Alexandre Dumas may be the most popular French writer in cinema, with hundreds of credits to his name based on his classic adventure stories like The Three Musketeers, Man in the Iron Mask, The Corsican Brothers and, of course, The Count of Monte Cristo. Improbably interpreted in the silent era, multiple times, as a short until Henri Pouctal made a fifteen part serial, this massive tome has been rendered time and time again, with varying degrees of fidelity, including a Hanna-Barbera cartoon and an animé. The Japanese have had their way with it, as have the Indians.

The story, as the kids say, is a banger.

A faithful rendering would take over 30 hours but fortunately no one has read the eighteen volume novel so no one complains about the missing parts.

The story, in broad strokes, is that the hero, Dontes, is framed for treason and thrown into a dungeon forever, but his isolation is broken by another man, who has an escape route worked out and also a line on some Templar treasure and, long story short (heh), Dontes escapes after fourteen years, assumes the identify of the Count of Monte Cristo, and then embarks on an elaborate plan of revenge.

His girl, believing him dead, ends up marrying the friend who betrayed and framed Dontes.

There’s a lot of room for fights, confrontations, plotting, swashbuckling, tense dinner parties and sick burns, as well as reflection on the nature of revenge. It would be easy to have Dontes turn into an actual villain, so hard is his heart, but fortunately, the villains who arranged for imprisonment didn’t stop doing evil just with him. By constantly reminding us of their perfidy, we can endure (and even enjoy) the various comeuppances our protagonist arranges.

This French picture came in at 42M Euros (which is about the same in US dollars) and looks good, if a little on the dark side. Literally, dark. The plot also strays into dark territory but, remarkably, doesn’t wallow in it. This is at heart a solid adventure story which gives a good nod to the dangers and bleak possibilities, but ultimately knows the adventure and romance elements are the key to this story’s endurance.

At a three hour runtime, it moves along at a breakneck pace, and many of the elements of the plot are implied. But it all works.

Even though it’s been done dozens of times before, it seems remarkable that it could be done today, and well.

The amazing thing about this debut feature from the Coen Brothers, after the fact that it works so well, is how much of their cinematic language was in place from jump: The idiosyncratic dialogue, the low-angle shots, and the primary theme through their work: To wit, that nobody knows anything.

Even the title, “Blood Simple”, refers to the confused state of the characters. (I had a Georgian friend who claimed that “blood simple” was a term for mental handicaps that resulted from inbreeding, and while I can’t imagine why she’d make that up, I can’t find any evidence for it.) When Julian (Dan Hedaya) hires a private detective (M. Emmet Walsh) to follow his wife Abby (Frances McDormand, in her film debut) and employee, Ray (John Getz), he discovers they are cheating on him.

The private detective has no name, by the way, which is no oversight. The only one who knows he exists is Julian, and so he moves through the story as a mysterious force leaving paranoia and misunderstanding in his wake.

Julian’s slowly driven mad by the thought of Abby with Ray so once again he hires the PI (whom he openly despises) to kill them. But while he can hire the killer PI, he doesn’t really know what the PI is up to, and before you know it, there’s a kind of cat-and-mouse game going on where nobody knows who is the cat and who is the mouse.

The hidden PI’s not the only one creating tension, either. Julian says something to Ray which makes him not just question Abby’s perfectly innocent requests for clarification, but reuse to answer them, assuming she’s just being coy. His refusal to address things makes Abby suspicious of him. And Ray’s heroic act done out of love for Abby just ends up hiding things more and causing more stress.

It’s a taut 96 minutes, which the Coens tightened later into a 93 minute “Director’s Cut”.

A Coen fan can watch it just for the references to their future works, and also certain techniques they quickly dropped. There’s a shot lifted from Evil Dead, for example, which is something akin to a camera on a motorbike being used to zoom in to some action. They stopped using that and other showier techniques fairly early on.

The Coens were pretty hard on this film, at least before Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers, and considered it their worst. I think it’s a damn fine noir.

Film debut of cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld and composer Carter Burwell.

“No lightweight,” as Walter Sobchak might say.