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The loathsome proprietor of a Texas bar slumps in his office chair after hours, seemingly dead from a gunshot wound to the chest. Another man tries to clean up the mess in an effort to cover up a crime that he mistakenly assumes someone close to him has committed. Only the blood isn’t wiped away so easily: it seeps into the hardwood. It streams from the victim’s nose and drips from his forefinger. An old shirt used an improvised mop soaks in much of a puddle, but leaves drippings like house paint on the way to the bathroom sink. Morally speaking, the whole ordeal represents a stain on the man’s conscience. But don’t overlook the plain fact that crime is a messy hassle.
That’s the defining sequence in Joel and Ethan Coen’s brilliant first feature, Blood Simple, and it may be the defining sequence of a career filled with amateurs who commit crimes of passion or conceive harebrained plots, but wildly underestimate how hard it is. Again and again in Coen brothers crime thrillers, we learn that human beings don’t die so easily and that impulsive acts of violence or ill-considered schemes lead to tragicomic ends. Think of the car salesman who has his own wife kidnapped in Fargo, the vain personal trainers who try to sell secrets to the Russians in Burn After Reading, or the welder who tries to slip away with drug money in No Country for Old Men. They either overestimate their resourcefulness or underestimate the potential variables. Whatever the case, they pay for their hubris.
When Blood Simple came along 40 years ago, still a few years away from the indie boom of sex, lies and videotape, there was barely any place for low-budget genre fare, other than cheap horror films such as 1981’s The Evil Dead, which the Coens helped edit for their friend Sam Raimi. It took festival raves and the interest of the tiny, newly formed distributor Circle Films to bring the film out into the world and introduce a film-making duo that could just as easily have sunk back into obscurity. Yet Blood Simple did more than set the table for the Coens’ future as beloved fixtures in American cinema. It also set the standard for a wave of modern noirs to follow.
The opening narration, echoed later in No Country for Old Men, suggests Texas as the sinister side of American individualism, a dog-eat-dog place where the best-laid plans can unravel and no one is around to help. (“Down here, you’re on your own.”) The man doing the narrating is Loren Visser (M Emmet Walsh), a private detective who carries that cynicism like a personal credo, operating without much respect for the laws of God and man. When bar owner Julian Marty (Dan Hedaya) hires him to find evidence of his young wife, Abby (Frances McDormand), sleeping with his taciturn bartender Ray (John Getz), Visser gives him more than he needs. When Marty asks him to do something about it, Visser replies: “If it pays right and it’s legal, I’ll do it.” Moments later, as Marty suggests that he wants Abby and Ray dead, the pay being right suddenly matters a lot more than the job being legal.
Countless noirs, stemming from a seminal work like James M Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, are about love triangles sorted out through murder, though in the Coens’ case, it’s not the young lovers who want to do the killing in Blood Simple but the cuckolded husband. But typical of Coen brothers movies to come, the plan falls apart immediately through a combination of ineptitude and avarice, dimwits acting without a moral code. It turns out that Visser isn’t a do-it-all detective and fixer, but a sleazebag who figures it’s easier to take Marty’s $10,000 and shoot him rather than follow through on killing two strangers at once. This is Texas. No one’s paying any attention.
It isn’t often that film-makers come out of the gate with their sensibility this fully formed, but Blood Simple has the knowing, impish, darkly hilarious tone that would become the Coens’ stock in trade. The brothers were clearly schooled enough in noir fiction and movies that they could fiddle around with the genre, modernizing the look with a roving camera and expressive flashes of color while coming at a familiar story from a fresh angle. The film is about crimes of passion, but it’s remarkably cold to the touch, starting with Marty, whose feelings for Abby are as hard to read as those of Billy Bob Thornton’s mirthless barber in the Coens’ The Man Who Wasn’t There. (Frances McDormand played the wife there, too.)
Blood Simple fixates on the sweaty, agonizing grind of murder – how difficult it can be to end a life and how vexing it can be to tie up all the loose ends. Yet the deliberate pace gives the big suspense set pieces more tension, not less, because nothing comes easy for anyone involved. A showdown between Visser and Abby in a loft apartment starts like a homage to Rear Window, with Visser eyeing his target through a sight directly across the street, but once the two get in close proximity, it’s a tense yet comically absurd confrontation between non-professionals fighting for their lives. Even a darker scene, when a man is buried alive in a field off the highway, gets the punchline of tire tracks in the soil leading directly to the spot.
The Coens would take more from Blood Simple than the chance to make another movie, Raising Arizona, three years later. The moody, melancholy piano theme by Carter Burwell was his first screen credit and the start of collaboration that would continue through most of the Coens’ work. The cinematographer, Barry Sonnenfeld, would make two more films with them before his own directorial career led to the Addams Family and Men in Black franchises. And McDormand would become their most frequent star and muse, an actor who could not only do comedy and tragedy, but allow them to coexist. There’s a lot of unnecessary grief in Blood Simple, owing to human flaws that are stupid and heartbreaking. The Coens have always been able to see both simultaneously.
