BLOW OUT (1981: Dir. Brian De Palma)
Like most young Americans film director Brian De Palma was forever altered by the political assassinations of the 1960s. An obsession with murky conspiracies has echoed through much of his work, but the first film to address it directly was Blow Out. Unlike The Fury's exaggerated comic book tone, Blow Out is a ripped-from-the-headlines thriller, stylishly combining elements of Chappaquiddick and Dealey Plaza to form a paranoid parable about heroism and remorse. Although in the past De Palma was accused (unjustly) of strip mining Hitchcock's themes and techniques, in Blow Out he self-conciously chose to reference works by Michelangelo Antonioni (Blowup) and even his own contemporary Francis Coppola (The Conversation), to reveal the scars that had formed on the American psyche after the killing of the President. By reuniting Carrie's former high school sweethearts John Travolta and Nancy Allen, De Palma found the ideal representatives of a now adult generation caught in the corrupt maelstrom of cynicism and secrecy that had come to represent the post-Nixonian era. For De Palma these sweetly romantic protagonists were made to bear the sins of the fathers, ultimately paying the tragic price in an Eighties culture swamped by political apathy and financial greed. It is a hard pill for an audience to swallow, so he wisely sugar-coated it in the cinematography of Vilmos Zsigmond, employing all of De Palma's signature visual flourishes to stirring effect, including split-screen, deep focus diopters, slow motion, and rear screen projection. Once again drawing from his unofficial repertory company, Blow Out featured unforgettable roles for Dennis Franz (Dressed To Kill) as a rapacious low-rent pimp in a stained undershirt, and John Lithgow (Obsession), whose mask-like visage personified the calculating psychopathy of an apolitical assassin. Despite its pervading air of ruthless suspense, Travolta, in the most resonant portrayal of his career, provides the film with real heart and soul, however the film's failure at the box office would confine him to primarily sequels and remakes, until Quentin Tarantino, a Blow Out uber-fan, cast him in Pulp Fiction (1994). One might think that Blow Out's unpopularity would have expunged De Palma's interest in the paranoid conspiracy genre, but seventeen years later he would try once more...
BLU-RAY
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