BLOOD SIMPLE @ 40

Bartender Ray is driving his boss's wife Abby home and their talk leads to revealing their attraction to each other. The photographs of their night in a motel are given to the boss Julian by the private detective he hired to straighten out his suspicions. When Ray shows up at the bar Julian, barely under control, warns him that Abby is playing him and they part in dark moods. Time for action, Julian calls the detective back and orders a hit. The chain is on and wound tight. The line on the poster read: The thriller is alive and well in Texas. Who knew what film noir meant in 1984?

Joel and Ethan Coen did and how.  Their debut feature did modest business at the cinema but was held up to the heavens by critics who recognised its taut construction, black humour, pace and characters as one for the future. And the Coens became a brand. By the end of the decade with the likes of Miller's Crossing and Fargo in the near future, citing the team as a favourite to people you didn't know outed you as one of the warmer cinephiles who did know what noir was but wouldn't correct you on details.

The Coens' cache was a rarity for film making teams, getting the auteur stamp early. A scene where the camera, moving along a bar and then lifts over the body of a collapsed drunk and back down again in this film is the kind of takeaway nugget that anyone could donate to a party conversation when new movies came up. It illustrated the kind of knowing humour reserved for the quietly adept in the previous decade and wasn't a spoiler. The Coens made their own cache, happily wearing cult status until their titles started paying for themselves and all that brand power starts. Just shy of the kind of rote admiration garnered by Stephen Spielberg, who peaked early and stayed there, the Coens added cool.

Cool is what Blood Simple bleeds. Instead of the by then old hat means of suggesting links to past genres and shooting in black and white (that would rise again in the '90s) the Coens chose the contemporary pallet of hard neon and soft light and thick colour like Michael Mann's decade-defining Thief from 1980. They knew they were making a noir and didn't want to distract their audiences from it, they wanted it to look like a noir if made in the mid '80s when it was. Apart from the diegetic Same Old Song played in the bar jukebox, the music is brooding and electronic, keeping a tight grip on the tension.

The cast was largely unknown but fit exactly into their roles to the extent that they appear both as essential components to the narrative but also the art direction. John Getz seems chiselled out of oak, a guy who falls into his gravity and never needs to do more than mumble, sexily macho. Frances McDormand's first film role shows her as a femme fatale who offsets natural beauty with Texan deadliness and practicality. She, of course, has gone the furthest of the cast from this faux ingenue to the potty mouthed harridan of her gleeful maturity. Dan Hedaya wasn't new to any size screen and keeps his constantly threatening emotional combustion barely under control. The least forgettable turn of them all, here, is M. Emmett Walsh as the detective with his gymnastic voice drawling around a stream of southern wisdom and his dodgem car physique. It's one of the decade's most durable performances.

The Coens don't rate their own debut highly. It displays their style, leanness of writing, and clarity of vision perfectly but it ranks low with them. Of course, when your rap sheet includes Fargo, Barton Fink, O Brother Where Art Thou among many bangers, they can afford to dump on a few (though there are still The Ladykillers, Burn After Reading, The Hudsucker Proxy, and Intolerable Cruelty and more of those, of course. Nevertheless it was the expectation of more of the tension and white knuckle comedy that kept us lining up for the next one. When they broke through it was with that cool intact which kept them on the indy side of approval long after their budgets and returns moved them into the mainstream. Blood Simple didn't start American arthouse cinema but it did embolden the style of it for over a decade as the Hal Hartleys and Quentin Tarantinos rose in the following decade.

I saw this on second run after my move to Melbourne. A bunch of us went down to the Richmond Valhalla cinema on Victoria St. After the usual quirky sketches and quirkier trailers for upcoming indy movies, this spectacle came up and we thrilled to its almost overcompetent finish, the perfectly timed visual gags, the noir intrigue and gleeful abandon to the sharpening and polishing of crime genre tropes from the '40s. It's movies from this time that I'd see in places like the long departed Valhalla that match electronic scores with edible colour visual pallets and will forever give me shivers of nostalgia. Blood Simple, the lean, little neo-noir that threw in a fable about capitalism along with its bleak adventure and belly laughs, will always be near the centre of my affection for the '80s. That it's still good apart from that makes it the same as an old stone building, beautiful on the outside, dependable shelter on the inside.