1984

Blood Simple

DIR. COEN BROTHERS

© USA FILMS, COURTESY PHOTOFEST

Along with Body Heat, the Coen brothers’ debut, Blood Simple, brought noir kicking and screaming (and killing and seducing) into the ’80s, with Frances McDormand as Abby (above, and with Dan Hedaya as Julian Marty below).

© CIRCLE FILMS/EVERETT

This damned burg’s getting me,” says the Continental Op, the narrator of Red Harvest, the 1929 novel by seminal hard-boiled author Dashiell Hammett. “If I don’t get away soon I’ll be going blood-simple like the natives. There’s been what? A dozen and a half murders since I’ve been here.”

Though Joel and Ethan Coen’s debut film, 1984’s Blood Simple, took its title from this quote, its true literary progenitor was pulp author James M. Cain. “We especially liked The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and Career in C Major,” Joel has said of the literary building blocks of film noir. (see pages 20 and 28.) “We liked the hard-boiled style, and we wanted to write a James M. Cain story and put it into a modern context.”

Three years after Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat redefined film noir for ’80s audiences, the low-budget Blood Simple offered a bleak, relentless story about a Texas bar owner, Julian Marty (Dan Hedaya), who hires a private investigator (M. Emmet Walsh) to kill his cheating wife (Frances McDormand)—only to be double-crossed. (Naturally.)

The Kasdan and Coen films were connected more than just thematically, though: Blood Simple made a number of visual nods to Body Heat, according to the director of photography, Barry Sonnenfeld, whose creative camera work helped define the film. (He later directed Men in Black.) Together, the two movies helped inspire a string of steamy thrillers that followed. (Think 1992’s sleazy, cheesy Basic Instinct, starring Michael Douglas, and Sharon Stone’s private parts.)

The protean Coens went on to a wildly varied career that encompassed a variety of genres, but they’ve frequently returned to noir in such films as Fargo, The Big Lebowski, No Country for Old Men, and The Man Who Wasn’t There. (The latter was even more explicitly influenced by Cain than Blood Simple was.) The Coen’s debut remains a critical favorite, though, and is the only one of their films that has been remade: The great Chinese director Zhang Yimou called his 2010 version A Woman, a Gun, and a Noodle Shop, a.k.a. A Simple Noodle Story.