Blow Out - Sound Bytes | Trash Cinema Club

Apr

10

Blow Out - Sound Bytes

≡ Category: Essential, Movie Reviews By Country, Suspense, United States |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

Country: United States
Genre: Suspense
Director: Brian De Palma
Year: 1981

Rating:

TRASH CINEMA ESSENTIAL MOVIE

Loosely based on the Chappaquidick scandal which scuttled senator Edward Kennedy’s presidential hopes for good, Blow Out is a thriller with all the qualities we have come to expect from a Brian De Palma film: melodrama, violence against women, broad comedy, and suspense. But here, we have something new — tragedy, and a celebration of the role of sound in film.

Jack Terry (a never better John Travolta) is a sound man who’s searching for the perfect scream for a cheapie horror film. One night, while foraging for sounds to add to his library, he witnesses what might have been a political assassination, but which ends up being reported as an accident. Terry attempts to reconstruct the event on film (an amateur happened to be filming the event as well on 8 mm film, in an echo of the Zapruder film from the Kennedy assasination), syncing his sound to the images. The rest of the film concerns his efforts to convince the authorities that the accident was actually murder while protecting the survivor of the accident (Nancy Allen) at the same time.

De Palma, in an uncharacteristically timid move (one wonders if the studio was involved), shows that the government operative responsible for the murder was acting on his own initiative rather than under the orders of his superior, playing into the type of hogwash the Warren Commission tried to foist on the American public when they claimed that Oswald acted on his own when (if!) he shot President Kennedy. Even given this handicap, John Lithgow convincingly portrays the unhinged but ruthlessly logical government operative Burke.

During the running time of Blow Out, De Palma displays an uncommon amount of discipline, marshaling all of his considerable craft in the service of the film instead of showing off, as usual. You won’t find any homages to the Odessa sequence from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potempkin here. De Palma focuses on the matter at hand. Even the sequences portraying violence against women feel germane to the film instead of being there for De Palma’s personal amusement.

De Palma’s stylistic flourishes and lurid obsessions are kept down to a dull roar, enough to qualify Blow Out as trash cinema, but not enough to undermine the essential quality and seriousness of the piece.

Some may take issue with the coda, in which De Palma rubs the viewer’s nose in the fate of his protagonists, but for once, instead of the leering quality of a closet sadist rubbernecking at a gruesome roadside accident, it feels like De Palma is grieving along with the audience, and manages to achieve an unexpected and unlikely tragic grandeur that knocks the wind out you, like a sucker punch to the gut.