The first in a series of chronological reviews of Joel and Ethan Coen’s filmmography.

ETHAN COEN: It’s crude, there’s no getting around it.
JOEL COEN: On the other hand it’s all confused with the actual process of making the movie and finishing the movie which, by and large, was a positive experience. You never get entirely divorced from it that way. So, I don’t know. It’s a movie that I have a certain affection for.

The Coen brothers cannot view their first film, Blood Simple, outside the context of its creation. In the same way, it’s virtually impossible for us to view it outside the context of their extensive filmography. Without the pressure of Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and No Country For Old Men driving us to watch it, Blood Simple would have long ago been relegated to the dust bins of slightly-better-than-average independent film. There are, here, the seeds of their idiosyncrasies and influences that would grow into a fully realized cinematic style, and so it becomes much more productive to view it as the first of many, rather than asking it to stand on it’s own two feet.

On a top 10 list of ways to die, this would not be one of them.

Ray (John Getz) and Abby (Francis McDormand) have a problem. See, they’re sleeping with each other, and Abby’s husband Marty (Dan Hedaya), who also happens to be Ray’s boss at a local Texan bar, is onto them. The jilted husband has called in a sleaze-ball of a P.I. named Loren Visser (M. Emmet Walsh) who has delivered the prerequisite naughty pictures. Guess who wants someone knocked off?

At the expense of poor puns everywhere, the plot really is that simple. Sure, there are the necessary double crosses and miscommunications and violent showdowns, but the bare bones story doesn’t get much more meat on it than what I’ve already mentioned. The spare plot is the point, however, because it allows the Coens to do one of the things they do best: character.

Of all the filmmakers working today, how many have created such instantly memorable characters? The Dude alone has single-handedly spawned an entire t-shirt industry. And while the denizens of Blood Simple don’t quite enter the pantheon currently inhabited by The Dude, H.I. McDonough, and Anton Chigurh (to be honest, they don’t even come close), they do stand as the film’s strongest asset. The Coens, as they’ve expertly done in many of their other films, have taken the staples of a genre – in this case, the jealous husband, promiscuous wife, stoic boyfriend, and snakelike P.I. – and expanded the stereotypes to become something entirely ‘other.’ Visser is the standout here, perhaps because it was the only role that the Coens’ specifically wrote for the actor who played it, M. Emmet Walsh. It shows as well, for the proceedings get slightly dull (excluding a midnight burial) when he is not around. The Coens would take this lesson and use it to their advantage later on: with few exceptions, the great characters of their filmography were all written with specific actors in mind.

This ability to toy with genre (to create a picture on the one hand that squarely exists within the conventions of a specific genre, while on the other becomes something completely different and quintessentially ‘Coen’) is their greatest strength, and you can see glimmers of it here, perhaps nowhere more obviously then in how they produced it.

Abby get your gun!

When they raised the money for Blood Simple, by showing random businessmen a 2-minute trailer emphasizing the blood and sex (of which there are little in the film), they advertised it as an exploitation flick, knowing full well it would be something different. Once they brought it to market, however, no studio would bite (and they visited all of them) because, in the words of Ethan Coen, “It was a little too arty for the sleaze studios and a little too sleazy for the majors.” That sentence alone illustrates the tentative balance they’ve struck between popular culture and art. Blood Simple, in its primitive form, began this delicate relationship and their other films perfected it. The roots of No Country For Old Men can be traced all the way back to this crude pseudo-exploitation film.

Blood Simple is the Coens taking baby steps, and while they are very confident baby steps, they are not the great strides that would be made once they reached Miller’s Crossing and Fargo years later. Perhaps the best praise that can be given Blood Simple is that even though I had seen it once before, and even though I had read the screenplay, I still wanted to see what would happen next. The reversals and double crosses and twists, all lodged in an unmistakable Texan atmosphere, are refreshingly original in a genre-plagiarizering sort of way. It has aged surprisingly well, and if nothing else serves as a fascinating primer for the Coen brothers.

Quotes taken from Stephen Lowenstein’s book, My First Movie