Though it later attained masterpiece status (courtesy of Quentin Tarantino) and is generally considered the epitome of director Brian DePalma's cinematic artistry. it bombed at the box-office......
We've our own theory on the film's failure which we'll get to in a moment, but it certainly wasn't the actors' fault. John Travolta, fresh from his string of blockbusters ("Saturday Night Fever", "Grease", "Urban Cowboy") provided his natural charisma to the role of a movie sound technician who stumbles upon a murderous political conspiracy.
And the film's other two MVPs also made it unforgettable.........Nancy Allen,as the kewpie-doll floozie caught up in the conspiracy broke your heart and John Lithgow. as a Watergate-inspired psycho hitman gone rogue chilled you to the bone........
So why did audiences turn away?
Don't blame the movie. It's brilliant from beginning to end. And it wasn't just the usual dazzling array of camerawork and editing that everyone had come to expect from DePalma. There was plenty of that of course, but the director also cleverly mixed in the themes that dominated late 70's cinema.........the fear of vast, malevolent forces tampering with our lives and the utter futility of hoping to defeat them.
And also something else nobody had ever seen in a DePalma film before........an aching tragedy......a death that actually shocked and saddened us.
We'd seen enough movies in the 70's where the bad guys won...... "Blow Out" doubled down on that idea and in the film's final shot, rubbed our noses in it......flipping the film's opening gag into a soul-sucking downer.
That's not what audiences wanted to see as the 80's got underway........the Feel Good Boys, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were embarking on their long careers of making movies that made you want to stand up and cheer at the end. and rest of Hollywood followed right along with them.
It didn't make any difference how artful and skilled De Palma was in blending together the paranoid dread of Antonioni's "Blow Up" and Francis Ford Coppola's "The Conversation" and coming up with a thriller uniquely his own........one that threw together JFK conspiracies, Nixonian coverups and DePalma's cheeky sendups of Hitchcock.
Moviegoers kicked the movie to the curb.......but in this current day and age, in the era of Trump and Covid-19, the desolation of abrupt nihilism of "Blow Out" seems a perfect fit our mood and times.
And it's still entertaining, suspenseful and visually witty as hell. BQ welcomes it back with 4 stars (****).
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