- There's a scene in Dial M for Murder in which Ray Milland reflects on the perfect crime, worrying that he'd "make some stupid mistake and never realize it until I found everybody was looking at me." The characters in Blood Simple make an astounding number of such mistakes, and none of them seem terribly worried at all. In this world, there are no criminal masterminds, no seasoned professionals, and no unstoppable heroes. Just the kind of people you might encounter in rural Texas, where everybody gravitates to the local watering hole and nobody seems to be in any particular hurry. And as the narrator carefully notes, down in Texas "you're on your own."
- The narrator in this case is an amusingly sardonic unnamed private eye (M. Emmet Walsh), who only takes jobs "if the pay's right and it's legal." Of course, when a sleazy bar owner named Marty (Dan Hedaya) wants to hire him for something "not strictly legal," the detective is all-too-willing to relax the second condition of his employment. The job involves taking care of Marty's guileless wife, Abby (Frances McDormand), who ran off with the laconic bartender, Ray (John Getz). Marty's first attempt at revenge reached a humorously literal dead end, so the new plan is for the detective to knock off the couple while Marty is out of town. Instead, the detective decides to spring a bizarre double-cross that involves doctored photos and one fewer murder. Normally that would be the end of the story, but Marty's surprising resilience and the self-implicating tendencies of the detective and Ray weave a tale that is far more tangled than most.
- On the surface, Blood Simple sounds like a standard pot-boiler, but it is considerably more interesting than that. While taking some basic cues from film noir, it modifies the standard motifs to establish a strange, alternate universe in which corpulent detectives successfully tiptoe around in cowboy boots and femmes fatale are completely innocent. Careless men botch the simplest jobs, leaving embarrassing clues at every turn, but their fates are ultimately independent of guilt or innocence. In my favorite scene, a tremendous sense of cosmic import is conveyed as a car approaches from the distance, only to reveal a yokel driving by. Similarly, the film's plot slowly evolves into an immense joke of precisely the sort that the narrator might appreciate. The end result is a film that is very enjoyable and plenty bloody, but hardly simple.
- This was the Coen brothers' debut, as well as the first role for Frances McDormand.
- Apparently, the title is derived from a line in Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest.
