What we said:“A s
black, sinful and nasty
as a weekful of Hitchcocks,
this is as fresh and
intoxicating now as it was
then. In a word: deadly.”
Notable extras:New
interviews with the Coens,
Walsh and McDormand,
plus a trailer the brothers
used to drum up funding.BLOOD SIMPLE
★★★★
RATEDR18+THE
VERDICT
an ill-fated reversal. By the end there’s plenty
of blood, while the plot is anything but simple.
Surprisingly, the line was an afterthought.
Walsh had given in to some pick-ups where he
was handed a sheet of paper: “‘Here, read this,
will ya?’ They had figured out in New York that
they needed something at the beginning.”
Blood Simple was the seeding ground for
numerous Coen motifs: hats, grouches behind
desks, gliding roads (a camera on a plank nailed
to the grill), skedaddling tracking shots, unhurried
deaths, and vomiting. “I am a sympathetic vomiter,”
notes Sonnenfeld. “Where Dan Hedaya gets
kicked in the groin and vomits with this rig that
aimed succotash into his mouth, as Joel said,
‘Cut,’ I threw up. For take two Joel told the
boom man to aim the mike at me instead.”
BROTHERHOOD WAS
EVERYTHING...
“It was Joel’s film, but they both looked
through the lens and then they would sit
and talk,” remembers Walsh. “They used
almost a silent language to communicate.”
The film, as with all early Coens efforts,
credits Joel as director, and Ethan as
producer, but the truth is always somewhere
in the middle.
“If I ever wanted a shot to be wider, I’d
show it to Joel,” chuckles Sonnenfeld. “If I
wanted it to be slightly tighter I would show
it to Ethan. Otherwise, they really do think
like one person.”
McDormand, however, has no truck
with talk of psychic links. “It is simply a
shared cultural background,” she sighs.
“Joel’s love of foreign film, Ethan’s study of
philosophy. I don’t think you can rely too
much on the familial part it. It is about
being a brotherhood rather than
being brothers.”
THE FUTURE WAS EVERYTHING...
On the morning after Blood Simple’s debut
at the New York Film Festival in January 1985,
Sonnenfeld went to get The New York Times.
He read the review right there. “It was not only
a rave, but the last few paragraphs were about how
the Coen brothers were going to be a force to be
reckoned with in the future, and the cinematographer
Barry Sonnenfeld would go on to greatness. I
remember thinking, ‘Wow, we are going to be able to
do this again.’” And how...
ALLSTAR, CAPITAL PICTURES, EYEVINE, PHOTOFEST, RONALD GRANT ARCHIVEClockwise from
left: The not so loving
couple: Husband Marty
(Hedaya) takes the
upper hand with wife
Abby; Marty’s not
impressed with the
menu; Private Detective
Visser has a spot of
toilet trouble; Ray
makes sure that Marty
knows who’s the
real boss.