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.
IYKYK
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 Coens shot this scene and showed it around to get funding.
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.
Long before she became Minnesota cop-mom in Fargo, Frances was a snack.
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.
“Lebowski” fans may recall that “brother seamus” (Jon Polito) also drove a VW Bug when tailing The Dude. It’s a wonderfully awful choice for someone trying to go unnoticed in 1984, much less 1991.