Movie Review: Blood Simple (1984)

A neo-noir masterpiece, Blood Simple is the debut of the Coen brothers and an exquisitely crafted crime thriller.

In rural Texas, Abby (Frances McDormand) is cheating on her husband Marty (Dan Hedaya), a bar owner, with his employee Ray (John Getz). But Marty is on to her, and has hired private detective Lorren Visser (M. Emmet Walsh) to catch Abby in the act, which he promptly does. Marty tries and fails to reel Abby in, and in desperation hires Visser to help him exact revenge. But events will spiral in unexpected and dangerous directions for the lovers, the jilted husband and the detective.

The plot summary is just the start. Blood Simple stands atop that foundation of infidelity and humiliation and builds a delightfully askew structure, where every next level is twisted. Double crosses and on-the-fly criminal improvisations engulf the characters in a nightmare of their own making, driven by overlapping combinations of lust, love, greed and retribution.

Produced on a budget of $1.5 million, Blood Simple credits Joel Coen as director and his brother Ethan as producer, and both as co-writers. But this is the start of their shared vision to create quality quirky films, and their first big screen foray delivers a visual and cerebral treat.

Classic film noir fundamentals abound, with all the characters deeply flawed and susceptible to self-serving sin. In the first scene Abby hints to her lover Ray that maybe something bad should happen to her husband Marty; the detective Visser is primarily interested in lining his pockets; and all three men are not beyond plotting and executing acts of violence most foul.

And the classic noir style is also evident in almost every scene. The film opens with an in-car conversation between two silhouettes on a rainy night, interrupted at regular intervals by the headlights of oncoming traffic. Later, light streams through bullet holes in a perforated wall. Lazy ceiling fans shuffle the stale air and help transition scenes and settings. And from third-rate motel rooms to the cluttered back room of Marty's bar, the Coens find ideal locales for everything to go wrong.

The highlight set-piece is an unforgettable Hitchcock-meets-noir sequence involving a victim, blood-soaked clothes, an attempted cover-up, an abandoned country road, a shovel and a grave site. It's an excruciatingly beautiful piece of tense film making, devoid of dialogue but filled with dread and mounting horror.

The four principal cast members fully immerse into their characters. Dan Hedaya and M. Emmet Walsh have rarely had similar opportunities for prominence, and both demonstrate their often underutilized dedication to scheming personas. Walsh, in particular, finds a career highlight as the sleazy private detective happy to freelance in search of maximum profit for least amount of work.

John Getz creates in Ray the perfect handsome but maybe not-so-smart guy ensnared by the wrong woman. In her debut, Frances McDormand projects just the right amount of sly seductiveness under an innocent veneer.

The final showdown features an attempt to tidy up criminal loose ends, and by this stage every ill-advised plan to cause harm has taken an astonishing turn. It's generally inadvisable to take a knife to a gunfight, but in Blood Simple, nothing is that simple.

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Movie Review: Brubaker (1980)

A slow burning prison drama, Brubaker portrays a noble fight against a corrupt system but lacks the depth of character needed to sustain its weighty intentions.

In the late 1960s, a new group of prisoners arrives at the derelict Wakefield State Prison in Arkansas. Among them is a quiet man (Robert Redford) who says little and observes a lot. He witnesses crumbling infrastructure, inhumane conditions and a brutal system of prisoners designated as trustees regularly abusing inmates with whippings and torture. Meanwhile the warden and his administrators are either absent or uncaring. When he stumbles upon a detainee in solitary confinement (Morgan Freeman) threatening to start a riot, the quiet man reveals himself to be Henry Brubaker, the new reformist warden of the prison, appointed with the help of politician Lillian Gray (Jane Alexander).

The idealistic Brubaker takes over the running of the facility, sets about to improve living conditions and appoints a couple of the more dependable prisoners as trustees, including Dickie (Yaphet Kotto) and Bullen (David Keith). He uncovers a racketeering operation based out of the prison grounds, and corruption that extends well outside the prison walls: the surrounding community depends on the prison for slave labour and a steady stream of revenue from contracted projects that are shoddily delivered. By disrupting the long-established status quo Brubaker finds himself at odds with state prison board officials, including chairman John Deach (Murray Hamilton). Things get a lot worse when a long-term prisoner reveals an ever darker secret about what goes on at Wakefield.

