Blood Simple (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1984)

The Coen Brothers have often been dismissive of their first film, a pitch-black noir with moments of humor, and I understand how the roughness and naivete in an artist's early work can make the creator of it wince, but for most of us Coen Brothers fans, Blood Simple is a confident and assured debut with a lot more rawness and grit than you'll find in the rest of the brothers' stylized and meticulous filmography (including True Grit).

That confidence was mostly feigned. Except for a handful of the actors, the filmmakers and their crew had never been on a feature film set before. Joel Coen has said that cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld (who also shot Raising Arizona and Miller's Crossing and eventually became a successful mainstream Hollywood director) was so nervous about his lack of experience that he vomited each day after the dailies. The brothers made a few amateur short films and a two-minute Blood Simple preview starring their friend Bruce Campbell that they used to find investors for the full-length film, but Ethan had no other filmmaking experience. Joel was a little more seasoned. He attended a semester of film school at the University of Texas in Austin before transferring to NYU's film program, where he made a 30-minute short as his thesis project. He then worked as a production assistant on educational films and music videos and was the assistant editor on two horror movies, Fear No Evil and his buddy Sam Raimi's debut, The Evil Dead, but Blood Simple would be his first time behind the camera directing a full-length, commercially distributed movie.

Blood Simple opens with shots of the central Texas landscape and a monologue from one of the main characters, a sleazy private detective named Loren Visser (M. Emmet Walsh). The Coens, in the first of a long tradition of writing parts for specific actors, wrote Visser with Walsh in mind. A seasoned character actor with a long CV, Walsh was initially reluctant to take the part in a low-budget indie from first-time directors because the pay was so low, but he liked the script and relented. Next, we meet our two leads, a bartender named Ray (John Getz, a TV veteran in his third film role) and the wife of the bar's owner, Abby (Frances McDormand, in her first movie part). Ray is driving Abby home from the bar, but the two take a detour to a motel to begin an affair after Abby complains about her husband and Ray tells her he's always liked her.

The bar's owner Julian Marty (Dan Hedaya, the other seasoned movie pro in the cast) suspects his wife of an affair before it's even happened and has hired Visser to follow her around. Visser takes photos of Abby and Ray, shows them to Marty, a murder-for-hire plot is hatched, a con and a grift are attempted, multiple misunderstandings occur, and things get bloody and weird before wrapping up in a stylish, tense, violent, and wryly funny conclusion.

Though all Coen films, even their wackiest screwball comedies, have moments of darkness, Blood Simple remained their most relentlessly bleak vision until their next Texas noir, No Country for Old Men, in 2007. Though the film gives birth to several recognizably Coenesque signatures, Blood Simple is one of the only Coen films that feels like it exists in our mundane, everyday world (I'd include parts of Fargo, A Serious Man, and Inside Llewyn Davis in that group, though those films also have heightened or fable-like moments).

Visser is the first of many loquacious, stylized, and eccentric characters created by the brothers, but much of the film's dialogue is naturalistic and laconic, and even big talkers like Visser and Abby mostly keep quiet in the film's second half unless they have something they need to say. These people feel much more viscerally real-world than the subsequent films' more exaggerated characters (which is not a criticism of the later films, I generally enjoy the stylized world the Coens create), but we also know less about them than we do the people in the brothers' other work.

Using just a few locations in Austin and Hutto, Texas, Blood Simple creates a nervous, claustrophobic atmosphere, and the Coens make excellent use of windows, headlights, slightly ajar doors, footsteps, beads of sweat, and droplets of blood. In its many expressive closeups of Frances McDormand's face, Blood Simple also documents Joel's falling in love with her. The two started dating during the film's shoot and married two years later. The part of Abby was originally intended for Holly Hunter (whose voice appears on an answering machine message late in the film), but her role in a play prevented her from doing the film. Hunter suggested her roommate, theater actor McDormand, which worked out great creatively and romantically. McDormand is, as always, excellent, but she claims she was so nervous about being in her first movie that she wasn't acting, just reacting.

