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All Things Thriller

A Celebration of Thrillers, Noire and Black Comedy by Pamela Lowe Saldana
May 16, 2025

The Making of The Coen Brothers Blood Simple: An Exercise in Rudimentary Gravitas

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.

May 14, 2025

The Favor: Section Three

He downshifted and whipped into the oncoming traffic lane. Head to head with the Honda, he released the throttle and put pedal to medal.

There would be no questioning if he got pulled over. Maybe a gentle scolding, but that would be that. He bisected the solid yellow line a good distance ahead of the Honda, reveling in the G-force of the 401 4-speed and the wind in his hair.

It was one of the things he never liked about Moe…that thing he did…that superiority thing.

Jay clicked through their meeting, the scenes vivid, like he was watching a viewfinder…Moe moving the envelope across the table with two fingers…talking without moving his lips…like he’s the boss of something.

Never mind the envelope in the first place. That’s not the way it’s done…in a coffee shop.

He’d said…No, you take it, Jay…for the trip. It’s how it’s done.

Like he was his mentor or something.

Okay…it could have been worse…at least it wasn’t in front of anybody.

Everyone knew there were only three…four…only four bosses. And the only time you had to deal with them was when you ran into one…or one called on you for something. When that happened you had to mind your p’s and q’s. Saying no wasn’t an option.

He watched the speedometer on the refurbished dashboard of the black on black 65 convertible Wildcat climb.

Moe?…you could say no to him.

____________________________________________________________________________________

“I told you it was him, Jay,” she said when they were seated at the breakfast nook watching the news on the five inch television.

“I never said it wasn’t,” he clarified.

“But you knew it…”

“Lonna! Please. I’m not going to say. Leave it at that. I’m begging you!”

She shrugged. “He needs money. That’s all I’m saying. He’s living at The Linkletter.”

“Of course he needs money. He had to sell everything he owned. We’ve talked about it ad nauseum.”

Then as an afterthought he asked, “where’d you hear he was staying at The Linkletter?”

“Lii…ving! Not staying. Living at The Linkletter,” she enunciated sternly. “And I’m not saying.”

He sipped his hot chocolate. “Did you put vanilla in this?”

She sighed. “Yes. I’ve been putting vanilla in it for awhile.”

“Delicious…the Linkletter Inn’s not that bad.”

“It’s not that good either,” she said.

When he frowned, she asked, “how long will you be gone?”

“I was planning on going up to Lexington since I’ll be so close.”

“Yes. I thought you would.” She sighed again and stirred her own hot chocolate. “Oh well, I’ll be back in the classroom anyway.”

“Five or six days. No more than a week,” he clarified.

“Do you want me to pack for you?”

Jay reached reached for Lonna’s hand and squeezed it.

“You’re a doll, he said.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

The night after the bank job, Moe didn’t sleep so well. Every car that passed the motel made him jumpy. He had to fight the urge to look out the window.

Amateur.

That was the thing he noticed most about getting older. He was more cautious, worrying about stuff that six or seven years ago wouldn’t have phased him. Like last winter when he caught the flu.

He got sick… weak.

Then, when he finally drifted off to sleep, he woke up a couple of hours later with such a terrible backache that he could barely get out of the bed…but he managed…stretched himself out like in the old days when he boxed Golden Gloves. All the contorting led to an episode where he, at first, rather furtively checked himself out in the mirror…longer than he had in awhile.

The old gene pool was pretty good. There was very little grey in his hair. Didn’t look his age.

The tortoiseshell kitten slinked through his legs and attacked his feet.

Could stand to loose a few pounds…twenty-five to thirty of them, but he hadn’t let himself go to seed.

After a hot shower, he gave himself a hair cut and cleaned up his stubble, chose a fine lined checked, forest green button down, a butterscotch belt, his best Dickies and some canvas loafers.

He counted out three thousand dollars that went into an envelope, which went into his shirt’s front pocket, closed the door, but immediately went back in. He’d forgotten to feed the kitten.

