Blood Simple

with Frances McDormand, John Getz, Dan Hedaya, M. Emmet Walsh
Written and Directed by Joel Cohen and Ethan Cohen
(1985)
by William Ham

Moviegoers for whom Fargo is their first Coen film may want to head back to frame one and get a load of the raw material that unspools through Blood Simple. Made for less than a million bucks (but looking like much more than that), this neo-noir shadowplay contains many of the same elements that Fargo brings to full fruition: small-town avarice and lust, double and triple-crosses that emerge from simple misunderstandings, and several unsavory ways to dispose of a dead body (much tougher when one of the bodies won’t quite bite it). Oh yes, and Frances McDormand, who, as in Fargo, provides the film’s chief source of emotional sustenance as a cheating wife who is marked for death by her sleazy husband (Dan Hedaya, the master craftsman of sleazy husbandry) at the hands of a low-life detective (the great M. Emmet Walsh). As a statement of stylized intent from the Coens, it works marvelously – nearly every scene contains some exciting technique or madcap touch (I love the fly that buzzes an unmoved Walsh in his key scene with Hedaya), a few of which are utterly thrilling in their don’t-forget-it’s-a-movie audacity. The Coens’ harshest critics point to these moments as alleged proof of their clinical approach to cinema, but screw them; for those who get off on film as film, a moment like the dissolve from a finger on an answering machine to a finger touching a bloody car seat is more engaging (and honest in its manipulation) than a multiplex’s worth of emotionally fraudulent product. And the last scene, a death struggle between two characters in separate rooms encompassing forced stigmata, shafts of light through drywall, and ludicrously complicated plumbing, is simply bad-boy filmmaking at its summit. More than that I will not say – just see the damn flick.