Blood Simple

Joel Coen, USA 1984, 97 minutes

The Coen Brothers' films are to other people's films what Mozart is to Boyzone. The taciturn pair of long-haired, bespectacled geeks have consistently managed to make their love of cinema shine through every frame of their work, not in a derivative, Tarantino-esque way, but in a respectful, artistic way. Recently they have wowed us with The Hudsucker Proxy and Fargo, as well as winning the Palme D'Or at Cannes with the moody `30s Hollywood satire Barton Fink, but this, their remarkably assured debut, is just as great a work as their more recent efforts.

Similar to both Raising Arizona and Fargo in tone, Blood Simple is a seedy, melodramatic tale of kidnapping and murder. According to the Coens, their obsession with this kind of story stems from the fact that it places ordinary people under a great deal of pressure and forces them to show their true colours, to work out what their priorities are and where their loyalties lie.

Where Raising Arizona andFargo were (despite the latter's high body count) light and warmhearted, with one or two sympathetic characters in amongst the lowlifes, there is no such relief here; everyone in Blood Simple is up to no good. A truly noir plot kicks off with Texas bar-owner Dan Hedaya hiring a sleazy private eye (exceptionally played with leering menace by M. Emmet Walsh) to kill his wayward wife (Fargo's Frances McDormand) and her lover (Clint Eastwood lookalike Sam Getz). Unfortunately, he's forgotten he's in a Coen Brothers movie, and it's only a matter of time before chaos theory kicks in and the whole plan spirals out of control in a series of double-crosses and brutal murders.

With all the sumptuous visuals and bravura camerawork we have come to expect from a Coen movie, the feature of Blood Simple that really creates the atmosphere is its use of sound. Ominous background noises are ever present and at times threaten to drown out the actors altogether. As we see the banality of evil played out on the screen, the monotonous whump-whump of the ceiling fan and the distant thunder of the incinerator show us the evil in the banal, the menace in the mundane.

"Inordinately good...a cornucopia of detail...performances are top-notch all round" - Variety

Review by Ben Stephens
Taken from EUFS Programme 1996-97