Afterwards he walked a half of a mile to the Denny’s. Before he was seated he used the payphone.

“Hey, Jay. It’s Moe…yeah I’m at the Denny’s on Linkletter. I’ll be here till nine. Can you meet me? “

Then he bought a newspaper and ordered the grand slam with extra bacon and coffee.

May 10, 2025

The Favor: Section Two

It was one of the weird things he thought about when he used to stay in high end hotels…had there ever been clothes in the dresser? …or chest of drawers as some called it.

Like so many other things, it had to be quantified before he guessed.

Was he staying in a standard room?

If so, his guess was No.

A suite?

Yes.

Wealthy guests commonly stay in luxury suites for an extended time.

Take his gambling associate, Bobby Olivier for instance…he stayed two months in the Caesars Palace Executive Suite. Lived like a prince. Cost him a fortune.

Bobby lost a lot at the tables that trip too.

He’s in the joint now… feds wiped him out… or so they thought. Rumor was Bobby had buried 2 million in a safe in the desert.

He carefully situated the folded laundry in the dresser drawer. He didn’t even want to think how many boxers had been in those drawers.

And the bed?…he’d scoured the mattress with a scrub brush and bleach solution when he moved in.

When he was younger he’d stayed in a flop or two. Made an impression on him. So much so he’d sworn he’d never end up in one.

Of course, this place was rungs above that…but not as many as he’d like. And the rent was sky high, eating into his cigarette money…his gas money. Not to mention groceries.

A tortoiseshell kitten hooked its claws into the bedspread and climbed up to the mattress. He took the cellophane off a pack of cigarettes–he was down to his last three– rolled it into a ball and flicked it onto the bed. The kitten pounced on the ball, flipped onto its back, rabbit kicking furiously.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

The air was rife with heat, so dry, so oppressive that his shirt stuck to his undershirt–and his undershirt stuck to his back. All his life he’d lived in this place and he still hated it when the thermometer reached 102 or above. Even now, with the sun going down, it was in the mid 90s.

He wrenched upward with his knees and his back raising the heavy, rusted bay door. Sure enough, a tell tell burn streaked across his lower back.

Damn it!

But how else was he supposed to do it? He was an old man now without the strength to do it properly.

The garage was almost entirely sheet metal which meant it was almost entirely perfect. He drove the LTD inside and popped the trunk.

He was about a quarter mile down the road before he caught a whiff of smoke.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

The bus let him off at Linkletter and 8th. He limped the rest of the way to The Linkletter Inn, carrying a gym bag.

It had always bothered him that even though the motel was on 8th, it was still called The Linkletter.

He stopped at the Montego and peered inside the drivers window before letting himself in room 11. Everything was kosher, just as he left it. He switched on the lights and dropped the gym bag on the bed. The Tortoiseshell kitten wiggled out between the pillows as he unzipped the bag and removed three bananas, a jar of peanut butter, a carton of Parliament, a quart of half and half and a ten pound bag of Alley Cat.

The kitten jumped on the cat food bag and rubbed its face on it.

He turned the gym bag upside down on the bed. A 32 S&W, three stacks and some loose bills tumbled out.

It was a decent little haul. Probably about twelve thousand. Just what he needed.

May 6, 2025

The Favor

He reached out the window of the Mercury Montego and hung up the pay phone. Big rain splotches darkened the sleeve of his Coastal Mist windbreaker, though he didn’t have to reach far. It was one of four payphones in town, all at Circle K’s, that you could roll right up to and not even have to get out to make a call.

Just one of many such nuggets he knew.

But others knew too. So if somebody was on it when he drove up he’d usually go inside for a cup of coffee or a tube of hot peanuts, sit at one of the sticky laminated plastic booths by the window and wait for the person to leave. Usually.

These days, he rarely had some place to be, which he enjoyed…for the most part.

But this wasn’t one of those days. So he had waited in the Montego, by the curb with his high beams on, facing a Mustang II Cobra. At least he was pretty sure that’s what it was.

Shitty little car.

