Blood Simple, the debut film by the Coen brothers, was shot in 1982, completed in 1983, released at film festivals in 1984, and then more widely in January 1985. (Thus, if we use its official US release date as a marker, the film is celebrating its fortieth anniversary this year.) It has a classic noir setup: somewhere in Texas, a husband hires a sleazy private investigator to tail his wife, who is having an affair with an employee of the roadhouse bar called the Neon Boots that he owns and operates. From there, it proceeds—through a series of misdirections, betrayals, and miscommunications—to drag its characters through the mud of desperate behavior.
The husband’s name is Julian Marty, played by Dan Hedaya in one of the sweatiest and most distressing performances I’ve ever seen. He has an ulcer he somehow passes along to the audience. Watching him is feeling a burning in the pit of your stomach. If he doesn’t make you want to swig Pepto Bismol, I don’t know what will. Frances McDormand, brilliant in her first film, is his wife, the perpetually worry-faced Abby. We wonder how on Earth she wound up with Marty, but we accept it. She has strayed with Ray and seeks freedom from the prison of an oppressive life with Marty, who has no doubt inflicted emotional and psychological damage on her. John Getz is Ray, Abby’s lover, Marty’s employee. Once again, the backstory is largely kept off the table, though we know that Marty really trusts Ray—he’s one of only three people with the combination to the safe at the Neon Boots. And, of course, there’s Loren Visser, played with aplomb by the character actor M. Emmet Walsh in Sydney Greenstreet mode, a skeezy private investigator, at first hired by Marty to catch Abby and Ray in the act and then to kill them but reversing course and deciding to off Marty instead, strutting through the film in his gaudy leisure suits and a ten-gallon hat, driving a Volkswagen Beetle (“We thought of him as a bug,” Joel Coen says in a conversation with the author Dave Eggers in one of the Criterion special features). In his review of Blood Simple for Time, Richard Corliss described the setting of the film as “a town off the dirt road from Southwest Nowhere,” and you can feel the space and expanse of Texas with its lonely roads and big skies and endless fields. “Down here, you’re on your own,” Visser says in the voice-over that opens the film, referring to his primitive vision of Texas, where it’s everyone for themselves, where trust is merely a myth on the horizon.
I’m very thankful for the Criterion release of Blood Simple with its abundance of extras—Eggers interviewing the Coens, a commentary by the Coens and the cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld, interviews with McDormand, Walsh, and the composer Carter Burwell, and more—but it’s not hard to put myself back in the shoes of the kid I was who found the VHS release of it on the shelf at Wolfman’s video store in southern Brooklyn in the late ’80s, took it home and watched it in a cloud of unknowing, utterly possessed by its mystery. Like so many of my seminal texts, it was not introduced to me but stumbled upon, which seems especially fitting in this case, as Blood Simple concerns itself with four main characters who are stumble puppies, blunderers, people reaching blindly in the shadows.
I think I was about twelve or thirteen when I first watched it (it was my first Coen brothers movie, certainly), and at that point I’d been slowly and surely developing a taste for the dark stuff. I discovered books by James Ellroy and read Jim Thompson for the first time after watching Stephen Frears’s adaptation of The Grifters. I became a massive David Lynch fan, renting (and having my perspective on the world altered by) Blue Velvet. I started to dip my toes into the murky waters of film noir after encountering Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour on PBS one lonesome Friday night. I hadn’t read Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain yet—two lodestars for the Coens—but I soon would.
The first thing that appealed to me about Blood Simple was the title. I puzzled over the poetry of it. I didn’t know at the time that it’s a phrase taken from Hammett’s Red Harvest: “This damned burg’s getting me,” says the Continental Op of murder-plagued Personville, Montana (aka Poisonville). “If I don’t get away soon I’ll be going blood-simple like the natives.” The phrase was again used by Ellroy in 1990, six years after the Coens’ debut, in a short story called “Torch Number”: “The caper went blood simple: guards snuffed, stray bullets flying.” That was, no doubt, the second place I ran across it, before I knew both the Coens and Ellroy were borrowing from Hammett.
