Is it just me or also an another person finds her performance absolutely terrible? I mean she sounds naive and stupid like a little girl. It pretty much ruins the movie, because she doesn't fit in there at all.
sharei found it endearing
so many movies, so little time
She was terrific. Her acting was so different than usual that I found difficult to recognize her. I knew it was Nancy Allen but she didn't sound like Nancy Allen or exactly look like her. She really inhabited the character.
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I think she's darling in it, and ultimately very poignant.
The VERY picky critic Pauline Kael gave her a rave:
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<< De Palma has been accused of being a puppeteer and doing the actors’ work for them. (Sometimes he may have had to.) But that certainly isn’t the case here. Travolta and Nancy Allen are radiant performers, and he lets their radiance have its full effect; he lets them do the work of acting too. Travolta played opposite Nancy Allen in De Palma’s Carrie (1976), and they seemed right as a team; when they act together, they give out the same amount of energy—they’re equally vivid. In Blow Out, as soon as Jack and Sally speak to each other, you feel a bond between them, even though he’s bright and soft-spoken and she looks like a dumb-bunny piece of fluff. In the early scenes, in the hospital and the motel, when the blonde, curly-headed Sally entreats Jack to help her, she’s a stoned doll with a hoarse, sleepy-little-girl voice, like Bette Midler in The Rose—part helpless, part enjoying playing helpless. When Sally is fully conscious, we can see that she uses the cuddly-blonde act for the people she deals with, and we can sense the thinking behind it. But then her eyes cloud over with misery when she knows she has done wrong. Nancy Allen takes what used to be a good-bad-girl stereotype and gives it a flirty iridescence that makes Jack smile the same way we in the audience are smiling. She balances depth and shallowness, caution and heedlessness, so that Sally is always teetering—conning or being conned, and sometimes both. Nancy Allen gives the film its soul; Travolta gives it gravity and weight and passion. >>
I chalk up Nancy Allen's performance in Blow Out to "the willing suspension of disbelief." I like the film, so I'm not concerned with why her character is the way she is. For me, it's not distracting, she's just an engaging character like some other silly trope in some other good movie -- like a Coen Brothers movie, or like was pointed out, Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday.
shareThe problem is that she acts in this "childlike" way in most of her prominent films. The character she plays in Blow Out is indistinguishable from the hooker in Dressed To Kill. I think what people are attributing to a conscious decision to play her role in Blow Out in a particular way is more so just a reflection of who she is, and not evidence of her acting chops. Every De Palma film she's in suffers from her presence. She doesn't ruin his best films (Blow Out being one of them), but she does bring them down to a certain cheesier, low budget level, almost as if De Palma intends his film to be schlockier than it needs to be or should be.
shareI thought it was her character. She did get convinced to get in a car that was going to crash on purpose.
shareActing aside, I've always found it strange that she was considered a "hot woman" in the late 70s and early 80s.
shareI watched it last night for the first time. She put me off of the movie every time she opened her mouth. I thought she was miscast.
Strangely, though, I grew fond of her by the end of the movie.
I had the same experience. She was annoying but I didn't want her to get killed the way she did.
shareAbsolutely terrible.
shareI agree 100%. Her character was so distracting that it honestly ruined the whole movie for me.
shareI don't even find her that great in anything. Peter Weller has more emotion when he turned into RoboCop than emotion she had in that movie.
shareI really need to revisit Robocop because I don’t really recall much about her performance in it, and I don’t think I’ve seen her in much else.
I’d like to think Blowout would have been elevated several notches with a better lead actress. That said, the film is highly regarded and she’s a big part of it, so we might be in the minority.