Because of the downpour, he couldn’t see the driver. But he knew it was a woman…probably a teenage girl who’d be easily intimidated…it had to be. No self-respecting-man would be caught dead driving that car.

Now Farrah Fawcett…she looked good in hers…but that, of course, was different.

Stupid television show. He’d never watched a single episode.

Sure enough the driver wrapped it up quickly. He didn’t budge when the Mustang backed up and had to make an awkward about face near the gas pumps.

That was the hurry up part. Now he was in for the wait.

Tiny beads of rain streaked down the window and settled around the control panel. Don’t let water get anywhere near that power window button, his mechanic had warned.

But he had to hear the phone ring.

He wiped the droplets away with his thumb and lit another cigarette.

______________________________________________________________

Her bare feet hit the cold tile that led to the in-laws apartment. The Buick, visible through the glass exterior door, signaled he was there.

Cautiously she tried the door handle of the apartment. It was pretty fifty fifty whether it would be locked.

It wasn’t.

The room was lit by the television turned to a barely audible murmur. A figure lay curled up on the couch, a shock of platinum hair just visible beneath a custom made quilt of gold and purple Crown Royal bags. She bent over it and gently shook the shoulder.

“Jay?…Jay, honey… wake up.”

He shuddered and rolled onto his back, blinking sleepily up at her.

“I’m sorry to wake you, hon, but Moe called the residential line. He said you have the answering machine on.”

“I must have slept through it,” he rasped.

She side eyed the end table, inventorying what was on it: telephone, answering machine, his glasses and prescription bottles.

“Here. Let me help you with that.”

She pulled off the quilt and he swung his legs down; she waited for him to settle before handing him his glasses.

“He said he was calling from a payphone. Do you want me to dial the number?”

Hitching up his broad angular shoulders he heaved an uncharacteristic sigh. She flinched. Her expression, though, as still as early morning lake water.

“Roger,” he said.

______________________________________________________________

She walked back toward the apartment, this time gingerly, carrying a mug of hot chocolate.

She knocked on the door.

“Come in.”

“I made you some coco. No pressure. I’ll drink it if you don’t want it.”

“Thanks. Sound’s delicious.”

She carefully handed it over.

“How are you feeling?”

“I’m good. Why do you ask?”

“That’s not funny.”

“Yes it is. I told you to quit asking me that. Please.”

It was true; he looked much as he always had. Like a perpetual sexagenarian. Sansabelt slacks. Golf shirts. Premature gray. Just a little paler…a little thinner.

“Ahh! This really hits the spot.”

“Jay…”

“Hmm?…”

“You know I don’t get into your business…”

He sat the mug on the end table.

“And I don’t get into yours.”

“Moe. He knows…”

“You were there when I told him.”

“So?…”

He patted the couch cushion, inviting her to sit. She obliged.

“He needs my help.”

“What else is new?”

“To be fair, the man’s never asked me for a dime. Not even when he had to sell everything he had.”

“But that’s the way it’s done. That’s what you’ve always said.”

“That’s the way its supposed to be done. He’s the only one that hasn’t.”

“Besides me.”

“Lonna!”

He watched her eyes fill. A tear ran onto her lips.

“You’ve never had to ask.”

“No. I haven’t,” she admitted.

He leaned in and kissed her.

“And you never will.”

They sat there for awhile and watched the NBC Mystery Movie…McCloud. Then she went back to bed.

March 16, 2025

The Duplicity of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Killing’

Titles are important. Take the action/thriller Snakes on a Plane. Screenwriter David Dalessandro shopped his screenplay Venom for five years before a big production house took a serious look. But it wasn’t until more seasoned writers Sebastian Gutierrez and John Heffernan renamed it that the ball really got rolling. Here’s what Samuel L. Jackson said about it:

“All I needed was to hear the title and I knew I wanted to be in that film.”

