Blood Simple (1984)

Blood Simple is the Coen brothers arriving fully formed. It’s a small Texas noir with four characters, and its engine is that not one of them ever understands what has actually happened.

They made it in 1984 with money raised from local investors. It’s a 9.

The Premise

Marty owns a bar and knows his wife Abby is sleeping with Ray, one of his bartenders. He hires a private detective to kill them both. The detective takes the money, decides on a different plan and sets in motion a chain of events where two people each believe the other is a murderer and neither is right.

The Dramatic Irony Structure

The audience knows everything, and nobody on screen does. Ray finds a scene and draws the wrong conclusion. Abby draws a different wrong conclusion. Each attempt to fix the situation makes it worse in a way only we can see. The long sequence of Ray trying to clean up in the bar and then dealing with what’s in his car is nearly wordless and almost unwatchable in the best way.

The Walsh Performance

M. Emmet Walsh plays Loren Visser, the detective, in a yellow leisure suit with a laugh that gets worse every time. He’s greedy, lazy and much more dangerous than he looks, and he’s one of the great screen villains. The Coens have said they wrote the film around him.

The Texas Setting

Barry Sonnenfeld, later a director himself, shot it, and it looks far more expensive than it was: neon, ceiling fans, headlights across a field, a long straight road. Carter Burwell wrote his first score for it and has scored every Coen film since.

The Last Shot

The ending, with a bullet hole in a wall, a dripping sink and a line delivered by someone who still doesn’t understand who he’s talking to, is one of the best final scenes of the eighties.

Craft Note

Does Blood Simple still hold up?

Yes. It’s a 9, and it’s astonishing as a debut. If you like the Coens’ later films, this is where all of it starts.

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