Blood Simple

Ethan and Joel Coen would make more artful and ambitious movies over the years, but their 1984 debut, Blood Simple, was the purest expression of their filmmaking essence: auteur as sadistic, wise-ass punk. Misanthropic, ostentatious, and utterly self-confident, Blood Simple is film noir as a Rube Goldberg torture device, and its protagonists and villains, though benighted and doomed, earn their moments of pity and terror.

Laconic bartender Ray (John Getz) is having an affair with willful Abby (Frances McDormand), whose husband, Julian Marty (Dan Hedaya), owns the backwater Texas joint where Ray works. Julian hires a detective (M. Emmet Walsh), first to confirm his suspicions about the pair and then to kill them. In an excruciating chain of misapprehensions and misinterpretations and pure dumb luck, everyone's intentions, both base and noble, are thwarted, and most everyone suffers hideously and pointlessly. It's hilarious cruelty, and the Coens rub your face in their showoff style (toned down in this re-edited re-release, which may be the first director's cut ever that's shorter than the original). Blood Simple introduced McDormand, later Joel's wife and an Oscar winner for the Coens' Fargo; and it offered the Walsh what's been his greatest role. In his cheese-colored leisure suit and sweaty Stetson, Walsh redefines the comedy of corruption and the horror of death. At the Avon.
-- Peter Keough