Directed by Joel Coen. Produced by Ethan Coen. With John Getz, Frances McDormand, Dan Hedaya, M. Emmet Walsh.
The world is full o' complainers. An' the fact is, nothin' comes with a guarantee. Now I don't care if you're the pope of Rome, President of the United States or Man of the Year; somethin' can all go wrong. Now go on ahead, y'know, complain, tell your problems to your neighbor, ask for help, 'n watch him fly. Now, in Russia, they got it mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else... that's the theory, anyway. But what I know about is Texas, an' down here... you're on your own.
In an interesting coincidence, Blood Simple is a perverse inversion of the title of the last film I watched, Wise Blood. The term "blood simple" comes from the Dashiell Hammett novel, Red Harvest, and describes the way people seem to grow dumber after prolonged exposure to stressful, violent situations. Beyond the title reference, the voice over and opening scene — a rainy night, a desolate highway, a double-cross, a man and a woman — direct our thoughts immediately toward the golden age of the film noir tradition. The term film noir was first applied by the French film critic Nino Frank in 1946 to the Hollywood films: The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Laura, and Murder, My Sweet. In the 50s, the term became used more broadly to describe the wave of American crime films after World War II that featured insulted, beaten heroes driven by desperation to acts of violence.
True to the film noir genre, Blood Simple’s plot revolves around the central characters’ various misunderstandings of the evidence left at a crime scene. Each of them acts on the basis of a fundamental misconception of what’s going on, what he’s doing, and what the others are after. The film noir imagery and story are mixed with horror movie gore, suspense, and absurdism. One of my favorite nods to absurdism is that our brother shamus/hired gun drives a comical VW Bug, wears an ill-fitting pale yellow leisure suit, pockets stuffed with cash, and carries a lighter inscribed with his name in looping rope font and ‘Elks Man of the Year’. Details! Then there is the corpse that won’t die, the blood that won’t wash away, the gun that gets passed around like a hot potato. Frances McDormand’s femme fatale is a combination of shrewdness, toughness, and intelligence that won’t be defeated. And so she walks away from the muddled madness that left three men dead.