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This Movie Was Excellent

posted 7 years ago by mgtbltp
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'BLOOD SIMPLE,' A BLACK-COMIC ROMP
By Janet Maslin

Published: October 12, 1984, New York Times

BLACK humor, abundant originality and a brilliant visual style make Joel Coen's ''Blood Simple'' a directorial debut of extraordinary promise. Mr. Coen, who co-wrote the film with his brother Ethan, works in a film noir style that in no way inhibits his wit, which turns out to be considerable. This is a film in which a dying man, mistakenly shot by a woman who cannot see him (and who meant to kill someone else), can hear her shout one more insult at the intended victim - and answer her, ''Well, ma'am, if I see him I'll sure give him the message.''

A lot of dying is done in ''Blood Simple,'' and almost none of it is done right. The plot concerns four people - a bar owner (Dan Hedaya), his wife (Frances McDormand), the bartender whom the wife runs off with (John Getz), and the private detective hired to kill the runaway couple (M. Emmet Walsh, the veteran character actor, who plays him with a mischievousness that is perfect for the role).

Their paths cross, re-cross and tangle to the point where the plot becomes a series of ingenious mistakes and misapprehensions. When the bartender, for instance, finds the bleeding, lifeless body of the bar owner, he thinks the wife shot her husband; he loves her, so he cleans up the mess and takes the body away to bury it. But the body is not so dead as it ought to be. And besides - we know, but nobody in the film does - it was the detective who did the shooting.

For all the plot's potential ghoulishness, Mr. Coen often interjects the kind of visual cleverness that underscores the playful mood. A long, late- night tracking shot from one end of the Neon Boot bar to another actually tracks along the surface of the bar itself - and when there is a drunk passed out on the bar, the camera simply lifts up and flies over him, then continues on its route.

A conversation is sharply interrupted by the sound, and sight, of a newspaper flying right into a plate- glass window. A car, embarking at night on a secret mission in a newly furrowed field, is seen the next morning to have left very clear tracks perpendicular to all the furrows. The film's final shootout, though grisly, also manages to have its share of bizarre humor and even beauty.

The camera work by Barry Sonnenfeld is especially dazzling. So is the fact that Mr. Coen, unlike many people who have directed great-looking film noir efforts, knows better than to let handsomeness become the film's entire raison d'^etre. In addition to its stylishness, ''Blood Simple'' has the kind of purposefulness and coherence that show Mr. Coen to be headed for bigger, even better, things.

''Blood Simple'' will be shown tonight at 6:15 and tomorrow at 9:30 P.M. as part of the New York Film Festival.

[–] mgtbltp 7 years ago

Roger Ebert review

The genius of "Blood Simple" is that everything that happens seems necessary. The movie's a blood-soaked nightmare in which greed and lust trap the characters in escalating horror. The plot twists in upon itself. Characters are found in situations of diabolical complexity. And yet it doesn't feel like the film is just piling it on. Step by inexorable step, logically, one damned thing leads to another.

Consider the famous sequence in which a man is in one room and his hand is nailed to the windowsill in another room. How he got into that predicament, and how he tries to get out of it, all makes perfect sense when you see the film. But if you got an assignment in a film class that began with a closeup of that hand snaking in through the window and being nailed down, how easy would it be to write the setup scenes? This was the first film directed by Joel Coen, produced by his brother Ethan and co-written by the two. Their joint credits have since become famous, with titles such as "Miller's Crossing," "Raising Arizona," "Barton Fink" and the incomparable "Fargo." Sometimes they succeed and sometimes they fail, but they always swing for the fences, and they are masters of plot. As I wrote in my original 1985 review of "Blood Simple": "Every individual detail seems to make sense, and every individual choice seems logical, but the choices and details form a bewildering labyrinth." They build crazy walls with sensible bricks.

What we have here is the 15th anniversary "director's cut" of "Blood Simple," restored and re-released. Its power remains undiminished: It is one of the best of the modern films noir, a grimy story of sleazy people trapped in a net of betrayal and double-cross. When it uses cliches like the Corpse That Will Not Die, they raise it to a whole new level of usefulness. The Coens are usually original, but when they borrow a movie convention, they rotate it so that the light shines through in an unexpected way.

How exactly is this a "director's cut?" It runs 97 minutes. The original film had the same running time. The term "director's cut" often means the director has at last been able to restore scenes that the studio or the MPAA made him take out. The Coens have kept all the original scenes in "Blood Simple," and performed a little nip and tuck operation, tightening shots of dialogue they think outstayed their usefulness. It is a subtle operation; you will not notice much different from the earlier cut. The two running times are the same, I deduce, because the brothers have added a tongue-in-cheek preface in which a film restoration expert introduces the new version and claims that it takes advantage of technological breakthroughs made possible since the original came out in 1985.

"Blood Simple" was made on a limited budget, but like most good films seems to have had all the money it really needed. It is particularly blessed in its central performances. Dan Hedaya plays the unkempt owner of a scummy saloon, who hires a private eye to kill his wife and her lover. The wife (Frances McDormand) is having an affair with one of the bartenders (John Getz). The detective is played by that poet of sleaze, M. Emmet Walsh. He takes the bar owner's money and then kills the bar owner. Neat. If he killed the wife, he reasons, he'd still have to kill the bar owner to eliminate a witness against him. This way, he gets the same amount of money for one killing, not two.

Oh, but it gets much more complicated than that. At any given moment in the movie there seems to be one more corpse than necessary, one person who is alive and should be dead, and one person who is completely clueless about both the living and the dead. There is no psychology in the film. Every act is inspired more or less directly by the act that went before, and the motive is always the same: self-preservation, based on guilt and paranoia.

