Review by Paul Sherman
ERASE THE LAST 20-odd years of movie history from your mind for a minute. Wipe away Raising Arizona, The Hudsucker Proxy, Fargo, The Big Lebowski and No Country for Old Men. Forget about the familiar axis of dark comedy and violent tragedy and the distinct intersection of independent and mainstream moviemaking where we regularly find Joel and Ethan Coen. For our purposes, these places and those movies don’t yet exist.
That’s because they didn’t exist when the Coens’ debut, Blood Simple, ambled into theaters in the spring of 1985. It was a low-budget genre picture by two unknowns, released by a tiny distributor, Circle Films, at a time when independent film was struggling (but soon to rebound, thanks to splashy debuts like this and Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It). No viewer had any expectations going into Blood Simple, though the title—plucked from Dashiell Hammett’s novel Red Harvest—certainly piqued the interest of those of us into American detective fiction. Hell, this was even before the era of brothers as filmmakers, before the Farrelly, Wachowski, Hughes, Russo and Polish brothers had ever rolled a foot of film.
So don’t worry about the subsequent notion of the Coens as post-modern moviemakers, making movies full of inside jokes that must be “studied” to be appreciated. The quirks in their movies have been overanalyzed—positively, negatively and usually needlessly. Cleanse yourself of any such need to “study” and just enjoy Blood Simple. Because there’s so much to enjoy that you don’t want to miss anything by overcomplicating matters.
What you get is a great little movie, in every sense of that phrase, with a killer second half that’s a particularly potent example of non-verbal storytelling. It’s a quintessential American thriller, with its Hammett title, a plot rubbing adultery and murder together with the fervor of James M. Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity) and a parched, God-forsaken setting that might have come from a tawdry tale cooked up by Jim Thompson (The Grifters, Pop. 1280). Yet Blood Simple subversively plays with its traditional thriller elements, freeing itself from old formulas while still acknowledging them. There’s an adulterous love triangle, yet it’s not the lovers plotting murder, and the woman is not a femme fatale. There’s a jilted husband, but he’s not a patsy. And there’s a private detective, but he’s not the morally dependable lone wolf who battles society’s corruption, as Raymond (The Big Sleep) Chandler’s Philip Marlowe does.
It’s the private detective (M. Emmet Walsh) who clues us in to the movie’s unforgiving backdrop in his opening voice-over. “The world is full of complainers,” he begins, telling us, essentially, that in the world as he knows it, everyone is screwed and everyone is guilty. So there are no illusions in Blood Simple. No angels, either. Meurice (Samm-Art Williams), the bartender who knows all three parties in the love triangle, seems like a nice guy, and he’s certainly the most level-headed of the bunch, but that might be only because we don’t see as much of him as we do of bar owner Marty (Dan Hedaya), his younger wife Abby (Frances McDormand) and Ray (John Getz), the bartender with whom she cheats on Marty.
Of course, the detective’s perspective is our doorway into the story. As the other characters are, we’re stuck with him, whether we like the leering, snickering vulture or not. The detective is so deliciously rank that his repeated belittling of Marty actually makes us feel sympathy for Abby’s two-timed and entirely unpleasant husband. Marty has hired him to follow Abby, and the detective catches her stepping out with Ray. But the confirmation of his suspicions about Abby isn’t enough for Marty. He wants blood vengeance, though the detective has his own ideas on how to carry out a high-paying murder plan. The result is an intricately-plotted story that employs an Alfred Hitchcock strategy—to let the audience know more than the characters do—to perfection.
The jigsaw fits together like this: the detective, who hasn’t really murdered Abby and Ray, takes Marty’s money for the job and kills Marty instead. He assumes Marty is dead, and so does Ray, who finds the body, assumes Abby shot Marty (the detective used her gun and left it at the scene of the crime) and buries his boss’s not-quite-dead-yet body. But Abby doesn’t know Marty is dead or the lengths Ray went to to protect her. Conversely, Ray doesn’t know that Abby doesn’t know what he knows. When Abby sees blood stains on Ray’s backseat, she even starts to fear he wants to kill her. The capper is that neither knows about the detective, though in the last hour or so before he dies Ray realizes someone is following him.
So while the Coens have often been criticized for being aloof and unable to connect emotionally with an audience, a sometimes justified criticism (particularly for Miller’s Crossing), Blood Simple is anything but aloof. As any good thriller should, it reels you in and keeps you hooked, partially because of the cleverness of the writing and partially because we want to see how the characters will (or won’t) squirm out of the jam they’re in. It’s an old-fashioned nail-biter because we see the complete picture while they see only fragments. It’s intense, not distant.
Frankly, the first half of the movie might not date so well to fresh eyes and ears. From its opening shots of oil wells and dusty highways, the movie firmly roots itself in its Texas setting and, at the time of its original release, the cast of newcomers seemed awfully Texan. Since then, McDormand (Darkman, Wonder Boys, Almost Famous) and Hedaya (Dick, The Usual Suspects) have been in dozens of movies, and any regular moviegoer knows they’re not Southerners (McDormand, of course, married Joel Coen soon after this movie and later won an Oscar for playing plucky, pregnant cop Marge Gunderson in the Coens’ Fargo). The Costner-esque Getz never quite made it as a star following Blood Simple. MacGruder and Loud, the TV series he starred in just after it, flopped, but he’s worked steadily, too. The cast’s accents now feel unconvincing at times, with Hedaya’s New Yorkese occasionally slipping through, though they weren’t the least bit unconvincing at the time.