By comparison, not necessarily to Snakes on a Plane, but to films within its genre such as The Asphalt Jungle, In a Lonely Place and Touch of Evil, the title of Stanley Kubrick’s 1956 crime drama The Killing seems a bit plain. Undoubtably film noir–of that its star (did Sterling Hayden star in anything else, besides westerns) and original movie poster attest.

So there will be killing…of that we can be assured. Yet the film’s title alludes to a singular act.

Hollywood journeyman Hayden stars as Johnny, a low rung career criminal who abides by the thieves code of loyalty, self reliance and tight lips. Johnny has spent the last five years in stir plotting an assent to criminal respectability via a two million dollar heist of proceeds from a horse racetrack. His complex scheme requires two inside guys.

One of them, a ground down husband of an unfaithful, materialistic wife is a cashier at the track. His name is George. The other, Mike, is also married; his wife, sweet and bedridden, is in desperate need of expensive medical care. Mike is the track’s bartender.

To that mix add Marvin, an old friend with an implied sexual history with the much younger Johnny. Marvin, the financier of the heist, could complicate things, but Johnny is unconcerned. As is common in such transactional relationships, Johnny is not gay. He has a gullible, loyal girlfriend.

Finally there is Randy, a crooked cop inspired by his affinity for expensive suits, luxury apartments and life and limb. He’s in debt to a local mobster.

These are the principal conspirators–the loot to be split evenly between them– swimming in a plot manufactured by screenwriters Kubrick and Jim Thompson. (Yes, that Jim Thompson.) The plot and pot is stirred by the then twenty-eight year old Kubrick in his first meaningful foray as film director.

Kubrick cloaks The Killing in documentary style using stock footage of a horse racetrack in the opening credits and voice over narration to establish a non linear timeline. The narration, along with mock pedestrian camara work and natural lighting establishes a world of simplistic hyper realism evident when Johnny runs errands in the lead up to the robbery.

This is the lens that Johnny envisions the heist through.

The documentary style is abandoned in interior scenes where the details of the plotting and the messiness of the conspirators private lives are established. Here Kubrick imposes his tenacious, claustrophobic camera style along with classic noir lighting techniques that reveal the lines and lies on the conspirators faces, the texture of the walls closing in on them and the cracks in the armor they wear and the plans they make.

This is the intramural reality that we see.

The cast is made up of prolific character actors from the world of film noir handpicked by Kubrick himself. Standouts Elisha Cook (The Big Sleep, Phantom Lady, Born to Kill) as the relentlessly henpecked George and Marie Windsor (Force of Evil, Narrow Margin) as his wife, the repugnantly duplicitous Sherry, play the obvious foils in Johnny’s scheme.

But it is the reliably understated Sterling Hayden who puts The Killing into motion. So caught up in the illusion of control, Hayden’s try-hard Johnny underestimates the devil who rests on his and his fellow conspirators shoulders. He forgets, or perhaps he’s never learned, that the devil also lives in the labyrinthic details of complicated plots devised by simple men.

February 4, 2025

Wanda (1970): A Groundbreaking American Independent Film Directed by Barbara Loden

Many years ago I lived across the street from a teenage girl, her adolescent brother and their practically nonexistent mother–all of them rather unfortunate looking except for their magnificent red hair.

For the life of me I can’t remember their names…

Bobby. The boy’s name was Bobby…

They lived in one of the many large historic houses of East Nashville, theirs built in the early 20th century, an American Foursquare architectural type, not quite as ornate as a Victorian, but impressive nonetheless.

These days the home has been beautifully, lovingly restored, fetching well over a million dollars in a market where every thing east bank is big bank. But back when my husband and I Iived there, East Nashville was called East Nasty and the Foursquare across the street was ramshackle at best.

So ramshackle, in fact, the sideboards of it’s massive front porch had rotted away, giving access and shelter to a vicious cur and her half grown pack of pups.

The boy had a way with the dogs, commanding them with clicking noises, whistles and hand gestures. And though he terrorized the children of the neighborhood and stole everything he could get his hands on, I had a grudging affection for him. My husband and I would give him pocket money that we couldn’t really spare for odd jobs we really didn’t need.

