Blood Simple

UK Release Date. 18 January 1985
Certification. 18
Running Time. 1 hour 39 mins
Director. Joel Coen
Cast. John Getz, Dan Hedaya, Frances McDormand, M. Emmet Walsh.
Rating. 81%

Review.

Would you believe the Coen Brothers' debut feature, Blood Simple, is 40 years old this year? The film was released prior to the independent cinema boom of the early 1990s at a time when there were barely any avenues for low-budget independent cinema to reach a wider audience. It took rave reviews at film festivals for Ben Barenholtz's newly formed and short-lived [1984-1989] Circle Films to bring the film to a wider audience and thereby introduce the cinema-going public to the filmmaking duo of Joel and Ethan Coen.

Blood Simple has the raw energy and intensity associated with fledgeling filmmakers who are determined to make an impression. Yet, the film did more than introduce the Coen Brothers, it set the standard for a wave of modern film noirs that followed - films such as The Grifters, One False Move, Red Rock West, Romeo Is Bleeding and Se7en.

The film's premise is apparently a straightforward tale of marital infidelity. Ray (John Getz) and Abby's (Frances McDormand) liaison is exposed by a private detective (M. Emmet Walsh) hired by a vengeful husband (Dan Hedaya). However, the screenplay (and excellent script) support a gloriously dark and bloody web of deceit and misunderstanding.

The direction from Joel Coen (and an uncredited Ethan Coen) is exceptional. The style is a claustrophobic mix of perpetual humidity, pulsating ceiling fans and barren Texan roadscapes. It is easily one of the most promising directorial debuts of the 1980s, rivalling masters such as Alfred Hitchcock, William Friedkin and John Frankenheimer in terms of suspense.  

Blood Simple was Frances McDormand's first acting credit, but the standout performance in the film is by the veteran character actor M. Emmet Walsh. Walsh had made a career out of playing dishonest, odious and sleazy characters, but in Blood Simple, he delivers a tour de force performance. Showstoppingly repugnant, there is doubt that his character is both capable and willing to do anything for money, no matter how heinous.

McDormand would become a muse for the Coen Brothers [in fact she married Joel Coen in 1984], but she was not alone in establishing a professional relationship with the Coen Brothers. Blood Simple's cinematographer, Barry Sonnenfeld, would collaborate on two more Coen Brothers' films (Raising Arizona and Miller's Crossing) before embarking on his own directorial career. And the eerie, sombre, haunting melancholic piano theme song composed by Carter Burwell was his first-ever screen credit and the start of the collaboration that would continue through most of the Coen Brothers' filmography. 

I attended a screening of the film as part of The Glasgow Film Theatre's Coen Brothers of the Month programme and was reminded how damn good Blood Simple is. Violent, unrelenting and fiendishly clever. Perhaps, without the comic quirkiness of some of the brothers' subsequent films. But the film laid the foundations for a career filled with similarly dark stories of crimes gone wrong and with Blood Simple the Coen Brothers set the standard for modern noir. Forty years on, the film is as original, fresh and intoxicating as it was back then.