Blood simple

Blood Simple

Another hit of the New York Film Festival was Blood Simple, hosannaed as a revivification of the film noir. Actually, it does not so much pump new blood into an old genre as provide new catsup in old bottles. This the kind of film where blood on a car seat is still so fresh the following day that, when a concealing towel is tossed over it, it manages to seep through. Here it is the brain that congeals. Thus a cheating married woman, who has reason to believe her husband is out to get her, moves into an apartment with huge windows but no blinds or curtains, to facilitate a sniper's work. When her lover comes at night to warn her, and tells her to turn off the light, she refuses. And he, too dumb even to duck, argues with her in the brightly lit room with his back to the window. If for no other reason than stupidity, he deserves to die.

Everyone in this film laid in Texas is full of lust or blood-lust, and profoundly simple-minded, which, I take it, is what the singularly clumsy title is meant to mean. Directed by 29-year-old Joel Coen and written by his brother, Ethan, age 27, Blood Simple is a typical film-school product: the cross-breeding of two genres, the film noir and the horror film (Joel's only previous professional experience was working on some horror films), which must have struck these young men as a particularly clever idea, the more so since much of the lust and violence is played for laughs. In any case, the marriage of horror and noir is sheer miscegenation. The horror film thrives on creating an atmosphere of unreality within reality, in which the weirdly irrational becomes plausible. The film noir, conversely, depends on making the most outrageous corruption seem so widespread and natural as to imply that vice is ecumenical, evil transcendent. But satanism and moral pessimism make poor bedfellows: The one is basically optimistic (God or man will defeat the devil), the other not (man is mostly bad, and that's that).

Indeed, the Coens did not really have to attend film school; it would have sufficed to study the worst films of Brian de Palma (which is to say almost any), but perhaps that is what goes on at our film schools. We are expected to believe that the murderous, extremely fat private eye (M. Emmet Walsh) can reach through adjoining windows from one apartment into another, there to have his hand nailed to the inside window sill by a knife; in agony, he can nevertheless, with four or five bullets, shoot a sufficient hole into the wall between the apartments to stick his other arm through it and pull out the knife. For this, he would have to be either Superman or an octopus. Again, after a man has been left for dead by a highly professional killer and transported for miles by a highly unprofessional one, he proves not only not dead but also able to pull a gun on his second aggressor, who is burying him alive. Presently he becomes even more one of the Undead, as he comes back to haunt his unfaithful wife. This is revealed to be only her dream, but a dream that, in context, makes no psychological, only exploitational, sense.

Though there is some decent acting, chiefly by Walsh and by Dan Hedaya as the vermiculate husband, most of the production values are mediocre. (It's fine to be low-budget, but only so long as it doesn't show.) Yet Blood Simple has been extolled by Richard Corliss of Time (to cite one typical accolade) as "a debut as scarifyingly assured as any since Orson Welles's.' Aside from the fact that "scarifying' does not mean "scary,' does this mean that Blood Simple is as good as Citizen Kane? Not even Corliss could be that absurd. Then it can mean only that terrifying assurance is a major good in itself. But there has never been a master criminal who lacked such assurance; does that make him an artist? Criticism should not be moralistic, but it cannot avoid being moral and survive.