The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, June 29-July 5
Blood Simple (1984)
Directed by Joel Coen
The belly spilling out the Coens’ career-long noir lust, Blood Simple is a riff built from neon and Motown. A standard establishing voiceover, coated with tobacco and drink, heralds a private dick tainted not with sexy loneliness but overworked cheapness: a never better M. Emmett Walsh spouts folksy wisdom, one word sloshing into the next. “Out here, you’re on your own,” he declares over slides of vacant Texas, where times struggle to keep up. These shots feature civilization squirreled away in corners, the pockets bursting with jealousy and misanthropy, as later revealed; distinguishing conflicts within an even larger one—here, the discovery of an affair against Soviet-conscious paranoia—has long been textbook Coen. The tryst of John Getz and Frances McDormand irks big boss hubby Dan Hedaya, prompting Walsh’s investigation and subsequent double-crossing. Unlike a bar-bound roving camera hopping some cowboy boots, results prove unclean for everyone but the writer-director duo, who ferment a persistent comic savagery towards beloved Americana. Whereas their later films would work that out through dialogue, Blood Simple—with assistance from budding cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld—builds pure tension through dumpster fires, bug zappers, and rotting fish, all culminating in a fittingly grisly finale. Max Kyburz (July 1-14 at Film Forum; showtimes daily)