Blood Simple (1984)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Blood Simple (1984) – J. Coen & E. Coen

The Coen Brothers’ first feature which I always remember as being dark (in lighting and tone) and impossibly confusing.  So, I watched it again to see if I was right.  There are four principals: Frances McDormand as Abby the wife; Den Hedaya as Julian Marty the husband and bar owner; John Getz as Ray the lover and employee; and M. Emmett Walsh as the private detective.  Our story opens (after a voiceover from Walsh about how things are different in Texas) with Ray helping Abby to flee her husband for Houston – but instead they turn around and discover they were being followed … by Walsh, who subsequently films their sexual tryst and offers the pictures to Julian Marty, who decides to have them killed. But things don’t work out so well for Marty. That said, he doesn’t quite stay put when he ought to.  The Coens’ subversive sense of humour is already in play here (they worked first with Sam Raimi, so there’s that) and their eye for little details that add up big is also well developed.  The surprise for me was just how much work was done with the sound design and soundtrack (by Carter Burwell) – some oddities and a nice 80s piano line.  Still, there’s something very hard to fathom as the chips fall, even if it might actually fit together properly. You can definitely see why it kickstarted the Coens’ career.