I first saw Blood Simple, not at the theater, but on a 27-inch color TV from a VHS tape that I’d rented. After watching Raising Arizona, I wanted to check out Joel and Ethan Coen’s first film (and back then, that was the way to do it).
At first, it’s a textbook film-noir plot: A Texas bar owner (Dan Hedaya) hires a private detective (M. Emmet Walsh) to kill his wife (Frances McDormand) and the bartender (John Getz) she’s been stepping out with. But, it’s not as simple as that, of course.
I understood the term “blood-simple,” as used by the Continental Op in Dashiell Hammett’s fix-up novel Red Harvest, to mean a craziness, not necessarily limited to one person, where they think that killing is the easiest way to get what they want, without thinking of the ramifications to themselves or anyone else.
Toss in the fact that it’s not easy to kill someone as you think, and that you may not be seeing the whole picture, and it makes “blood-simple” much more complex.
Blood Simple is a low-budget film, but the Coens make the very best of that limited budget.
They put together a terrific, small cast. Walsh milks his role for every sleazy drop without ever over-chewing the scenery. Hedaya and Getz believably capture their characters’ struggles with difficult decisions or the misconceptions of what is going on. And McDormand, in her first film, convincingly plays a somewhat oblivious femme fatale around whom the whole plot spins.
And Blood Simple is meticulously plotted. If the camera captures something within the film’s frame, it probably means something. There’s a lot of foreshadowing.
For a low-budget debut, Blood Simple is beautifully photographed. It was Barry Sonnenfeld first film as cinematographer; he has gone on to direct a couple of Addams Family movies, the Men in Black trilogy, Get Shorty, and more recently Schmigadoon!, on Apple TV+. (I won’t bring up Wild Wild West.)
The Coens don’t balance the violence with as much humor as in their later films, but the violence isn’t heavy-handed. It adds to the grit of this film noir.
Of late, not every movie that the Coen brothers make is a strike. Hail, Caesar! is not The Big Lebowski; Burn After Reading is not Fargo. But Blood Simple rolls close to 300, and that says something after nearly 40 years.