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Ten Days Of The Coen Brothers: Day One
Detective Friction
♦ With the release of Hail, Caesar! in the UK on 4 March, Tripwire kicks off a look at all of the Coen Brothers films released to date, starting today with its editor-in-chief Joel Meadows assessing their debut movie Blood Simple (1984).
Blood Simple
Director: Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
Stars: John Getz, Frances McDormand, Dan Hedaya, M. Emmet Walsh
The Coen Brothers’ debut, released a staggering thirty-two years ago, gave very few pointers to the style that they would adopt as their own. Blood Simple is a Brian DePalmaesque southern gothic thriller about a wealthy, jealous man who hires a private investigator (M. Emmet Walsh) to kill the man’s wife and her new lover. But as with every noir tale ever told, nothing runs according to plan.
Blood Simple feels like the sort of story that James M Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity) would have written if he had made films in the 1980s. The cast is pretty strong, with Dan Hedaya who plays Julian Marty, the man who hires private detective Loren Visser (Emmet Walsh) to take care of his cheating wife Abby (Frances McDormand, the future Mrs. Joel Coen, turning in a very watchable performance). McDormand is good here as is Emmet Walsh, who always managed to lift any film he was in, but Blood Simple lacks the flair and invention that later Coen Brothers work possesses. Its director of photography Barry Sonnenfeld went on to carve a niche for himself as a director in his own right and he does create a wonderful sense of mood here. It isn’t a bad film, as it does work as a meat and potatoes noir thriller, but it does feel like it is imprisoned too often by the conventions of the genre it occupies. It can still be seen as a worthwhile debut for Joel and Ethan Coen.
JOEL MEADOWS
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