I hadn't seen Blood Simple in years, but looking through some stuff I found that I actually own a copy. Think I bought it at Borders, a store that hasn't been open for several years.
On the surface it might have seemed like a pretty basic mid-80s neo-noir. It's got the neon signage and the ironically-used oldies (some of which work quite well.) As it turne out the Coens were doing their own thing.
It's not like the story is unique on paper. A woman plans to run away from her bar-owner husband. She starts sleeping with one of his bartenders, because that will obviously end well. The husband was suspicious enough to have her tailed by a private detective. When his suspicions are confirmed, he hires the detective as a hitman.
How well do these people match up to their parts? The husband isn't scary, or even particularly nasty most of the time we see him. He mostly just seems mopey. The wife, played by future Coen-in-law Frances McDormand, isn't as calculating as the husband says. In fact she seems flighty and convinced she's in a different movie. Her lover is a laconic cowboy type, a Marlboro Man without a smoking habit. At first. Contact with violence and danger turns him downright chatty.
The PI is the smartest one in the movie, albet not in a socially acceptable way and not in an obvious way. He's basically trolling the other three, For example he doesn't carry out the hit the way he was supposed to, btut he's not sparing the lovers. He's just got a different agenda.
Anyway, after that re-watch I'll have to catch the Chinese remake one of these days.
On the surface it might have seemed like a pretty basic mid-80s neo-noir. It's got the neon signage and the ironically-used oldies (some of which work quite well.) As it turne out the Coens were doing their own thing.
It's not like the story is unique on paper. A woman plans to run away from her bar-owner husband. She starts sleeping with one of his bartenders, because that will obviously end well. The husband was suspicious enough to have her tailed by a private detective. When his suspicions are confirmed, he hires the detective as a hitman.
How well do these people match up to their parts? The husband isn't scary, or even particularly nasty most of the time we see him. He mostly just seems mopey. The wife, played by future Coen-in-law Frances McDormand, isn't as calculating as the husband says. In fact she seems flighty and convinced she's in a different movie. Her lover is a laconic cowboy type, a Marlboro Man without a smoking habit. At first. Contact with violence and danger turns him downright chatty.
The PI is the smartest one in the movie, albet not in a socially acceptable way and not in an obvious way. He's basically trolling the other three, For example he doesn't carry out the hit the way he was supposed to, btut he's not sparing the lovers. He's just got a different agenda.
Anyway, after that re-watch I'll have to catch the Chinese remake one of these days.
2 comments:
a family favourite, tho, surprisingly, not a part of our coen bros collection (fargo, raising arizona, barton fink, hudsucker proxy, miller’s crossing, man who wasn’t there, &, of course, big lebowski). frances mcdormand is wonderful, but m. emmet walsh just sorta proceeds to stomp all over everyone & everything from the moment he show up :) …
it demonstrates that, from early on, the coens were one with hitchcock when it came to deliberately subverting audience expectations being one of their trademark techniques. &, even when their movies occasionally get you to where you anticipated they would, it’s never along quite the same path that you thought they might traverse :) …
oh, & do give ‘a woman, a gun, & a noodle shop’ a watch if at all possible. very dark/funny, well-done ‘re-imagining’…
we just re-watched another low-key favorite, ’sling blade’. pretty stupefying accomplishment (as writer, director, & star) by billy bob thornton, who completely disappears (even physically - he’s hardly recognizable!) into karl. funny how frequently it’s the movies about about small, insignificant people, places, & events that pack the most powerful punches :) …
Those are fine additions to a movie library. I used to have The Hudsucker Proxy, but it was an oddly defective edition: panned and scanned when with the Coens you kind of need letterboxing because composition is so important. Frances McDormand does make a great first impression here, I think it being about her first movie. Loren Visser takes over the whole thing because he just seems to be this feral and inchoate intelligence native to the Texas plains.
The Hitchcock comparison is apt. This is one of their more Hitchcockian movies in content. They're probably closer in spirit than Brian DePalma, who has had some good scenes but seems more inspired by potboiler TV movies.
The library system has a few copies of "A Woman, A Gun, and a Noodle Shop." I definitely plan to see it before the year's out.
Billy Bob Thornton really did throw himself into that role. Since he hadn't been a household name or anything, so I wonder how many people thought initially that was really how he spoke. Hey, there are a lot of naive folks out there. But yeah, maybe it's because small lives are hidden and ignored to begin with, the revelation has more power.
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