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.