Search - Blood Simple on DVD

Minor cuts that leave minor scars

Scott Worley | Brea, CA USA | 10/03/2001

(4 out of 5 stars)

"As a big fan of the film since it was released in 1985, I was looking forward to seeing Blood Simple transferred to DVD. A cleaned-up widescreen transfer, and maybe a little cleaner audio, were all good things that I wanted to see happen; and with the Director's Cut, it did happen. However, I think the edits that were made in this version of the film may displease fans of the original -- I know they displease this fan.I won't go into a laundry-list of the cuts. They are, for the most part, the removal or trimming of some funny bits and gags that don't really contribute to telling the story; but they do, in my opinion, contribute to the quirky charm of the film without consuming a great deal of time on screen. Also trimmed are some uncomfortable silences that develop between people in certain scenes; making them not so uncomfortable, I guess, but I don't see this as an improvement.Most disconcerting to me are some of the music changes. One that particularly disappointed me is when Ray first confronts Marty on the back steps of the bar. In the original version, a slow-tempo instrumental country-western tune is playing inside the bar, and after transitioning to the outside, the same song is heard muffled in the background with the bass still booming. As anyone who has ever stood outside a nightclub can tell you, this is exactly what you hear -- the lower frequencies propagate better than the higher frequencies. The editors have seen fit to change this to a vocal piece of music that is reduced in volume as the view changes to the outside, but without the realistic frequency balance. I don't understand why this change was made. Perhaps some didn't like that the music here wasn't really so much music as it was background sound, or perhaps it was thought to interfere with hearing the conversation; but I think it was a wonderful element in the atmosphere of the scene that I surely miss.Regarding the new intro with the pompously lecturing gentleman, suffice it to say that it can be fast-forwarded through.This Director's Cut version delivers basically the same psychological and visceral thrills as the original version, with improved video and audio; but long-time fans, such as myself, may find the changes have done some minor cosmetic harm, rather than good."

A Highly Entertaining Debut

Lawrence Kinsley | Lakeland, FL USA | 04/07/2005

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Blood Simple, made in the mid-1980's, helped to establish the cheaper indie film, independent of the Hollywood mill system, as a force to be reckoned with. It also launched the careers of the film's makers, Joel and Ethan Coen, as an artistic duo equally to be reckoned with. Finally, the movie itself, a film noir entry with post 1950's elements of sardonic humor, helped to prove that that genre - one of America's prime contributions to theatrical film making - was still alive, if only occasionally ticking.

Pretty much based on its title - `blood simple' meaning the less than intelligent condition those involved in murder frequently display in their attempts to cover up the crime - the film mixes a fairly straight forward narrative with a few curves and symbolic gestures thrown in that were to become the Coens' trademark. One can speculate endlessly, of course, on various artifacts - the whirling fans, the cigarette lighter, the decaying fish, etcetera - provided in the movie, but for the most part they in the end would appear to be little more than examples of - and quite likely a homage to - Hitchcock's celebrated McGuffin - ie: an item around which a plot seems to revolve but which in the end has no real significance to the film's denouement. (Although one exception to this rule is to my mind the hat which forms a central icon in the Coen's later masterpiece, Miller's Crossing, where it obviously signals Gabriel Byrne's authority and integrity as an independent human being.)

Blood Simple presents a basically ensemble cast of 4 actors, all of them at that time pretty much new to movies. Frances McDormand, never looking more attractive (watch the bathroom scene where she lets down her hair and splashes water on her face, wherein she bears a distinct resemblance to an equally young Jane Fonda), embarks here on a successful career in both future Coen releases and other films. She conveys a frank innocence marred by an apparent propensity to sexual affairs (though in fact this is based mainly on hearsay - her only discretion actually shown in the movie occurs with the John Getz bartender character after she is in the act of leaving her husband.) Her own first display of the Blood Simple condition actually occurs beforehand, with her returning to her and her husband's house and then moving in with Getz rather than keeping on in her plan to flee to Houston, where presumably the Getz character, having little or no visible tie to either his job or his home, could easily join her. Getz, always somewhat wooden in his performances, actually uses this shortcoming to good advantage as the phlegmatic bartender, who finds himself forced to commit his own `blood simple' crime in order to cover up for the crime he supposes his new lover has committed. Dan Hedaya gives what is to be his usual sinister but somewhat dry-witted performance as the husband, while as the private eye M. Emmett Walsh shows yet again his superb ability to portray redneck sleaze elevated to almost surreal heights by a high-pitched cackling laugh. The ending, though in some ways a bit too obvious, at least rivets with its macabre violence and moody, again Hitchcockian, setting.

Much has been made of the so-called return from the grave by one of the corpses in the movie. Not revealing the identity of the victim, nevertheless it can be pointed out that this incident is of course presented as an obvious dream sequence and not as reality. But what makes the scene distinctly curious is that the sequence also appears to the McDormand character as a sort of premonition or augury of the movie's final denoument. What no one else seems to have noted is the presence in the scene of window glass spread over the floor of her apartment, glass which did not actually appear until near the end of the film in the finale's first shooting scene.

The DVD version has been presented as a director's cut, though most of the cuts are little more than a tightening of dialogue to increase the pace a bit. Also removed was some banter involving Getz's bartender friend, as well hardly pertinent to the plot. One cut, however, that does bother is Getz's brief cigarette shtick with McDormand's piggy bank: at the end of the movie he is attacked by this very artifact, but the viewer hardly knows what it is since in the new version it appears only in a couple of long shots. The Coens make up for the few removed minutes by tacking onto the front of the movie a comic turn by a man purporting to be the head of the company that `restored' the movie for its DVD presentation, which along with the commentary track provided is nothing but a send-up of both restoration projects (greatly needed and hardly seeming to be a subject for satire) and DVD commentaries (often deserving of a thorough parodying). Yet why in this movie the Coens felt the need for such a presentation is unclear; one could see it attached say to one of their comedic entries such as the estimable Raising Arizona, but here in a film noir, as funny as the un-credited commentator may have been with his droll presentation of the `original' Blood Simple plot, it seems out of place and self-indulgent.

Finally, much has been made of Blood Simple's resemblance to a later Coen Brothers film: Fargo. Both it is true follow the same basic idea of stupidity following a crime. But the to me fatal flaw in Fargo is that this stupidity also occurs systematically during and before any actual crime, by characters who are for the most part congenitally dumb. This unfortunately negates the entire basis of film noir, which was of basically `average' people being caught up in a dark universe not of their making and beyond their control. The other pertinent flaw in Fargo was that the McDormand cop was presented as a positive, intelligent and fully capable character around which all the flawed characters revolved, thus again removing much of the film noir sense of existential inevitability from the plot - we knew from the start that she would in the end win out over these cretins, which is exactly what she did. All in all, with its total immersion in the film noir world of everyman characters facing forces and confusions they are unable to cope with, I find that Blood Simple is a far better film than Fargo, in fact second only to Miller's Crossing thus far in the Coen Brothers' oeuvre.
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