BLOW OUT
© 2001 MGM Home Entertainment

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BLOW OUT

What's happened in the process is that De Palma's high stylized oeuvre has been dwarfed by this unfair criticism which has put a stigma on some of his best work.

One of his most underrated is 1981's BLOW OUT. At the time of release, the movie was mercilessly chided for its bleak view, paranoiac allegations and downer ending. However, viewed in the context of a more challenging era of filmmaking, BLOW OUT is sheer genius in retrospect.

The film begins as a parody of all the stalker films of the era voyeuristic camera shots peeping into the windows of scantily clad coeds, featuring a couple of murders and of course the requisite shower scene. The catch of course is that this is a faux movie COED FEVER that Jack Terri (John Travolta) is providing the sound effects for. When the director demands a better variety of sounds not the one's that they've used over and over again, he treks out into the night to capture some nice ambient tones to placate his boss.

Of course, Terri ends up at the wrong place at the wrong time when a tire blows out on a car, sending the vehicle into a river bed below. He saves the passenger, a young woman named Sally (Nancy Allen), but the driver dies on impact. Soon Terri learns the awful truth the driver was a presidential hopeful that Sally was setting up. The tire blow out of course was not an accident, but everyone wants to cover up the truth. Jack has it all on audio tape and when photos from an "amateur" photographer (Dennis Franz) show up, he manages to put the audio to images to uncover an even bigger truth.

Terri finds himself racing against time and an assassin, played by John Lithgow, who is trying to clean up all the loose ends. The movie is smart, taut and filled with dazzling camerawork by Vilmos Zsigmond.

The photography in particular was iconographic for De Palma at the time, utilizing split screen and split diopter shots which allow the foreground and background to be in focus at the same time. It gives the film a very polished feel and creates yet another highly voyeuristic landscape for De Palma to create in.

Loosely based on Antonioni's BLOW-UP, BLOW OUT also features a nod to Francis Ford Coppola's excellent THE CONVERSATION. The story is quite tight, and although there are a few stumbling blocks towards the end, it never loses its edge before the final frames (unlike many of De Palma's latter day works).

Although Travolta wasn't taken seriously when he initially made this film, the multi-talented actor we've become accustomed to shines through as Jack Terri. There's some levity to the character, but his aggressive pursuit of the truth gives Travolta an opportunity to excel. He has a great foil in Allen, who brings a sadness to Sally a tragic character trapped in a nightmare of her own design.

MGM Home Entertainment and 20th Century Fox are currently re-releasing many of De Palma's films from the late '70s and early '80s on DVD (THE FURY, CARRIE, DRESSED TO KILL) but BLOW OUT is definitely the one to search out. A clean, crisp, anamorphic widescreen print of this caliber has not been previously available and it really shows off the craft and care De Palma devotes to his work. He may lift some elements from others, but as this film and many of his efforts from the era prove, he was a master craftsman in his own right.