"Blood Simple" is comic in its dark way, and obviously wants to go over the top. But it doesn't call attention to its contrivance. It is easy to do a parody of film noir, but hard to do good film noir, and almost impossible to make a film that works as suspense and exaggeration at the same time. "Blood Simple" is clever in the way it makes its incredulities seem necessary.

In my 1985 review, I tried to explain that: "It keys into three common nightmares: (1) You clean and clean but there's still blood all over the place; (2) You know you have committed a murder, but you're not sure how or why; (3) You know you've forgotten a small detail that will eventually get you into a lot of trouble." Those feelings are so elemental that the movie involves us even though we know the Coens are laughing as they devise their fiendish complications. In a strange way, the contrivances also help excuse the blood and gore. If you are squeamish, here is the film to make you squeam.

[–] mgtbltp 7 years ago

A.V. Club Review

Every 16 years (at least so far), the Coen brothers’ 1984 debut, Blood Simple, gets a theatrical re-release. Back in 2000, the marketing hook was a so-called “director’s cut,” though Joel and Ethan had encountered no interference regarding the original release; they were just a bit embarrassed, in retrospect, by what they perceived as their amateurish touch in certain spots, and re-edited the film in order to obscure or remove those alleged infelicities. Whether artists should ever “improve” work they presented as complete many years earlier is a contentious subject—see, for example, The People Vs. George Lucas—but the Coens have clearly decided to stick with their revised cut, as that’s what’s rolling back into theaters this week, showcasing a new 4K restoration. (It’ll also be the sole version included in a forthcoming Criterion Blu-ray edition.) While purists may grumble—and astute readers may detect a grumbling subtext to this very paragraph—any excuse to see the Coens’ magnificently moody neo-noir on the big screen is welcome.

As is often the case in film noir, neo- or otherwise, infidelity sets the plot in motion. Weary of Marty (Dan Hedaya), her abusive husband, Abby (Frances McDormand, in her screen debut) has been carrying on an affair with Ray (John Getz), one of the bartenders at a tavern Marty owns. Unbeknownst to Abby and Ray, however, Marty suspects their relationship, and hires a private detective, Loren Visser (M. Emmet Walsh), to confirm it. Visser subsequently agrees to kill the cheating lovers, and provides photographic evidence that the deed is done. Unbeknownst to Marty, however, the photos Visser shows him have been carefully doctored, and Abby and Ray are still very much alive. Several more permutations of “unbeknownst to X, however” then follow, as all four of the characters confidently make decisions based on false information and/or mistaken assumptions. Most thrillers keep viewers in the dark about certain details for a while, in order to create mystery or suspense. Blood Simple, by contrast, reserves various elements of surprise for the increasingly hapless folks on screen. Only the audience has a clear picture of what’s really going down.

Decades later, the Coens would employ that same basic idea to comic effect in Burn After Reading. Here, their sense of humor comes through in extremely bitter irony—the movie’s final line is priceless—and a few knowing visual jokes, like a shot in which the camera, traveling the length of Marty’s bar at drink level, finds its path blocked by the head of a passed-out patron and serenely glides up and over the obstacle, continuing on its way. (Cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld later became a notable director in his own right, best known for helming the Men In Black franchise.) The brothers instantly demonstrate their knack for coaxing beautifully offbeat performances from their actors, too; Walsh in particular is delectably sleazy, speaking his lines in a sneering Texas drawl that makes every word sound as if it’s turned rancid. And then there’s Carter Burwell’s score—his very first—which lacks the grandeur of his orchestral work in later Coen films like Fargo, but manages to evoke a palpable sense of dread with a simple piano theme. Insofar as their name signifies an aesthetic, the Coen brothers were fully formed right from the get-go.

That makes it all the more maddening, for the purists (grumble grumble), that it remains impossible to see Blood Simple as originally released, unless one can somehow watch one of the 35mm prints struck in 1984. Due to home-video licensing issues, the VHS and laserdisc releases substitute a truly lame version of “I’m A Believer” for the Four Tops’ “It’s The Same Old Song,” heard several times during the film. That was corrected in the 2000 re-release (which is what’s currently available on DVD and Blu-ray), but at the cost of Joel and Ethan’s retroactive cosmetic surgery, visible again in this latest incarnation. The changes themselves are quite minor, scarcely detectable to anyone who hasn’t committed Blood Simple to memory, and they do improve the movie a bit, honestly; their main effect is to significantly reduce the screen time of an actor named Samm-Art Williams, who’s definitely the weak link in the cast (and hasn’t acted since 1991, according to the IMDB). Still, it’s the principle of the thing. Artists sprucing up their work many years later, merely out of vanity—as opposed to a genuine director’s cut that restores alterations imposed by a studio—is the equivalent of digitally altering old photos to make yourself look less dorky. Blood Simple didn’t need that sort of hindsight tweaking. It’s a trailblazing masterpiece in any form.

[–] Jones70 (6195) 2 years ago

I agree I’ve seen it a few times.

[–] trevorh321 (5495) 2 years ago

Yet another 'brilliant' Coen movie. I have never liked any Coen movie enough to purchase. They are usually just ok films and little more. The characters are in this film are all unlikable. So I didn't really care what happened to them. In lieu of interesting characters, I wanted an interesting plot, and it misses the mark on that, too. I was warned this was a very violent and gory movie. Not really. It has a few moments. It is well acted, the direction is good, the music sometimes very good. But overall, I'd give it a 7/10.

[–] [deleted] 2 years ago

Yep. This is my favorite Coen brother movie.