It’s easier now to study Blood Simple from the vantage point of age and experience. I have read takes on it by my favorite film critics. I have listened to the main participants describe the process of making it. I have listened to my favorite writers, actors, and directors discuss its impact on them (see Criterion Channel interviews with Megan Abbott, Bill Hader, and Guillermo del Toro). I have seen it more than twenty times over the years—on VHS, on television, on DVD and Blu-ray and now 4K, streaming, and only once in a theater (fittingly, while I lived for a brief spell in Austin, Texas, in my early twenties). I can rehash stuff that I’ve read and heard elsewhere, but what continues to fascinate me is my initial response to it. Without the language to understand exactly what I was seeing, without the framework to make sense of the technical choices the Coens had made in the classical traditions of noir and horror, it’s compelling for me to consider what I was seeing and how I was seeing it.
Though I’d watched a handful of classic noirs and a few films that could be classified as neo-noirs before seeing Blood Simple—just enough to wet my whistle—in many ways its noir aesthetic was the most significant gateway for me. I felt an emotional response to all the silence and neon, the shadows and the headlights flashing across blacktop. Heavy rain. Ceiling fans. A Texas of the Coens’ linked imaginations. A few years later, when I got to college and took my first creative writing classes, I would have teachers put into words something I felt before I understood it: that good writing is made by good details. And Blood Simple is a study in details. Loren’s lighter. Abby’s gun. The incinerator. That clamshell case. That glass of milk on Marty’s desk. The photographs of Marty and Abby that we see. The chipped dial on the safe. Broken glass scattered on the floor. Shafts of light filtering in through bullet holes in the wall. On the commentary track with Sonnenfeld, the Coens point to their intense use of close-ups as amateurish, but it only adds to the claustrophobia of the small, brutal world they created, makes more immediate the dramatic effect of the details they chose to focus on, which tell the story under the surface without any burdensome exposition.
I love Frances McDormand—as difficult as it is to imagine, she’s been one of my favorite actors across five decades now—and M. Emmet Walsh is an all-time great, a bona fide scene-stealer, but rewatching the film recently, I was struck all over again by Dan Hedaya’s performance. Watching him—hirsute, sweaty, oozing with desperation—I was thrust back to my childhood perception of the film and reminded of the fact that my burgeoning interest in villains, in “unlikeable” characters, was seeded by Blood Simple. Julian Marty is the squeeze-dried black heart of the film. The darkest (and funniest) deeds are inflicted upon him. “Hey, mister, how’d you break your pussy finger?” a kid asks Marty on his way to meet Visser, after Ray has snapped his finger back to free Abby from a chokehold Marty’s got her in. Marty is someone we want to see punished, but most of us probably feel some ethical and moral doubts as his fate is sealed in the ugliest manner possible: being buried alive by Ray, who believes Abby has shot him (when, in fact, it was Visser).
Hedaya is Syrian Jewish, from Bensonhurst, my part of southern Brooklyn. The community he grew up in was close-knit. A 1995 profile in The New York Times of Hedaya by Bernard Weinraub, “After 20 Years, Dan Hedaya Is Fading Out of Anonymity,” relates that “[Hedaya’s] family expected him to enter the import-export business, but he fled Brooklyn as a teenager to join the Merchant Marines and later attended Tufts University, where he began performing at the campus theater.” His path to success in Hollywood was full of detours and dead ends. One thing’s for sure: he does not scream “Texas.” (Nor do the Coens, though Texas has become foundational in their work—Joel lived in Austin briefly, and they were drawn to set and make Blood Simple there because they knew they could rustle up a crew and find places to shoot.) I first recognized Hedaya on television shows I grew up watching. He played Nick Tortelli, the husband of Rhea Perlman’s character Carla on Cheers (and got his own spin-off show in 1987, The Tortellis, which lasted only thirteen episodes). I’d seen him in childhood favorite Commando (released in 1985, nine months after Blood Simple), starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and the love of my young life, Alyssa Milano, and he’d made memorable appearances on Family Ties and Who’s the Boss? (with Milano again). Hedaya’s career in film and television spanned back to the mid-’70s, and I’d catch up with many performances of his I’d missed, as well as seeing him in other works that were deeply important to me throughout the 1990s and 2000s, particularly David Lynch’s 2001 masterpiece Mulholland Drive, where Hedaya plays Vincenzo Castigliane. It was Hedaya’s performance in Amy Heckerling’s Clueless (1995) that probably helped him break through on another level, though. It’s also interesting to note that Hedaya played a character called Lou the Werewolf in a 1993 episode of NYPD Blue, who reminded me very much of the Russian guy I called Wolfman who ran my local go-to video store where I first rented Blood Simple (and where I would rent upwards of ten movies a week until Blockbuster put the store out of business).
