Blood Simple, the filmmaking debut of brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, has not aged a bit in the more than three decades since it was first released. Taut, suspenseful, well-written, and superbly directed with a sly sense of black humor, it is a deliciously wicked film noir given a modern bent and reset on the open plains of central Texas. Where evil, guilt, and shameless desire festered in the dank, claustrophobic cityscapes of ’40s film noir, here it does so in honky-tonk bars and on endless stretches of empty highway. The key ingredients of a noir-ish murder thriller are all here, namely intense emotions and the willingness to kill because of those emotions, and the plot is deviously constructed to keep the on-screen characters unaware of what is really happening, right down to the movie’s final line of dialogue.

The story concerns the sleazy proprietor of a honky tonk, Julian Marty (Dan Hedaya), whose younger wife, Abby (Frances McDormand), has begun an affair with one of his bartenders, Ray (John Getz). Marty hires an equally sleazy, if not sleazier, private investigator, Loren Visser (M. Emmet Walsh), to follow them and deliver proof that they are, indeed, gettin’ it on. But, Marty doesn’t stop at that. He is so jealous and bitter that his wife has betrayed him (even though it is made clear that he doesn’t really love her) that he asks Visser to kill her and Ray. Visser mulls it over for a few moments, then tells Marty to go on a fishing trip and he will call him when the deed is done.

That is just the set-up, as the movie then follows these four characters as they become mired in misunderstandings, incorrect assumptions, double-crossings, and half-truths. It’s the kind of movie where murder victims aren’t always as dead as they seem, and the wrong person spends an entire night risking his life to cover up a murder he didn’t even commit. The movie works so well because the Coens set everything up very carefully in the opening moments. A conversation between Ray and Marty seems to be just a throwaway moment of male one-upmanship as the jilted husband comes face-to-face with his wife’s new lover, but the dialogue is crucial in establishing not only Ray’s reason for covering up what he thinks is a crime committed by Abby, but also for his not entirely trusting her.

Although Blood Simple was their first movie, it is readily evident from the very beginning that the Coens are masterful filmmakers with a unique outlook and a willingness to experiment. Blood Simple is very much an homage to the black-and-white film noir of the 1940s and ’50s, as well as the hard-boiled detective novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, with a little of Alfred Hitchcock’s wily sadism thrown in for good measure. Yet, when they stir it all up, it becomes uniquely their own with an authorial stamp that is undeniable.

Blood Simple was made on an extremely tight budget of $1.5 million that the Coens raised themselves. Despite these limited means, the movie has a nice polish—perhaps a little rough around some of the edges—but it holds its own visually, much of which is due to the sharp eye and inventive use of color by cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld, who would go on to shoot Raising Arizona (1987) and Miller’s Crossing (1990) with the Coens before becoming a reputable director himself with such movies as The Addams Family (1991) and Men in Black (1997).

If Blood Simple is not quite as great as some of the Coens’ later work, most notably Fargo (1996) and No Country for Old Men (2007), two films with which it shares many similarities, it is because the characters are not quite fully realized. They are psychologically defined and we understand everything they do, but they’re never particularly sympathetic or intriguing because we don’t get to know anything about them (this is particularly true of Ray, who is quite dull, and Abby, who is never clearly a victim or a tramp). While this is certainly in keeping with the film noir tradition, it still limits the movie’s emotional resonance. Where it could have been deeply involving, it instead is content to merely manipulate our responses, something that it does all too well.

Copyright © 2017 James Kendrick

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