If viewers recognized anyone in Blood Simple, it was the inimitable Walsh, whose role as a disreputable parole officer in Straight Time, last seen de-pantsed and chained to a fence alongside a highway by victimized parolee Dustin Hoffman, had already cemented his onscreen image as a slimeball. As Tracey Walter did after playing the oddball janitor in Repo Man, Walsh parlayed the shady detective role into a decade’s worth of work following Blood Simple.
The Coens’ script unleashes most of its verbal fun, like the detective’s opening voice-over, as it sets up the plot. Once he shoots Marty, sounds and visuals really take over and dialogue becomes less important (a foreign viewer could turn off the subtitles halfway through and still comprehend what transpires).
With cinematography by Barry Sonnenfeld, an NYU Film School classmate of Joel’s and later director of The Addams Family and Get Shorty, Blood Simple is always a very sensory experience. The zap of the bug light outside the bar’s back door heightens the tension in the scene between Marty and Ray, while the stench of the fish Marty brings back from Corpus Christi, which remain on his desk long after his death, is almost palpable (the fish also hide the engraved lighter bearing the detective’s name, Loren, which no one ever actually utters). The single most emblematic sound in the entire movie involves no words at all. It has to be the foreboding metallic scrape of the shovel along the highway blacktop when Ray goes after creeping Marty. Whatever happens, you know it’s not going to be pretty.
Ray’s attempt to clean the bar’s bloody back room and his struggle to bury Marty unfurl with very few words. So do the scenes in which the detective returns to the bar to find the evidence Marty put in the safe and when Abby arrives there and interrupts him. Silence is tension in Blood Simple. At one point the Coens break that tension with a zing of humor by having a thrown newspaper clang against the screen door behind Abby and Ray, whose conversation about their predicament has hit a silent, frustrating dead end.
But the culmination of the non-verbal storytelling in Blood Simple, and its most inspired use of visuals, comes during the climax in Abby’s apartment. We know the mysterious “someone” following Ray there is the detective, who quickly shotguns his target after Ray arrives and tells Abby they’re in danger. When the detective gets into the apartment and Abby’s battle with him begins, the shafts of light that pour out of the lit-up bathroom and through the bullet holes he makes after she knifes his hand onto a windowsill are classic thriller images, using the light and shadow of film noir to give form to the danger reaching out to snag her.
The use of light and shadow (the movie’s affection for ceiling fans as shadow-casting atmospheric devices single-handedly ushered in an era of ceiling-fan chic in cinematography) and the James M. Cain-like story made Blood Simple one of the first neo-noirs. After the original noir cycle ended in 1959, with Touch of Evil and Odds Against Tomorrow, film noir thrillers continued to occasionally be made in the 1960s and 1970s, with The Friends of Eddie Coyle and Night Moves being among the best from these years.
Such movies usually weren’t consciously made as tales from an “old” genre. But starting with The Postman Always Rings Twice-inspired Body Heat in 1979, and continuing with the remakes of The Postman Always Rings Twice and Out of the Past (as Against All Odds) in the early 1980s, a new generation of moviemakers who hadn’t been working in 1960 had its crack at the genre. These neo-noir thrillers almost had to be seen as a comment on the genre’s past movies, just as any current western has to be seen in relation to vintage westerns. That’s not surprising with the first wave of neo-noirs, since so many of them were literally drawing from the past movies and novelists that figured so heavily in the original noir cycle.
Blood Simple was, and still is, the most interesting of the bunch (with the literal remakes being the least interesting). The Coens’ movie just has more to offer, more in its tool box. Joel had worked as an assistant editor to Edna Ruth Paul on Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead, and Blood Simple borrows one of Raimi’s tricks when the camera quickly pushes in on Abby and Marty’s tussle with an Evil Dead bit of “shaky-cam.” The horror connection also colors Carter Burwell’s score, which sounds heavily influenced by the synthesizer scores of director-composer John Carpenter in such movies as Halloween and Escape from New York, and extends to Abby, about whom we never learn much but whose plight is akin to the last-girl-standing in so many horror movies.
The mixture of horror and thriller elements also carries over to the previously mentioned blend of violence and humor. Movies often play the two against one another, but as first-time moviemakers, the Coens are extremely assured storytellers here, confident enough to make its most violent character (the detective) its most amusing, and to pepper the danger-laden story with such visual gags as Meurice’s determined march to replace the country music in Marty’s bar with The Four Tops or the camera movement in which we climb over a drunk passed out on the bar.
It was Bruce Campbell of Evil Dead who played Marty in the three-minute trailer the Coens made in order to interest investors in the production. Inspired by Raimi’s success selling limited partnerships in Evil Dead in his native Michigan, the Coens did the same thing in their home state, Minnesota, eventually snagging 60-70 backers for Blood Simple. I don’t know if Campbell was ever considered for the feature, but the brothers offered future Raising Arizona star Holly Hunter the role of Abby. An acting conflict made her unavailable, and she recommended roommate McDormand for the role (Hunter can be heard leaving a message on Meurice’s answering machine, though).
