Popular culture is awash with homages of varying merit. In the film world, Brian de Palma has long been renowned for paying tribute in his own movies to the work of Alfred Hitchcock, and because I'm a Hitchcock fan, I've long been drawn to de Palma's work, although it is much more variable in terms of quality. With Blow Out, he combines various hat-tips to the Master of Suspense, but even more significantly this film is a riff on Antonioni's Blow Up, a memorable movie from the Swinging Sixties.
The premise is fairly simple. John Travolta plays Jack Terry, who works on sound effects at the trashier end of the film business. While working on a slasher film, he goes out one night to play around with sound effects, and finds himself witnessing (and recording) a car crash. The car plunges off a bridge and into a creek. Jack jumps into the water and rescues an attractive young woman, but her male companion is dead.
It turns out that the dead man was a prominent politician, who was regarded as a potential President. The girl (Nancy Allen, who was at the time de Palma's wife) is an escort. When Jack checks his recording, he discovers that there was a gun shot prior to the car crash. The story that the crash was caused by a blown out tyre was a cover for a political assassination.
De Palma doesn't get involved in the politics of the storyline. Instead he focuses on melodrama, and this is a pretty good decision. A bond develops between Jack and the woman he saved, but it soon becomes clear that dark forces are at work and that someone is desperate to avoid the truth coming out. There are some good action scenes and an ironic finale. This isn't a masterpiece - it's markedly inferior to Coppola's much subtler The Conversation, for instance - but it's become something of a cult favourite: Quentin Tarantino is a big fan, for instance. I'd say it's one of de Palma's better films.
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