Ethan and Joel Coen have made 10 movies together over the last 18 years, sharing writing, directing, and producing chores, even editing most of them under the screen name Roderick Jaynes. All of them, without exception, have been odd, outside the mainstream. Lots of visual quirks and extremely stylish cinematography. Most recently, The Man Who Wasn’t There and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the award-winning Fargo, the comic Raising Arizona. 1984’s Blood Simple was their first effort, written while Joel worked as an editor on Sam (Spider-Man) Raimi’s cult classic Evil Dead.
The story in Blood Simple is basic, mostly a framework on which to hang dialog and visuals, a cheating wife, a suspicious husband, a sleazy private eye, and the boyfriend. The story isn’t important and it mainly develops that people all too easily misunderstand based on assumptions they ought not have made. Frances McDormand, who married Joel Coen shortly after this film was made, is the cheating wife, very young, blonde and pretty, but with that unique combination of mouth and eyes that always seem older than she is. This was her first (credited) movie role though she has starred in many of the Coen films and won the Best Actress Oscar for her work in Fargo.
John Getz (yeah, I asked who he was too) gets his biggest part here as the boyfriend. Maybe its his gritty voice but in this film he shows a massive lack of emotional range, which works fine here but is probably less than advantageous in getting other parts. M. Emmet Walsh is the conniving, backstabbing private eye, a terrific character actor who’s made over 75 films in the last 30+ years. Dan Hedaya is the husband, another career character actor who mostly plays a sleaze; typical of his roles, on the comic side, was as Bette Midler’s ex-husband Morty in The First Wives Club. There are very few other roles in this movie, only a couple of which have lines, none of which matter.
Blood Simple can be viewed as the blueprint for almost all of the Coen brother films: tight, confusing plot with strong but (until lately) not big name actors playing odd, offbeat characters, lots of strong but often misdirecting visuals, and, whether comedy or drama, a nearly hallucinatory atmosphere.
Recommended
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