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Blood Simple
Joel and Ethan Cohen put themselves on the Hollywood map with an undeniably stylish and cleverly mounted noir-ish tale of lust, blackmail, greed, and murder from 1984 called Blood Simple whose real beauty lies in its simplicity.
The story, on the surface is, quite simple: Marty is the wealthy owner of a Texas bar who suspects that his wife, Abby, is having an affair with one of his employees, Ray. He hires a sleazy private detective to get the goods on Abby and Ray and when he does, Marty is unable to deal with what he has learned that he decides to have Abby and Ray murdered, which sets off a bizarre series of incidents that we don't see coming.
Joel and Ethan Cohen's deceptively simple screenplay is so deft in its execution we don't even initially realize what the Cohens are doing. Remember in the old Peter Falk series Columbo how each episode would begin with us witnessing the crime in its entirety and then we would watch Columbo try to piece the crime together? Well, that's what happens here. We see the crime, or to be more specific, crimes being committed so that we know exactly what's going on but none of the characters onscreen have the whole story and because of that, they all go into self-preservation mode because they don't have the whole story and everybody in the movie makes a lot of dumb moves in the name of self preservation that aren't really necessary. The viewer is the only part of the movie experience who has the whole story.
As we start yelling at the screen because we want to fill in the characters on what they do and how a lot of the moves they are making are unnecessary, we find ourselves distracted by some clever directorial techniques that, despite us being the only ones equipped with all the facts, there is an often Hitchcock-calibre suspense created as we watch and hope that these people don't incriminate themselves in order to protect themselves. We see a character discover a dead body and make the decision to get rid of the body in order to protect himself, but all he does is dig an even deeper hole for himself.
As always, the Cohens apply first rate production values to make their story leap off the screen, including stunning cinematography, editing, and dizzying camerawork that almost gets us too close to what's going on. Dan Hedaya is bone-chilling as Marty and John Getz offers the best performance of his meh movie career as the not so bright Ray. Frances McDormand, the real life Mrs. Joel Cohen, as the woman at the center of this mess, but the film is effortlessly stolen by that late M Emmett Walsh as the nasty private investigator. It's easy to see why this film made Hollywood sit up and take notice of the Cohen Brothers.
Joel and Ethan Cohen put themselves on the Hollywood map with an undeniably stylish and cleverly mounted noir-ish tale of lust, blackmail, greed, and murder from 1984 called Blood Simple whose real beauty lies in its simplicity.
The story, on the surface is, quite simple: Marty is the wealthy owner of a Texas bar who suspects that his wife, Abby, is having an affair with one of his employees, Ray. He hires a sleazy private detective to get the goods on Abby and Ray and when he does, Marty is unable to deal with what he has learned that he decides to have Abby and Ray murdered, which sets off a bizarre series of incidents that we don't see coming.
Joel and Ethan Cohen's deceptively simple screenplay is so deft in its execution we don't even initially realize what the Cohens are doing. Remember in the old Peter Falk series Columbo how each episode would begin with us witnessing the crime in its entirety and then we would watch Columbo try to piece the crime together? Well, that's what happens here. We see the crime, or to be more specific, crimes being committed so that we know exactly what's going on but none of the characters onscreen have the whole story and because of that, they all go into self-preservation mode because they don't have the whole story and everybody in the movie makes a lot of dumb moves in the name of self preservation that aren't really necessary. The viewer is the only part of the movie experience who has the whole story.
As we start yelling at the screen because we want to fill in the characters on what they do and how a lot of the moves they are making are unnecessary, we find ourselves distracted by some clever directorial techniques that, despite us being the only ones equipped with all the facts, there is an often Hitchcock-calibre suspense created as we watch and hope that these people don't incriminate themselves in order to protect themselves. We see a character discover a dead body and make the decision to get rid of the body in order to protect himself, but all he does is dig an even deeper hole for himself.
As always, the Cohens apply first rate production values to make their story leap off the screen, including stunning cinematography, editing, and dizzying camerawork that almost gets us too close to what's going on. Dan Hedaya is bone-chilling as Marty and John Getz offers the best performance of his meh movie career as the not so bright Ray. Frances McDormand, the real life Mrs. Joel Cohen, as the woman at the center of this mess, but the film is effortlessly stolen by that late M Emmett Walsh as the nasty private investigator. It's easy to see why this film made Hollywood sit up and take notice of the Cohen Brothers.