I did somehow know Hedaya was from my neighborhood when I first saw Blood Simple. Word of mouth, I suppose. My stepfather was a public school teacher who moonlighted as a wannabe actor—he’d had bit parts on the show Kate & Allie and in the early-’80s films Stardust Memories and Trading Places. I’m sure I knew from him. There was certainly some sense that the neighborhood had made Hedaya. And, despite my Scottish handle (my father was off-the-boat Scottish), my mother is Italian American and so was my stepdad, and I grew up with the Italian side of my family in Gravesend and Bensonhurst. Hedaya often portrayed Italians, and I probably figured at the time that he was Italian; I wouldn’t be surprised if my stepdad believed that as well. Italian American artists from New York City (Scorsese, De Niro, Pacino, Turturro, Buscemi, Tomei—the list goes on and on) made up the core of my list of heroes. I almost certainly lumped Hedaya in with them, and I’m sure that part of my initial visceral response to him in Blood Simple was rooted in that mistaken belief.
More important, though, was the fact that Hedaya brings a gravitas to the part—and a beatific scumminess—that I appreciate. There aren’t many actors capable of what he’s capable of simply by being. A trembling look can shake you to your soul. That emotive face. That cleft chin. Peter Lorre could do it; Lon Chaney. Hedaya is one of those rare actors who could’ve had a career at any point in cinematic history. It’s not difficult to imagine him in silent pictures or stealing scenes in noir films throughout the ’40s and ’50s or finding a niche in the New Hollywood character studies of the ’70s. His career followed in the wake of all that, and was (and is) impressive and wide-ranging. He’s still kicking at eighty-four, though he hasn’t appeared in anything since 2021. In any case, that early viewing of Blood Simple found me mesmerized by Hedaya, by his crawling, aching, pained turn as Marty, even as he disappears from the action with a significant chunk of the run time left, leaving the other three leads to scavenge and claw and to try make sense of the unfolding mess.
I remember my dreams after first seeing Blood Simple: I dreamed the way the movie looks. Long car rides in the dark. I dreamed in shadows and silences. A man I couldn’t see in an adjoining apartment shooting through the wall at me. It fundamentally changed the way I see in my mind’s eye, rewired some of my creative impulses. In Adam Nayman’s excellent 2018 book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together, he talks about Blood Simple as “a kind of ground zero—a wellspring of the Coens’ stylistic and thematic originality. . . a film that points the way ahead for its creators even as they’re undeniably glancing backward at the same time.” I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how instructional my earliest viewings of the film were. From an artistic standpoint, I mean. I didn’t necessarily know or understand it at the time, but I was studying Blood Simple. It made me think about POV in ways I’d never thought about before. That Visser voiceover in the beginning. What the viewer knows that the characters don’t throughout is key. The way the Coens withhold. It shaped how I write violence—finding a balance between quick and messy realism and a nice bit of splatter. It shaped how I think about character motivations and textual patterns. There’s also what I’d call (for lack of a better term) a sort of religious weight to the proceedings. Maybe it’s just that Visser gets stabbed through the hand, and—for a kid raised in the Catholic church on crucifixion imagery—it felt extra potent, but I think there’s more to it. The Coens’ vision of sin and punishment and violence, while not moralistic, is freighted with a type of religious urgency I associate with Flannery O’Connor’s dark Catholic gaze. Maybe it’s just that noir and religion can feel drastically of a piece because of the heavy-duty atmospherics, all the smoke and mirrors. Either way, it was something I felt, something I learned from (and continue to learn from), digging into its mysterious effects. To borrow a few lines from the poet Christian Wiman, Blood Simple excels at “silvering / a coolness through you / like a soul of nerve.”
