By any standard Joel & Ethan Coen’s 1984 debut feature film Blood Simple is outstanding. It was the brothers’ first ever time working on a feature film and most of the crew had more film set experience than they did. But, in some ways that is why you surround yourself with a great crew from the gaffers, key grips, up to production and costume designers, and director of photography. It takes a village to make a small independent film, but you need what the Coen’s had to make it succeed: dedication, fraternal support and the combination of their clear vision and an amazing script.
Blood Simple is a twisted modern take on classic noir films such as The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, and Red Harvest, which were adaptations of novels by authors Dashiell Hammett, and James M. Caine. The story centres around bar manager Julian (Dan Hadaya) a man cuckolded by his wife Abby (Frances McDormand) with bar worker Ray (John Getz). Julian decides to get revenge by getting the sleazy private detective (M. Emmet Walsh) who discovered the infidelity to murder Abby and Ray. The Coen brother’s twist on the noir genre is that, rather than fill the screen with fast-talking people cracking wise and getting in and out of tough scrapes, the main characters spend most of the film with either no real idea what’s going on or misunderstanding what really is going on. You could easily retool Blood Simple as an ‘madcap’ 80s farce with Steve Martin, Kathleen Turner, and John Candy and the plot would still work.
Low-budget debut features are rarely gifted with such a talented cast. John Getz (The Social Network, NCIS, Bosch) easily switches between slow drawl/slow burn and barely contained panic, and Dan Hadaya (Usual Suspects, Mulholland Drive) gives a great account of a man with revenge and gastric juices both bubbling just below the surface. But the film belongs to M. Emmet Walsh and Frances McDormand. Walsh (Blade Runner, Silkwood), as the sleazy PI, is skin crawling while delivering non-stop inappropriate comments, but is chilling when switching effortlessly to sly and malevolent. McDormand is utterly compelling as Abby, the wife trapped in an unhappy marriage. We don’t know the source of the unhappiness or how long she has known lover Ray, but you feel her frustration, passion and intelligence from the early part of the film’s ‘got-to-get-away’ panic through to the tense denouement with Walsh.
The 4K restoration is superb as it still retains the grit from its low-budget roots but revels in the light/dark contrast of that extra resolution bringing out ink blacks against glowing neon and the bright white car headlights as they strafe the long desolate Texas highways. The extras are small but perfectly formed with very few going over 30 minutes. There are previously available interviews with the Coens, John Getz, and M. Emmet Walsh (who died in 2024) but it’s the three new insightful features I really enjoyed: Designing Blood Simple with Jane Musky, Shooting Blood Simple with Deborah Reinisch, and Composing Blood Simple with Carter Burwell. I learned some great facts from these: the Coens were friends with Sam Raimi (Evil Dead and Spider-Man) and Joel Coen had worked as an assistant editor on The Evil Dead (which may explain some of the fast tracking-in shots); M. Emmet Walsh was working on Silkwood at the same time as Blood Simple and didn’t trust these new directors so insisted on being paid in cash; and it was Frances McDormand’s screen debut and her friend, actress Holly Hunter (who would appear in the Coen’s next feature Raising Arizona) is the voice on the answer machine in one scene
I was a pretentious film and photography student when Blood Simple was released and a group of us saw it at the cinema and talked of little else for weeks after. During that time I saw hundreds of classic and cult films but have found that re-watching some of these 30-40 years later can curdle a good memory (sorry Rumblefish that’s you), but Blood Simple has stood the test of time. It’s well written, filmed, acted and edited, and it’s thrilling from start to finish. One final fact; the Coen Brothers must be one of the few auteurs who realised they could tighten up the original so produced a director’s cut that is 10 minutes shorter than the theatrical release.
Released by STUDIOCANAL
Review by Paul F CookKeep up to date with all new content on Joyzine via our
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