THours later, the hated Texas bar owner slumped in his office chair, apparently dead from a gunshot wound to the chest. Another man is trying to clean up a mess to cover up a crime he mistakenly attributed to someone close to him. However, blood cannot be wiped off easily and soaks into the hardwood. It flows out of the victim's nose and drips down his index finger. An old shirt with an improvised mop soaks up most of the puddles, but leaves behind drips that look like house paint on their way to the bathroom sink. Morally speaking, this whole ordeal represents a stain on the man's conscience. But we should not lose sight of the obvious fact that crime is a troubling problem.
This is the defining sequence of Joel and Ethan Coen's brilliant first feature, Blood Simple, in which they commit crimes of passion, dream up harebrained plots, and… It may be the defining sequence in a career full of amateurs who grossly underestimate how difficult it will be. In the Coen brothers' crime thrillers, we learn over and over again that humans don't die easily, and that impulsive acts of violence and rash planning can lead to tragic endings. A car salesman whose wife is kidnapped in “Fargo,” a vain personal trainer who tries to sell secrets to Russians in “Burn After Reading,” and a man who steals drug money in “No Country for Old Men.” Think of the welder who tries to run away with it. They either overestimate their resourcefulness or underestimate potential variables. Either way, they will pay the price for their arrogance.
When “Blood Simple” came out 40 years ago, we were still years away from the indie boom of sex, lies, and videotape, and other than cheap horror films like 1981’s “The Evil Dead.” There were few places for low-budget genre productions. The Coens assisted their friend Sam Raimi in editing. It took the enthusiasm of festivals and the attention of a small, fledgling distribution company, Circle Films, to bring this film to life, and to launch a filmmaking duo that could easily have slipped back into obscurity. But “Blood Simple'' not only set the stage for the Coens' future as a beloved film in American cinema. It also set the standard for the wave of modern noir that followed.
The opening narration, which would later be echoed in No Country for Old Men, depicts Texas as the sinister side of American individualism, a place where the best-laid plans fall apart and there is no one to save the day. It suggests something. (“You're on your own here.”) Narrated by private investigator Lauren Visser (Emmett Walsh). He takes that cynicism as a personal credo and operates without much respect for God's laws. man. When bar owner Julian Marty (Dan Hedaya) asks him to find evidence that his young wife Abby (Frances McDormand) is sleeping with taciturn bartender Ray (John Getz), Visser tells him Give more than you need. When Marty asked him to do something, Visser replied, “If it's legal and you can pay for it, I'll do it.'' Shortly after, when Marty suggests that he wants Abby and Ray dead, suddenly it becomes far more important that the job is legal than that it is paid properly.
Countless noirs, derived from such seminal works as James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, depict love triangles resolved by murder, but in the case of the Coens, In Blood Simple, it's not the young lovers who are about to commit the murders, but the cuckolded husbands. However, as is typical of future Coen brothers films, the plan quickly falls apart due to a combination of incompetence and greed, and foolish actions with no moral compass. Visser turns out to be not a do-it-all detective or fixer, but a bad guy who thinks it's easier to take Marty's $10,000 and shoot him than kill two strangers at once. This is Texas. No one is paying attention.
It's not often that a filmmaker comes out of the gate with such a fully formed sensibility, but Blood Simple has the Coen family's trademark knowing, mischievous, darkly hilarious vibes. There is a tone. The brothers are clearly well-educated in noir novels and films, allowing them to play around with the genre, modernizing the look with moving cameras and expressive flashes of color, while also telling familiar stories from a fresh angle. I approached. The film is about a crime of passion, but it's surprisingly cold to the touch, starting with Marty. Marty's feelings for Abby are as hard to read as those of Billy Bob Thornton's ruthless barber in the Coens' The Man Who Never Was. (Frances McDormand also played his wife there.)
Blood Simple focuses on a sweaty, painful murder scene. How difficult it is to put an end to life, how annoying it is to tie up all the loose ends. But the deliberate pacing gives the big suspenseful set-pieces more tension, rather than less, because nothing comes easy for those involved. The showdown between Visser and Abby in the loft apartment begins like an homage to Rear Window, with Visser staring at his target from a view directly across the street, but once the two get close, it's a tense yet comical scene. It will be an absurd confrontation. Professionals who put their lives on the line. Even a dark scene in which a man is buried alive in a field off a highway gets the punchline: tire tracks in the soil that lead directly to the scene.
The Coens would get a lot more out of Blood Simple than the chance to make another film, Raising Arizona, three years later. Carter Burwell's moody, melancholy piano theme became his first screen credit and the beginning of a collaboration that would continue throughout most of the Coen family's work. Cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld would make two more films with them before his own directing career would lead to The Addams Family and the Men in Black series. And McDormand became their most frequent star and muse, an actor who could not only play comedy and tragedy, but also make them coexist. There's a lot of unnecessary sadness in Blood Simple due to stupid and heartbreaking human flaws. The Coens could always see both at the same time.
