Film should not be passive and this story asks questions about humanity to which you won’t like the answer. Something keeps pulling me back to this thing over the years.
Between those two bookends of infuriating disingenuous masturbation -I’m committed to this possibly fringe opinion- lies De Palma’s best work. It’s a perfect distillation of the director’s most rewarding themes, the story giving De Palma the delightful excuse to go full Hitchcock, and outdo Argento, more than ever before (an amateur detective, a loner to boot, chased by shadowy forces, falls in with a femme fatale). More than ever since too. He would soon settle into more genre specific fare, like The Untouchables or Carlito’s Way, brilliant though they may be. But this neo-noir remixed with 70’s exploitation might have been the film Hitchcock would have made if he was still young and hungry enough when the studio system he always pushed against finally snapped.
It’s a wonderfully tactile film, a delight in mise en scene, full of detail as Jack busies himself with his own reel-to-reel tapes and, later, reconstructing a video by animating shots from a magazine. There’s De Palma’s brilliant split diopter and prowling POV shots all over the place, complemented by superlative editing and direction. Colour and music burst with style that never undermines the plot. Given the subject matter, there’s an excuse for some outrageously contrived sound design and that’s a springboard for everything else to have a heightened sense of reality. There are, of course, even scenes set in a train station; honestly, Brian De Palma made full use of his season tickets in the 80s. None of this is at the cost of substance and Blow Out genuinely does follow Vertigo in picking and squirming at the deep-rooted troubling psychosis of humanity. Especially our failures.
However, film history is littered with great style. The real testament to De Palma, as always, is his direction of performances that shine despite his visual bravado. It’s the same reason you remember Pacino in Scarface or Carlito’s Way. Ergo, Travolta is at his pre-Pulp Fiction best, invested fully in character and wrapped into the film’s many layers. It’s a shame we rarely see his genuine talent at this level. Nancy Allen takes longer to settle into what’s a complicated but underwritten role (underwritten by De Palma the writer, but De Palma the director gives Allen the space to bring integrity to naive Sally). Finally, John Lithgow is a wonderful villain. Deadly and perverse yet reined in enough to be terrifyingly viable.
I still believe the film needed a stronger narrative foothold to go quite so dark in the finale. Vertigo remains peerless. In any case, it’s an incredible, unique experience getting to that point. For nothing else, watching Blow Out again with the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in the news is fascinating.
VIDEO
This is a phenomenal transfer to 4K. While we’re always limited by era, and that’s largely true here, some shots could have been filmed this year. Note the scene of Lithgow talking in a phone box; ok, he spends a lot of time in phone boxes, but specifically when disguised as a construction worker. It’s striking how bright and crisp the street is. It’s a film about detail and that’s reflected in the image; texture, reams of magnetic tape littering Jack’s office; faces and skin-tone perfectly balanced. It’s a joy to see.
AUDIO
The soundtrack had to be on point in a film about an audio engineer and it doesn’t disappoint. The remix spreads the soundstage perfectly when it’s appropriate. Dialogue meanwhile is always clear. It’s a busy film, as busy as anything you may think of, but voices are never lost in the cacophony of environmental noise, unless they should be. The score flits between classically Bernard Herrman style and more modern stylings, both having a strong presence across the stage.
EXTRA FEATURES
- New 4K digital restoration, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
- Interview with director Brian De Palma, conducted by filmmaker Noah Baumbach
- Interview with actor Nancy Allen
- Murder à la Mod, a 1967 feature by De Palma
- Interview with cameraman Garrett Brown on the Steadicam shots featured in the film within Blow Out
- On-set photographs by Louis Goldman
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by critic Michael Sragow and Pauline Kael’s original New Yorker review of the film