Blood Simple was the first shot across the bow for the brothers in a remarkable career that's only dipped in quality a couple times (I'm lukewarm on O Brother Where Art Thou, Intolerable Cruelty, and The Ladykillers, but I love everything else), and their first four films established the elements they've been mixing and matching in surprisingly creative ways ever since: film noir (Blood Simple), screwball comedies (Raising Arizona), archly stylized retro-Hollywood genre films (Miller's Crossing), and dark comedy-dramas about the horror of existential crises (Barton Fink). Blood Simple may be cruder and less assured than what would come next, but it's got atmosphere and feel, a compelling story, great faces, and more dirt under its fingernails than any of their other movies, and it establishes crime and deception as the brothers' great subjects, one or both of which play a part in every Coen film.

Vampyr (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1932)

Carl Dreyer, one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived, a pioneer of what would later be called the "art film," and the writer/director of such astonishing masterpieces as The Passion of Joan of Arc, Day of Wrath, Ordet, and Gertrud, made one of the eeriest, dreamiest, and strangest horror films in Vampyr. It's a film that seems both older and decades newer than its 1932 release date, and though it shares a few small affinities with Dreyer's other films and the vampire genre, it stands apart from both as its own weird object. (Some kinship can be found with Dreyer's horror/comedy/public service announcement short film They Took the Ferry, another delightfully strange detour for Dreyer.)

Vampyr, in its first third, seems to be a mostly plotless collection of surreal images and nightmare logic, which is more than fine with me, but a narrative slowly and seamlessly emerges from the darkness. Even as the narrative takes shape, the images remain rooted in dream. It's a mysterious, unsettling film.

We begin with a young man obsessed with the occult named Allan Gray (Nicolas de Gunzburg under the pseudonym Julian West) arriving at an inn in a seaside French village named Courtempierre. He sees a lot of strange things, one of which is an old man coming into his room at night and giving him a cryptic message about not letting a woman die and presenting a letter that must not be opened until the older man's death. Allan wanders from the inn to an abandoned building full of strange shadows moving on their own. These shadows lead him to a large country manor. He looks in the window and sees the lord of the manor, who is the same man who entered his room at the inn. A shadow shoots and kills the lord. Allan tries to save him. The attempt is unsuccessful, but the servants and a daughter of the lord ask him to stay. The other daughter has been bitten by a vampire, and Allan becomes a part of the fight to save her and prevent her from turning into a vampire as well as an unwitting pawn in the vampire's human servants' attempt to turn her.

This plot description sounds conventional on the page, but it's only a thread connecting the incredible images. Allan's search for the manor makes little narrative sense until he reaches it, the thin gauze covering the camera lens creates a suspended-in-nightmare look, the locations are both visceral and surreal, the extremely sparse dialogue creates a hypnotic silent-film feel, and the mostly unprofessional cast appear haunted, frozen. Everything is a little off from the way other movies work.

Dreyer, a Dane who mostly used Denmark as the source for his locations and casts, filmed Vampyr in the French countryside with an international cast discovered on the streets of Paris, with the exception of two professional actors, Sybille Schmitz as the sister bit by the vampire and Maurice Schutz as the lord of the manor. Gunzburg, a Parisian who was an heir to his Russian noble family's fortune, agreed to finance the film in exchange for the leading role. Fortunately, he had an amazing face and dreamlike gait that suits the film perfectly. He used the name Julian West because his family strongly disapproved of acting. He later moved to the United States, becoming a fashion journalist and mentor to Calvin Klein.

Vampyr, Dreyer's first sound film, was dubbed into French, German, and English in an attempt to hit as many large markets as possible and was one of his only films to be conceived with commercial profits in mind, though Dreyer's creative approach remained defiantly his own. Oddly, the film was received negatively by critics, especially in Germany, though time has been kind, with most film historians and critics in the present regarding it as another Dreyer masterpiece. I think it's great, too.