Director Stuart Rosenberg returns to the prison milieu he helped to make famous with Cool Hand Luke, but this time it is the warden rather than a prisoner who shakes up the system. Written by W. D. Richter, Brubaker is loosely inspired by the real-life experiences of warden Thomas Murton and the 1967 Arkansas prison scandal. The film settles down to 132 minutes of oppressive drama where prison life is either bad or worse, the mood is grim and prospects bleak. Brubaker's progressive energy represents a thin ray of hope. But gradually he comes to realize that as difficult as it is to make changes within the prison walls, it's the fight against the broader community, benefitting from the prison as a source of slave labour and fraudulent contracts, that represents the greater challenge.

Within the prison the film is dominated by a large number of desperate men abandoned in dilapidating conditions, while the businessmen and politicians on the outside are determined to leave an existing economically advantageous arrangement alone. Rosenberg and Richter successfully build up a system seemingly too entrenched for one man to take on, and then let their hero loose to try and knock down a sturdy wall built on exploitation and abuse.

Cinematographer Bruno Nuytten colours the film in dark blues, greys and black, creating a bleak, grimy and frequently damp environment whether the action is inside the old buildings, on the expansive grounds, or within the depressed community. This is a film drenched in the pessimism of a broken system, and the tone rarely varies.

While mentally engaging, Brubaker rarely stirs the soul. The central character is too monotonal in his quest to do good, and little is offered in the way of character depth or evolution. Redford's performance starts and stops with a dogged determination, and does not change in the face of insurmountable odds.

The trustees and prisoners are plentiful, and that is a problem. Rosenberg is unable to carve out any individual identities beyond the most rudimentary sketches, and in the absence of characters with compelling depth, the film does drag. While David Keith as Larry Lee Bullen comes closest to finding a personality, Murray Hamilton and Jane Alexander have plenty of screen time but not many opportunities to step beyond their predictable character boxes. In addition to Morgan Freeman in his first credited role, stalwarts M. Emmet Walsh and Wilford Brimley have relatively minor appearances.

Brubaker has the right intentions and a worthwhile story, but lacks the spark needed to truly break out of the prison walls.

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Movie Review: Blade Runner (1982)

A triumph of visual style over narrative substance, Blade Runner is a magnificent sensory achievement. Director Ridley Scott creates a sombre future Los Angeles that is all too believable, and the stunning images enrich the otherwise standard story of a hunt for rogue replicants.

In 2019, the world's cities are polluted and overpopulated, and many humans live and work on other planets.  Human-like robots, known as replicants, are manufactured by the dominant Tyrell Corporation to help perform specific functions, but the powerful Nexus-6 models, built with a four-year limit on their life, are specifically prohibited from Earth due to violent tendencies. Retired Los Angeles police officer Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is a "Blade Runner", a specialist in tracking down and "retiring" rogue replicants. With the help of the mysteriously dark Gaff (Edward James Olmos), police chief Harry Bryant (M. Emmet Walsh) recalls Deckard to help in finding and eliminating four Nexus-6 models who have arrived illegally on Earth.

Led by Batty (Rutger Hauer), Leon (Brion James), Pris (Daryl Hannah) and Zhora (Joanna Cassidy) are searching for a way to overcome their four-year life limit. Deckard meets Dr. Eldon Tyrell (Joe Turkel) the main designer of the replicants, and Batty's primary target. Tyrell's latest experiment is Rachael (Sean Young), a replicant unaware of her status and injected with fake memories to help her believe that she is human. As a romance develops between Deckard and Rachael, Deckard tracks down first Zhora then Leon, but Batty and Pris find their way to J.F. Sebastian (William Sanderson), a genetic designer who can lead them to Tyrell.

Based on the Philip K. Dick short story Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner is working with limited source material, effectively a glorified but quite linear detective chase. Scott successfully fuses together a depressingly bleak future with basic film noir characteristics to create a memorably artistic tableau, rendering the actual plot quite secondary.

Blade Runner's dazzling achievement is a rich extrapolation of the present into a credible but horrendous future recreation of a large Earth city. The Los Angeles of 2019 is an overpopulated urban nightmare bathed in constant darkness, never-ending rain, persistently rising steam from unidentified cavities, and washed with the sickly glow of incessant, oversized neon corporate advertising. Mammoth, super-dense buildings dominate the cityscape, the population is mostly Asian, every inch of sidewalk is congested, and the police presence is pervasive in hovering "spinner" vehicles, their yellow beams of light adding to the suffocating environment. Every external scene in Blade Runner re-emphasizes this grim future, Scott making use of shadows and light to create a hallucinatory, recalibrated but frighteningly believable reality.

