Blow Out (1981)

This film is part of the Colonial’s countdown to the Semiquincentennial Series. Learn more about this film series here.

“On paper this movie, written and directed by Brian De Palma, might seem to be just a political thriller, but it has a rap intensity that makes it unlike any other political thriller…It’s a great movie.” — Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

“This is one of the finest films about the process of movie-making, a bleak, complex work that gives Travolta his most challenging role.” — Philip French, The Guardian

SYNOPSIS

Shot in and around the City of Brotherly Love, Brian De Palma’s Blow Out transforms a Hitchcockian thriller into one of the defining works of the recently deceased New Hollywood era. John Travolta delivers one of the finest performances of his career as Jack Terry, a movie sound technician who inadvertently records evidence of a political assassination, only to find himself ensnared in a web of conspiracy, deception, and escalating violence. Drawing inspiration from Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, De Palma fashions a uniquely perverse thriller that owes as much to Antonioni as it does to Hitchcock, evolving into a virtuoso meditation on image, sound, and the uneasy relationship between truth and political power. By turns suspenseful, heartbreaking, and formally dazzling, Blow Out stands among the crowning achievements of 1980s American cinema, as well as a haunting reminder that the truth does not always set us free.