I rewatched Blood Simple often throughout high school as my interest in film developed. A friend of my mother’s knew I loved films and that I maybe wanted to try my hand at writing screenplays, so he’d bring me published editions of scripts. At some point (I can’t remember exactly when, but it must’ve been a few years later, at least), he brought me an omnibus edition of Coen brothers scripts. It became a bible to me as I spent my high school years trying to learn to write for the movies. I continued to study and work; I woke up two hours before school on weekdays and early on weekends and plugged away on my Smith Corona typewriter. I copied the style and format of Blood Simple. I wrote many scripts in those years—at least seven or eight, all very bad. One was called Coup de Grâce (I had to draw that fucking circumflex), a term I’d no doubt lifted from some other film or book. It was the most egregious of my Blood Simple rip-offs: a love triangle, an attempted murder or three, blunderers blundering through a nasty maze of bad decisions and double-crosses, some good old-fashioned blood gushing.
Blood Simple had given me that new camera in my mind, and I couldn’t see any other way. At the time, I thought I wanted to make films, to be a director. I figured I’d go to film school and learn the ropes. Studying Blood Simple taught me lessons about keeping a project small and doable that I still utilize today, even though I drifted away from my interest in making films (by age eighteen, I realized I was cut out for writing fiction, for the solitary art life, and that film was far too collaborative a medium with far too much time spent chasing money). Still, Blood Simple spurred my interest in small casts and limited locations, which can provide automatic tension when handled properly, and it built a realization in me that too much freedom can be a trap, that constraints are useful creatively.
In college, at a state school in New York’s Hudson Valley, I became a Bob Dylan obsessive. The Big Lebowski was released my junior year, in which the Coens use Dylan’s “The Man in Me” from New Morning. They’d also make Dylan a significant background character in their 2013 masterpiece about the 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene, Inside Llewyn Davis. I mention this not to be obtuse, but there’s a throughline: the Coens, like Dylan, are Jewish Minnesotans. That religious urgency I mentioned previously—it’s there in Dylan’s work. He also has toyed with noir traditions throughout his career, especially in his twenty-first-century output with Theme Time Radio Hour, 2003’s Masked and Anonymous, his Sinatra albums, and 2023’s Shadow Kingdom. Rewatching Blood Simple recently, I thought of those two double-edged words—blood and simple—and was surprised I’d never made a certain connection before. The second track on Dylan’s revered 1975 album Blood on the Tracks is “Simple Twist of Fate.” There’s a part of me—knowing, of course, that the phrase comes from Hammett—that chooses to see that as evidence of something. Blood (on the Tracks) Simple (Twist of Fate). Willfully, aggressively, I will make my case, even if it doesn’t hold water. Yet another way the film has burrowed pleasantly into my subconscious.
Blood Simple makes for an interesting bookend with the Coens’ award-winning 2007 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. Visually and thematically, it’s amazing to think about how fully formed they were when they made Blood Simple in their late twenties, and to trace their development. For McCarthy, No Country for Old Men was a stripped-down later period work, a concise exploration of evil run amok in a frail world, with Texas as the playing field. For the Coens, it was a midcareer reckoning with the same themes that had haunted them since Blood Simple (interesting to note, as well, that it was only their second adaptation, after their Odyssey riff with O Brother, Where Art Thou?).
Simplicity is a hell of a concept. Everything can seem simple until it isn’t. Llewelyn Moss finds that out the hard way in No Country for Old Men. Guilt nags. Fates collide. There’s destiny and then there’s death. It’s impossible not to think of Visser under that sink at the end of Blood Simple, waiting for a droplet of water to fall from that pipe. Down here, you’re on your own. 
William Boyle is the author of eight books set in and around the southern Brooklyn neighborhood of Gravesend, where he was born and raised. His most recent novel is Saint of the Narrows Street, available from Soho Crime. His books have been nominated for the Hammett Prize, the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger Award in the UK, and the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in France. He writes an online film column for Southwest Review called I Wake Up Streaming, and he coedited (with Claudia Piñeiro and Frances Riddle) the noir issue (108.3) of the print magazine. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi.
Illustration: Brianna Ashby
