Amazon.com Essentials:
The debut film of director Joel Coen and his brother-producer Ethan
Coen,
1983's Blood Simple is grisly comic noir that marries the
feverish toughness of pulp thrillers with the ghoulishness of even pulpier
horror. (Imagine the novels of Jim Thompson somehow fused with the comic
tabloid Weird Tales, and you get the idea.) The story concerns a
Texas bar owner (Dan Hedaya) who hires a seedy private detective (M. Emmett
Walsh) to follow his cheating wife (Frances McDormand in her first film
appearance), and then kill her and her lover (John Getz). The gumshoe turns
the tables on his client, and suddenly a bad situation gets much, much
worse, with some violent goings-on that are as elemental as they are
shocking. (A scene in which a character who has been buried alive suddenly
emerges from his own grave instantly becomes an archetypal nightmare.) Shot
by Barry Sonnenfeld before he became an A-list director in Hollywood,
Blood Simple established the hyperreal look and feel of the Coens'
productions (undoubtedly inspired a bit by filmmaker Sam Raimi, whose The Evil Dead had just
been coedited by Joel). Sections of the film have proved to be an endurance
test for art-house movie fans, particularly an extended climax that
involves one shock after another but ends with a laugh at the absurdity of
criminal ambition. This is definitely one of the triumphs of the 1980s and the
American independent film scene in general. --Tom Keogh
