“This is Texas out here you’re on your own. The long, sometimes inspired, sometimes bonkers career of the Coen Brothers started right here, with those words. This 1984 noir film arrived onto the world cinema stage like a bolt of lightning was it a thriller? A western? What was for sure was it was a calling card for one of the most original talents to emerge for many a long year.
After all, this was the year of Ghostbusters, Footloose, Amadeus and The Cotton Club all pretty generic studio stuff. The American Indie film was a rare beast, and for a debut film the Coens had a mighty task just to get the thing made.
But get it made they did, and it still stands up as a minor masterpiece. While they might have made films that are more visually slick, better dressed (Hudsucker Proxy), darker (No Country For Old Men) and funnier (Big Lebowski), perhaps none have quite the fresh, student spirit of this marvellous sweaty noir story.
It’s pretty much a four-hander. Frances McDormand is married to sleazy, scary bar owner Dan Hedaya, but having an affair with ex-serviceman Getz. Hedaya hires private dick M. Emmet Walsh to kill the lovers, but it’s here that things get complicated in a very southern gothic way. Interestingly the Coens raised the money for the film by making a clip of a man crawling along a road in front of a pair of car headlights. In the trailer it was Bruce Campbell, in the film it’s Hedaya, in a 13-minute murder sequence in which there is no dialogue.
That’s the most memorable sequence in the film, but there are plenty of other eye-opening moments. The newspaper slapping against the front door, McDormand’s face moving from the bar into her bed without her blinking, her nailing Walsh’s hand to a window frame, Hedaya’s unexpected reappearance in a stomach-churning dream sequence all utterly original, and here, in this director’s cut, made sharper by some crisp editing. The cut is actually slightly shorter than the original film you might have in your collection, and the original music is restored to its original running time.
The performances too have a freshness that occasionally borders on the amateur but never breaks the spell. McDormand is a highly unusual femme fatale, her innocent face and clear eyes hiding a dark soul within. Getz is the usual man of few words, as is Hedaya, but it’s Walsh who threatens to steal the show. With his sweaty, thinning hair, beer gut, cigars and laconic laugh he is the very essence of sleaze. A fly lands on his face not once, but twice it could be coincidence but with the Coens you never know.
The extras include a hilarious trailer from a fake digital remastering company with a typically weird Coens character extolling the virtues of cleaning up analogue films. Along with the trailer for The Big Lebowski it’s hilarious stuff.
Overall verdict: Coens fans will almost certainly own the DVD already, but this new version is still worth investing in for its sharper editing and music score. It’s a collector’s item of one of the most original films to come out of the US in decades, and heralded the start of the Coens’ careers.
Special Features:
Trailer
Reviewer: Mike Martin