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Forty years ago, the first Coen brothers movie set the tone for their filmography. Here’s why you should watch it now
The Coen brothers' debut film, the Texas noir Blood Simple, was released January 18th, 1985. Its legacy echoes through their subsequent films.
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Circle FilmsTable of ContentsTable of ContentsA beautiful visual languageJoel Coen and Frances McDormandThe role of comedyFuture Coen collaboratorsMcDormand steals the showA perfect ending
Blood Simple is a gloriously clean, well-constructed darkly comic noir that rides the border between pure satire and utter nihilism. Forty years after its release in January of 1985, the first Coen brothers film remains one of the defining debut features of the past half-century. Like Athena springing full-formed from the head of Zeus, all of the Coen motifs perfectly formed right out of the box.
A beautiful visual languageCircle FilmsLike all Coen films before 2004’s The Ladykillers, Blood Simple is officially directed by Joel Coen to conform with DGA regulations at the time which allowed only one credited director on a project. But the brothers have always directed, written, produced and edited their films together, and Blood Simple, with its stylized shots — a view down the barrel of a discarded gun, two lovers framed in a massive arched window — is, like all of their movies, a succession of perfect images, gilded in neon purples and deep, dark blues. With director of photography Barry Sonnenfeld, himself later an accomplished director (of 1991’s The Addams Family, among others), the Coens create a parade of painting-like frames almost startling in their ceaselessness, clearly influenced not only by classic noir but also roughly contemporary films like Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, with its uncanny sense of the big-sky American west.
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Joel Coen and Frances McDormandCircle FilmsThe movie is notable for its formation of one of Hollywood’s longest-lasting power couples — director Joel Coen and his future wife, star Frances McDormand, met at her audition. Unsurprisingly, as with anything in which McDormand appears, the film belongs to her. To the uninitiated, what will be most surprising is the degree to which she sneaks up on the story, taking it over suddenly and without warning after a slow start. She plays Abby, unhappy wife of Texas bar owner Julian Marty (Dan Hedaya, a New York-accented outsider). In the first scene, she’s leaving her husband and hitching a ride with his employee, Ray (John Getz). In the rain-soaked car sequence that plays under the credits, the Coens already introduce the visual theme that reoccurs throughout the movie, as an almost epilepsy-inducing passing of shadows obscure Getz and McDormand beyond the point of recognition. If the people in this movie ever truly see each other, it’s only sporadically, and in minute flashes — no wonder, then, that so many of the subsequent scenes are obscured by the shadows (or shot through the blades) of ubiquitous overhead ceiling fans.
The role of comedyCircle FilmsRay and Abby end up in bed in a hotel room, there to be surreptitiously photographed by the extraordinarily sweaty private detective Loren Visser (M. Emmet Walsh) who Marty has hired to follow them. Marty, wracked with jealousy, hires Visser to kill them both. Visser, though he’s clearly a podunk nobody with his cruddy Volkswagen bug and hand-rolled cigarettes, takes the gig. What follows is enough misunderstanding for a French farce, in which none of the participants are particularly trustworthy, though some are grislier than others. No wonder Visser spends much of the film, including his climactic final scene, giggling uncontrollably. The movie is careful to take its characters seriously, but some of this stuff is just inescapably funny — Visser, Ray, and Marty are all different shades of stupid, and mostly too weak-stomached to function as the cold-blooded killers it turns out they’ll need to be. Thematically, we’re establishing with the bedrock of a filmic mentality that the Coens would carry into even the most serious of their subsequent films (even their cold butcher knife of a masterwork, No Country for Old Men) — under the best-laid plans of violent men runs a constant undercurrent of cosmic irony.
Future Coen collaboratorsCircle FilmsAll of the future regular members of the Coen stable are, like their directors, firing on all cylinders from the get-go. Carter Burwell, who would go on to write music for all but one of the films the Coens made from 1985 until their ostensibly temporary (but still ongoing) breakup in 2018, provides a synth-and-piano score that sounds like a series of sonar messages emerging from the depths of the ocean. Walsh, who would go on to appear in the Coens’ second film, Raising Arizona, puts on a deliciously unintelligible Southern drawl to create a character alternately turgidly unresponsive (a fly seems always to be buzzing around his forehead) and chillingly determined. (There’s even a cameo from future Raising Arizona and O Brother, Where Art Thou? star Holly Hunter, as a voice over a telephone.)
McDormand steals the showCircle FilmsBut again, the movie belongs to Frances McDormand, whose Abby Marty spends much of the movie unaware of the ill-formed machinations of the men in her life and upon whom reality comes crashing in only in the last scene of the movie, which she plays to perfection. There’s an element of Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie Strode in McDormand’s Abby as she undertakes her final face-off against Visser in the spare apartment she’s rented to escape from her husband. She, too, sweats (everyone in this movie is always sweating in the oppressive Texas heat), backs up against walls and sinks shudderingly to the ground, a pistol trembling in her hand. But her fiery eyes are unyielding. Julian Marty, Visser, and Ray are fascinating figures from a noir perspective — like many of their genre forebears, they appear to be enacting every possible safeguard against their schemes falling apart, but they’re constantly making obvious errors, leaving proof of their malfeasance or loose ends they have to tie up. In the last fifteen minutes of the film, Abby, by contrast, is the closest thing the story has to an action hero, clambering along the sides of buildings, firing well-timed shots, and acting as the focal point of one superbly staged piece of violence I won’t spoil here. As in the Coens’ Fargo (1996), in which McDormand plays a Minnesota police officer who needs only a momentary glance at the crime scene to understand everything that happened perfectly, McDormand is the smartest woman in the room. Seems right to me.
A perfect endingCircle FilmsOf course, even Abby’s victory is based on the same circumstance that guides nearly everything in Blood Simple — misunderstanding. (Even as she confronts Visser, she thinks he’s Marty.) In the film’s final shot, Visser, though hardly triumphant, is laughing once again, as much at himself as at Abby. What fools these mortals be.
Blood Simple is streaming on Max.
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