July 1981 concludes with horny Tarzan, Snake Plissken, and De Palma's best movie
But we've also got to talk about UNDER THE RAINBOW, so buckle up
This is the issue I’ve been waiting to write all month. Not one but two stone-cold genre classics released on one weekend. It is also the single hardest edition of this newsletter in a while thanks to the mix of titles. There are films I adore here that I want to get right, films I loathe that I want to give their due, and films that are just plain hard to describe.
People love to talk about the weekend when you could walk from the theater showing The Thing into a theater showing Blade Runner, and that certainly was a hell of a time. But imagine you’re at a multiplex in 1981 and you’re looking up at the marquee and you’re trying to decide between For Your Eyes Only, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Stripes, Superman II, Blow Out, Arthur, The Great Muppet Caper, or Escape from New York. That was possible. That’s what audiences had on their plate when they went to the theater on these final two weekends, and I honestly think this was one of those formative summers for me because it was a summer where I felt like I was teetering between childhood and my teenage years, hungry for new adult experience but still wide open to some really young things as well.
This is one of the longest editions I’ve ever sent to your inbox, so let’s just jump right into it and start with one of my favorite films, maybe the best thing ever released by one of my favorite filmmakers. The whole point of writing this newsletter is to give myself room to write some pieces on these movies that have been important to me over time but that I’ve never really reviewed and this time, we’ve got several of them, almost back-to-back.
JULY 24
Blow Out
John Travolta, Nancy Allen, Peter Boyden, Curt May, John Aquino, John McMartin, Deborah Everton, J. Patrick McNamara, Missy Cleveland, Roger Wilson, Lori-Nan Engler, Cindy Manion, Missy Crutchfield, Marcy Bigelman, Ann Kelly, Dean Bennett, John Coppolino Jr., Archie Lang, Dave Roberts, Claire Carter, Maurice Copeland, John Hoffmeister, David De Felice, Barbara Sigel, Thomas J. McCarthy, Reginald M. Wallace, Robert L. Primrose, Larry Woody, Dick McGarvin, Michael Borghese, Rossana Fichera, James Jeter, Luddy Tramontana, Sid Doherty, Milt Fields, Bud Seese, Maureen Sullivan, Brian Corrigan, Elaine Filoon, Robin Sherwood, Tim Choate, B.J. Cyrus, Dave DeAngelis, Thomas Finn, Tony Devon, Henry Cohen, Bernie Rachelle, William Tarman, Michael Tearson
cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond
music by Pino Donaggio
screenplay by Brian De Palma
produced by George Litto
directed by Brian De Palma
Rated R
1 hr 48 mins
When a sound man accidentally records the death of a presidential candidate, he becomes involved in a far-reaching conspiracy.
We do not arrive at our taste as movie lovers fully formed.
Star Wars was my formative moment, the sword I pulled from the stone, but that same year, I also saw movies like Smokey and the Bandit and The Spy Who Loved Me and The Many Adventures of Winnie The Pooh in the theater and fell in love with all of those as well. By 1981, I was trying to figure out “Movies,” not just individual films, and I was starting to devour film criticism. To be fair, it was a great time for critics, and along with Siskel and Ebert, my weekly TV buddies, I had Pauline Kael putting out these amazing books, leading me to track down her work in The New Yorker. I did not automatically like things they liked. Far from it. Part of why they were all so important to me was because I learned what I loved by the intensity of my reactions to their reactions.
Pauline Kael loved Brian De Palma. That was apparent from reading her work, and her reviews of Dressed to Kill and The Fury were important reviews for me. They led me to watch those films through her eyes, and I found myself pushed so far outside my comfort zone that I had to expand my own ideas about movies and what I considered “good” or “bad’ in the first place. Blow Out was the first of De Palma’s films that I actually managed to talk my way into seeing theatrically, and it was one of those experiences that landed on me so hard that it expanded my ideas about what movies were. I love that age, where you are constantly having your boundaries challenged, and this was a pivotal film for me in terms of my overall worldview.
After all, this is one of the most paranoid of the paranoid thrillers released in a post-Watergate world. Watergate is the first news story I remember from television and the newspapers, and it’s hard not to grow up with some degree of cynicism baked in when the first thing you remember is learning that the government and the President can be liars. I’m not sure I ever had a moment where I wholeheartedly believed that authority figures had my best interests at heart because I grew up in an era where everything was telling me all the time to question authority and to be distrustful of institutions. This film is Brian De Palma’s big broken-hearted statement about how it felt to be an American during this time period, and time has only made it more poignant and powerful.
This was a huge swing for Filmways as a film company. They were a major power in television in the ’50s and ‘60s, producing hit shows like The Addams Family, Mister Ed, and Beverly Hillbillies. Anyone who ever watched Green Acres remembers Eva Gabor purring “This has been a Filmways presentation, dahhhhhling” over the company logo. The original company expanded, buying smaller companies like Ruby Spears Productions and American International Pictures. When they got into movies, they tended to smaller films, personal pictures, or eccentric visions like The Loved One, The Americanization of Emily, and The Cincinnati Kid. They had films break through with cultural buzz or at the box-office or with awards, movies like Ice Station Zebra or Save the Tiger or The Fearless Vampire Killers, but they also had a lot of movies that disappeared completely. By the time the ‘80s began, they were struggling to figure out which company they were… a small company making tiny films or a big company trying to play the same game as the studios. They bet big on Brian De Palma back-to-back with Dressed to Kill and Blow Out, and while I’m a fan of both films, I wouldn’t say the bet paid off for them. By the following summer, they’d be completely finished as a company, and nothing they released after this was as smart, as daring, or as fully accomplished.
I would have made the same bet if I were them. On paper, Blow Out must have looked like a home run. After all, this was a reunion of many of the key elements of Carrie, the film that turned De Palma into a commercial force. Nancy Allen was electric as Chris Hargensen, the megabitch whose actions set off the carnage in the film, while Travolta has a raw animal magnetism as Billy Nolan. Their scenes together in the film felt carnal and crazy, both of them spurring each other to more and more outrageous bad behavior. De Palma didn’t initially want to cast Allen, who he had recently married, but Travolta pushed him on it once they decided they were making Blow Out. De Palma considered several films after Dressed to Kill, and the two he came closest to making instead were Flashdance and Prince of the City. While I’m not sure I can imagine his Flashdance, we get at least a glimpse of what his version of Prince might have looked like in Blow Out, thanks to the sequence where Travolta talks about his career as a police office and the surveillance job that went wrong. That sequence was developed for Prince, and when De Palma and Travolta left that film, they took that scene with them. De Palma had an earlier script called Personal Effects that he also cannibalized, mixing that, the sequence from Prince, and some thoughts about the filmmaking process in general into the film that he eventually made.
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