The Coen brothers are quite enamored with the droll Texan archetype. West Texan archetype to be exact. Case in point…pretty much the whole cast of No Country for Old Men (2007).

  • El Paso Sheriff: What’s it mean? What’s it leadin’ to? You know, if you’d have told me 20 years ago, that I’d see children walking the streets of our Texas towns with green hair and bones in their noses, I just flat-out wouldn’t have believed you.
  • Ed Tom Bell: Signs and wonders. But I think once you quit hearing “sir” and “ma’am,” the rest is soon to foller.
  • Ed Tom Bell: How many of those things you got now?
  • Ellis: Cats? Several. Well, depends what you mean by got. Some are half-wild and some are just outlaws.

I could go on with these quotes ad nauseum. I’m sure you could too. But this post isn’t about No Country for Old Men. It’s about Blood Simple.

The first time I saw it was 1986. I watched it on HBO; I’d never heard of it.

Normally–back then–I wouldn’t have been so late to the party, but my husband and I were still in the honeymoon phase, which meant that I watched a lot of what he liked. Action movies…Three Stooges…stoner movies…Max Headroom…all well and good (except for The Three Stooges)but not exactly my cup of tea.

He was always game, though, when I put my foot down about something I wanted to see, so we watched Blood Simple together. We loved it…had a lot in common with the couple.

The Blood Simple couple, hitherto known as Ray and Abbie (John Getz and Frances McDormand respectively) are hardcore in love. They’re down for each other.

Ray’s a stereotypical Texas male as viewed through the Coen brothers tantalizing, quasi-satiric lens (and you know what they say about stereotypes) tough, quiet, fundamentally decent…prone to screw ups with the law and otherwise. Abby’s much the same, except she’s talkative.

There’s just one problem. Abbie’s married to a strip club owner. His name is Marty (Dan Hedaya) and though the setting is somewhere in the West Texas geographical area, most likely around the scrublands of Austin’s Hill Country, he wears his East Coast smarminess like a rattlesnake wears scales.

Marty subscribes to the if I can’t have her no one can ethos. To that end he pays Visser, a private detective (M. Emmet Walsh) who he’s already hired to spy on the lovebirds, ten thousand dollars more to kill them.

Pretty standard stuff from neo noir perspective. As detective Frank Durbin said in Naked Gun when a missile was driven into a fireworks superstore, nothing to see here folks.

Things get nastier (keep in mind, they were already rancid when Walsh came on the scene, portraying a character so gamy that flies swarm around him) when Visser double crosses Marty with some doctored photos that make it look like Ray and Abby were murdered in bed together. That’s when it goes from bad to worse.

Again, standard noir material…then it gets really bad.

So that’s about all I’m going to say about the plot on the off chance that I might spoil things for a newbie unacquainted with the Coen brothers cinematic debut. Now I’m going to opine about the nuts and bolts stuff of filmmaking…

Imagine, if you will, that you’ve never seen a Coen brothers film…that you know nothing about Joel and Ethan…and you see this:

Makes an impression doesn’t it?

Now imagine you are a young “know it all film buff” with a couple of film classes in your handbag and theatrical stage experience…that you are from, roughly, the same geographical area that Abbie and Ray are from and boom! Your mind is blown!

To me, this opening scene sequence is perfection–to this day.

Oh, I know it’s not, that it could be done better…that’s the charm and genius of it. It’s so deferential to noir of old, yet so tongue in check–and so close to fly by the seat of your pants perfection that it’s quintessential.

The part where M. Emmet Walsh is narrating…the topography, that’s Midland/Odessa where my husband and I are from. Barry Sonnenfeld (director of The Adams Family, Men in Black franchises) is the film’s cinematographer.

Then when we go into the opening credits sequence with Abbie and Ray in a vehicle and there’s an a switch. Ray’s driving. It’s a night scene.

This sequence is filmed in a garage. The night time effects achieved with relatively simplistic techniques and rudimentary equipment. The interior of the car–a Fiat–chosen for its cramped cabin and hatch back, is partly front lit with and industrial light rigged to the hood. Rain is achieved by a prop woman sitting on top of the vehicle, dousing the windshield with one of those bug exterminator sprayer things. And darkness happens by simply turning off the garage’s interior lights.

The illusion of cars passing Ray and Abbie on the highway is pulled off by Sonnenfeld and the brothers mounting two theatrical lanterns to a dolly, pulling it across the garage under the cover of darkness, filming it again and again as the industrial light is turned off and on.

The brothers rigged a camera set up in the hatchback, which gave them multiple angles and rearview shots. They used a Volvo for the exterior car scenes.

Blood Simple in its entirety is filmed, written and produced, all by the brothers Coen, with such ingenious gravitas that Samuel Fuller would be proud. But, unlike Fuller, Joel is a formally trained and educated filmmaker and his brother Ethan has been at his side making films since they were kids goofing around in the backyard of their childhood Minneapolis home.

Like with the No Country for Old Men quotes, I could go on and on about the ensemble cast, all of them brilliant, McDormand and Walsh in particular. But I won’t. This post has been long enough.

If you haven’t seen Blood Simple, by all means do so. The sooner the better.

As Abbie and Ray would be quick to remind...you never know what is lurking around the corner or just outside the window. You might not get another chance.