KEITH UHLICH
Blood Simple
film classics
Blood Simple (1984, Joel and Ethan Coen, United States) The brothers Coen made a spectacular debut with this twisty and clever neo-noir in which a bartender (John Getz) runs afoul of his boss (Dan Hedaya) after sleeping with the latter’s wife (Frances McDormand). This ignites a combustible chain of events involving murderfor-hire and other sordid happenings, much of them overseen by a sleazy private eye named Loren Visser (M. Emmet Walsh). The Coen siblings’ darkly humorous aesthetic touchstones are already in evidence; one eye-catching, hilarious tracking shot along a bar rises above one of the drunken patrons collapsed upon it. And their mischievous morality is also apparent in spades, as all the characters are unable (or unwilling) to extricate themselves from a universe in which animal instinct triumphs more often than not over humanity. It’s a point of view they both would hone further over the years in arguably more complex films like No Country for Old Men and A Serious Man. Yet there’s still something bracing about how fully formed the brothers’ ideas and ideology were from the start. (Streaming on Max.) The Beguiled (1971, Don Siegel, United States) The same year he portrayed the relentless Dirty Harry Callahan, Clint Eastwood and director Don Siegel also teamed up on this gothic period piece set during the American Civil War. Eastwood plays a 20
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Union soldier whose grievous wounds land him in a Mississippi seminary school inhabited entirely by women. Geraldine Page plays the repressed headmistress, and you better believe the introduction of some XY chromosomes into this little cloister wreaks hormonal havoc. (The school’s hothouse ambience proves as sticky as the southern heat.) In contrast with Eastwood’s usual roles, he’s somewhat submissive here, a beta-male manipulator who brings out the devil in himself and others. His innately seductive tendencies eventually lead to some shocking moments in which the women get the better of him, none more memorable than the sequence in which one of his gangrenous limbs is graphically amputated. (Streaming on Criterion.) Husbands (1970, John Cassavetes, United States) The YouTube faithful may be familiar with the episode of Dick Cavett’s talk show where friends and collaborators John Cassavetes, Peter Falk, and Ben Gazzara drunkenly cut loose for their entire appearance. The line between bad behavior and endearing fellowship is shifted, crossed, exploded, obliterated. It’s an infamous episode that was part of the promotional tour for Cassavetes’ 1970 feature about a trio of friends, Harry (Gazzara), Archie (Falk) and Gus (Cassavetes) C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E
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