You didn’t even have to enter the theater in 1985, or sit through their debut film, Blood Simple, to know the Coen Brothers, with their morbid, deadpan sensibility, were going to be a unique filmmaking force…
It was all right there in the poster.
It seems so, uh, simple now…hardly noteworthy; but at the time, posters for independent films were almost always garishly illustrated affairs filled with blood, explosions, fists and tits. They reeked of desperation – anything to grab your attention. In comparison, this was so subtle. A wink and a whisper. It promises: this is not your average cheap genre flick. It has style. Confidence. Intelligence. It suggests a twisty Film Noir plot – a steamy affair that leads to murder – with only two pair of feet (contrasted in boots and high heels) and a purse that has spilled out a motel key, a make-up compact, and a revolver.
It doesn’t matter there is no such scene in the film itself —
It makes us lean in, look closer…
Did she just drop it? Has he even noticed it yet? Is the gun meant for him? Is he twisting her arm? Are they kissing or fighting? Both??
And why don’t we see their faces, you might add.
Firstly, as just illustrated, because it is more interesting to imagine the drama in progress just out of/above frame. After all, the image plays off a long-established cinematic trope: illicit lovers in over their heads. So…who needs the heads?
But more relevantly, in purely practical terms, this film was a micro-budget thriller with two completely unknown actors in the lead roles (including future Best Actress and Mrs. Joel, Frances McDormand), so why bother even showing them? The real “stars” were behind the camera. Their precocious craft and attitude showing in all that arrogant blank space, glowing neon border…
Or, as seen below, by a possessive credit already snugly above the title:
And then there’s that tag line… Breaking up is hard to do.
Raymond Chandler meets Neal Sedaka – the perfect smirk. Promising us a sly modern spin on private-eye pulp.
When I first saw the poster in a multiplex lobby somewhere in the San Fernando Valley – the bare color version at top (but WITH that tag line) – it stopped me cold. None of those critics’ quotes cluttering up the image yet and I didn’t need them. I was sold. Love at first teaser.
Where do I get my ticket?
It was the austerity/mystery I miss so much in today’s film advertising…
The fact the movie kept the poster’s promise and turned out to be just as cool and quirky, dark and smart, and truly surprising as I hoped it would be, was the historic part. The Coens were off and running – kicking off one of the all-time great bodies of work in American film history. And whenever their comedies got too obscure or fanciful (at least for mainstream consumption), they would return to their Noir roots and create hard-boiled crime tales like Miller’s Crossing, or Fargo, or their masterful adaptation of No Country For Old Men.
It all started with a not-quite-dead guy and a shovel.
And maybe the biggest compliment I can pay them – not that they ever curried anyone’s favor – is the fact that, as good as it is, Blood Simple lands maybe sixth or seventh on My Favorite Coens’ list. Over the next few decades, they proved their genius over and over with Barton Fink, The Big Lebowski, O Brother Where Art Thou, A Serious Man, True Grit, Inside Llewyn Davis.
Most recently, their latest, The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs, a typically-droll but also poignant rumination on death, was my choice for Best Film of 2018. If it had not been released on Netflix, I believe it would have made the Oscar shortlist.
And now it seems like they are closing up shop, inching towards the exit doors.
But, oh man, what an entrance.