The girl, on the other hand, we had no interaction with at all, though I would see her, now and again, sitting on the porch or walking down the street, always alone, always with a blank expression.

Sometimes late at night, when I was sitting at the attic window smoking, listening to the cacophony of inner city malaise–the inevitable revving of engines and screeching of brakes, the distant thumping music, angry shouts and, occasionally, gunshots–I would see various young men (young in relative terms, early twenties or so) climb a weathered, yes, ramshackle trestle and disappear into the Foursquare through an open second story widow.

“They’re from the deiseal college up the road,” said Mrs. Gibbony, my octogenarian next door neighbor, when I told her what I’d seen. She flicked her ashes in the wind with a long, yellow forefinger. “You watch, she’ll turn up pregnant.”

And she did.

Then one day I was on Mrs. Gibbony’s front porch having a smoke with her and the girl came out of the Foursquare house and sat on its broad porch steps with her baby–a little girl with the same red hair as the rest of the family. The girl just sat there, holding the baby with lifeless arms, staring off into space, same blank expression.

“Can you believe that girl’s mother works for the Governor?” Mrs. Gibbony scoffed.

“Yeah, I can,” I said.

We laughed.

  • Criterion Collection Edition #965
  • Directed by Barbara Loden • 1970 • United States
    Starring Barbara Loden, Michael Higgins
  • With her first and only feature film—a hard-luck drama she wrote, directed, and starred in—Barbara Loden turned in a groundbreaking work of American independent cinema, bringing to life a kind of character seldom seen on-screen. Set amid a soot-choked Pennsylvania landscape, and shot in an intensely intimate vérité style, the film takes up with distant and soft-spoken Wanda (Loden), who has left her husband, lost custody of her children, and now finds herself alone, drifting between dingy bars and motels, where she falls prey to a series of callous men—including a bank robber who ropes her into his next criminal scheme. An until now difficult-to-see masterpiece that has nonetheless exerted an outsize influence on generations of artists and filmmakers, WANDA is a compassionate and wrenching portrait of a woman stranded on society’s margins.
  • Restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Restoration funding provided by Gucci and The Film Foundation.
January 9, 2025

Kimi (2022), a Film Directed by Stephen Soderbergh; Popcorn /Techno Thriller

In the best of circumstances Angela is no doubt as edgy as her hair is blue; to this her extreme mannerisms, full force exercise routine and combative attitude attest. But these are not the best of times nor circumstances. A prior sexual assault has badly wounded her. Covid has ripped the wound wide.

Unwilling to commit therapeutically, her tics have ballooned while her world has shrunk to a chic Seattle flat where she monitors the users of Kimi, a voice command speaker, for algorithm coding. Similarly, she monitors her neighbors via the windows of their flats across the street.

Due to its more nuanced and comprehensive recognition of language usage, Kimi, a subsidiary of tech giant Amygdala, is poised for public offering and take over of the voice command speaker market. Hence Angela monitors only anonymous Amygdala executives who possess Kimi prototypes. During a session, she overhears what could be the assault and murder of a user. Unsure, she goes through company protocol instead of going to the police.

It is a decision Angela soon comes to regret.

With Kimi, Steven Soderbergh commandeers the popcorn thriller–an interesting vehicle to showcase his brand of subtle subversive filmmaking. Here he confines his pet themes of sexuality, greed, the upper class, nature vs nurture and cognitive dissonance to a crisp script with a restrained running time that compliments his muscular camara work, ratcheted suspense and edge of your seat action sequences.

In her portrayal of Angela, Zoe Kravitz is serviceable…and I mean that as a compliment. Her gears shift so predictably that when they falter in overdrive, I was not only surprised, I was worried. This reaction owes as much to Kravitz’s understated skill as it does to Soderbergh’s aptitude.

Yet it is within the strength of economy that this well oiled machine stalls. Angela’s tryst with the guy in the flat across the way homage to Rear Window is so short shrift that it comes off as a clunky accessory weighing down an otherwise sleek design.

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