Newly restored for re-release, Dennis Hopper’s 1980 Out of the Blue is an anti-redemptive parable of alienation. It features both an unforgettable performance and an unforgettable ending.
The spirited teenager Cebe (Linda Manz) has the worst parents in her British Columbia town, maybe in the entire province. Her dad (Dennis Hopper), is a drunk, deservedly in prison for an act of irreparable harm. (Cebe bears a facial scar from this incident – and lots of emotional damage as well).
Her chirpy mom (Sharon Farrell) can’t keep a needle out of her arm or guys out of her pants. Ever impulsive, she ruefully observes that there are two kinds of men – the sexy, adventuresome types and the good providers; it’s evident that she hasn’t bet her life on the good providers.
After five years in prison, the dad is released and gets a job operating heavy machinery at a garbage dump overrun by sea gulls. But he’s still sucking on his ever-present pint bottle, and the town won’t forget why he was incarcerated.
Cebe is full of life and has a gum-chewing swagger. She’s comfortable leading her teen peers in some rowdiness, but she also has a rich imagination and she spends a lot of time in her room alone, acting out her interests in Elvis and punk music.
But Cebe doesn’t know in what direction to channel her exuberance; she can’t tell her sympathetic, court-appointed psychologist (Raymond Burr) what she wants.
The one thing that Cebe doesn’t want is what’s best for her – to be separated from her parents. As is common with neglected and abused children, she clings to the bad situation that she is familiar with.
Cebe acts out in mildly rebellious mischief at school, and she runs away for a night of adventure in Vancouver, somehow emerging unscathed from risky situations.
Back home, she hides from her parent’s arguing in her room. Suddenly, the audience is shocked by something the father says (what??!!), and it is revealed that the parents’ dysfunction is MUCH darker, more twisted than previously apparent.
Cebe erupts and Out of the Blue ends with a stunning, utterly unpredictable climax. Hopper follows Billie Wilder’s screenwriting advice – “don’t hang around”; the ending is not even one second too long.
Dennis Hopper wrote and directed Out of the Blue, pacing the film well and delivering verisimilitude from Vancouver area setting. The camera swirls around the actors at times, and Hopper makes good use of the thousands of seagulls populating a garbage dump.
Out of the Blue is really all about Linda Manz’s singular performance as Cebe. Often improvised her performance is naturalistic and unpredictable. When she is in her room or walking through a Vancouver night, she acts like no one is watching her, and it’s riveting.
By the time she was 19 in 1980, Linda Manz had acted in and narrated a masterpiece (Terence Malick’s Days of Heaven) and appeared in two cult films (Philip Kaufman’s The Wanderers and Dennis Hopper’s Out of the Blue). Then she retired to raise a family. Manz died at 59 in 2020.
As the dad, Hopper is able to demonstrate the that attracted the mom and the playfulness that endears him to Cebe. In a scene where the dad dramatically gets himself fired, Hopper shows a man so enjoying his ballsy action, and then his visage changes as the consequences of his impulsivity sink in, reflecting on his helplessness when he is once again done in by his own impulses.
As the mom, prolific television actress Sharon Farrell excels in a rare movie role.
Don Gordon plays Charlie, the dad’s marginally more functional pal. Gordon had key supporting roles in Bullitt and Papillon and over s hundred appearances in the episodic TV of the 60s and 70s.In Out of the Blue, Gordon displays his gift for playing drunk convincingly. Gordon really understood the essence of drunk thinking and behavior, has an even more compelling drunk scene in Hopper’s The Last Movie).
Out of the Blue premiered at Cannes and enjoyed praise from Roger Ebert (“Bitter, unforgettable. An unsung treasure.”) and other critics. But the ending is so shocking and emotionally desolate, that it wasn’t released in the US; no distributor wanted to bet on its acceptance by a US audience. John Alan Simon acquired the distribution rights for a 17-week art house tour in 1982 with Hopper. Now Simon and Elizabeth Karr have digitally restored Out of the Blue from the only two 35mm prints in existence.
Out of the Blue is not available to stream; (I own the DVD.) In late 2021, the 4K restoration opened at a New York City screening presented by Chloë Sevigny and Natasha Lyonne. I’ll let you know when Out of the Blue reaches Bay Area theaters or a streaming platform.