The film plays with several themes related to the essence of being human. The replicants are struggling against their unalterable built-in four-year life span, expressing the hopelessness of an existence that is certain of a termination date. Humans of course suffer the same certainty of death, but without knowledge of the expiration time, and the screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples questions the fairness of human-like creations, designed to express human emotions, but sabotaged in their ability to hope and dream, that most essential of human attributes. There are also puzzles related to Deckard (is he human or a replicant), and, ultimately, what does the future hold when the line between natural and man-made humans is blurred beyond obvious recognition.

With the film's appearance dominating the plot and characters, the performances are understandably subdued. Harrison Ford, looking to expand from the Star Wars universe, has little to work with, Deckard hard boiled enough but without the edge or wit afforded to classic film noir investigators. Rutger Hauer's Roy Batty emerges as the most dominant character, physically and emotionally imposing, a replicant who understands his role and fallibilities all too well. Sean Young wears the same sad and puzzled expression throughout, a not-so-fatale femme, Young as unassured about her performance as Rachael is about her humanity. Daryl Hannah, Joanna Cassidy, Brion James, William Sanderson and Edward James Olmos are colourfully good fits for their bizarre surroundings, but in limited roles none can benefit from any character evolution.

Blade Runner set a new standard for what a serious science fiction film could look like, in a universe where reality is not so much newly constructed as imaginatively stretched from the more austere elements of the present. It's an enduring cinematic achievement, the routine story compensated for by a dazzling package.

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The Movies Of M. Emmet Walsh

All movies starring M. Emmet Walsh and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

Midnight Cowboy (1969, uncredited)

What's Up, Doc? (1972)

Serpico (1973)

The Gambler (1974)

The Prisoner Of Second Avenue (1975)

Slap Shot (1976)

Airport '77 (1977)

Straight Time (1978)

The Jerk (1979)

Brubaker (1980)

Raise The Titanic (1980)

Ordinary People (1980)

Blade Runner (1982)

Silkwood (1983)

Blood Simple (1984)

Missing In Action (1984)

Wildcats (1986)

Raising Arizona (1987)

Harry And The Hendersons (1987)

Narrow Margin (1990)

Cops And Robbersons (1994, uncredited)

A Time To Kill (1996)

My Best Friend's Wedding (1997)

Twilight (1998)

Arthur Newman (2012)

Knives Out (2019)

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The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: Missing In Action (1984)

A brain-free Vietnam war revenge fantasy, Missing In Action exemplified what Cannon Films was mostly about: C-level action movies for non-discerning audiences, filled with heavy weaponry, explosions, chases, macho posturing and dead bodies.

A US government delegation travels to Vietnam to discuss the issues of soldiers still listed as missing in action. Colonel James Braddock (Chuck Norris) is a last minute addition to the delegation - he was held by the Vietnamese during the war and accused of killing civilians before escaping his captors. Braddock is not interested in meetings and negotiations. He sets off in his own, skulking around Ho Chi Minh City to uncover clues about the location of a prison camp where Americans are still being held.

Braddock travels to Thailand and connects with Tuck (M. Emmet Walsh), another war veteran with access to weapons and equipment. Together, Braddock and Tuck launch an amphibious assault in an attempt to free the MIAs and embarrass the Vietnamese.

Rushed into production and release to beat Rambo: First Blood Part II into the theatres, and apparently based on early treatments of the same script, Missing in Action succeeds in elevating Sylvester Stallone's bloodfest into classic status. Chuck Norris cruises through the movie with an exasperating non-expressive face, surviving numerous attempts on his life and dispatching all-comers with a minimum of effort and a maximum of noise. All the Vietnamese are evil, all the American politicians are morons, and only Braddock understands what is wrong and right. The pervasive rah-rah kill'em all attitude is plain nauseating.

Typical of productions from the Golan - Globus stable, the production values are choppy, and the supporting performances straight from the dossier of lost careers. The only woman in the cast is Lenore Kasdorf, a stalwart of the daytime television soap opera scene. Director Joseph Zito hustles the action along with the sole purpose of canning every scene at the lowest possible cost while capturing the highest number of stuntmen flying through the air to their cinematic death. One of the stuntmen was none other than Jean-Claude Van Damme, doubtless taking notes on the finer production points of mindless action movies.

Missing In Action was supposed to be the second film in the series, but was released first after the original story of Braddock's captivity and escape proved to be a weaker movie (as difficult as that is to imagine). The sequel become the launch of the franchise, and the supposed first instalment was relegated to prequel status.

Missing In Action established Norris as a second-tier bankable movie star within the second-tier category of indestructible all-action patriotic heroes, proving that those willing to travel deep enough down the leagues will eventually find a zone of comfort.

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