The elements were all here in Joel and Ethan Coen’s first film, about a private detective (M. Emmet Walsh) who becomes a force of chaotic evil when he’s hired by a grimy bar owner (Dan Hedaya) to find out if there’s anything going on between one of his employees (John Getz) and his wife (Frances McDormand). There are the many nods to film noir (from The Postman Always Rings Twice to Chinatown). There is the sly humor (including a great, repeated gag involving a dead-end street). There is the audacious camerawork from cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld (such as the infamous shot running along the top of the bar that “bumps” over the slumped head of a drunk). And there is the indelible character work (Walsh’s Loren Visser is a sloppier, more jovial prototype for No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh). Even here, in a calling-card genre exercise, the Coens are clearly interested in existential, quasi-spiritual concerns about guilt, justice, revenge, and violence. All that good Old Testament stuff.
