“West of the Pecos there is no law; West of El Paso there is no God.”

— Unknown

Blood Simple

1984

Crime, thriller

A rich but jealous man hires a private investigator to kill his cheating wife and her new man. But, when blood is involved, nothing is simple.

Length: 99 minutes

MPAA rating: R

Directors: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen (uncredited)

Writers: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

Stars: John Getz, Frances McDormand, Dan Hedaya

Screen times: Friday, 9:30 p.m., Waterville Opera House; Tuesday, July 12, 9:30, Waterville Opera House; Saturday, July 16, 9:15 p.m., Railroad Square Cinema.

The Smith Brothers made cough drops. The Marx Brothers made comedy. The Koch Brothers make money.

But the Coen Brothers? They make films — not movies, mind you; films. Steven Spielberg makes movies. J.J. Abrams makes movies. The Coen brothers make films, small films that in turn make big trouble for little people.

The Coens create characters that attract trouble the way black wool attracts lint. They are born to get in trouble; trouble is out there on dark highways, in bars, back alleys. It’s on the highways in Arizona, bars in Texas, the Hollywood hills, big studios and chain gangs in the South.

Trouble, as the Coens design it, is a hound dog with a good nose for dumb people. They can run, but they can’t hide.

With the brothers Coen, people are always in trouble. Consider “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” “Fargo,” “Raising Arizona,” “No Country For Old Men,” and the cult classic “The Big Lebowski.” There are a dozen more, but the above seem to get the most attention.

Then there is “Blood Simple,” the 1984 piece of dark tar and gravel, blood and smoke, that got people’s attention. It took on a life and kept growing. Some of you coming to this year’s Maine International Film Festival probably have never seen it, maybe never heard of it. Here’s your chance to see it in a new 5.1 audio mix and color-corrected digital restoration, and it’s the director’s cut.

The story is a like a big, old, scary house. I can, in this review, show you the house, but not the rooms. You have to go inside there yourself.

There’s this cheap Texas back road bar owner, Marty (Dan Hedaya), who knows his wife, Abby (a young and gorgeous Frances McDormand), is cheating with one of his bartenders (John Getz) and decides to have them killed. He hires a fat, rumpled private investigator, Mr. Visser (M. Emmet Walsh, born to play this role) for the job. It’s that simple.

Of course we know by watching them make the deal that both of them wouldn’t know a scruple from a crushed armadillo on the highway. We know that the fat man’s greed, the bar owner’s out-of-control jealousy, the cute young wife’s duplicity and the bartender’s unbridled lust will lead them all down a dirt road to a river of blood. Simple.

The Coens use a box full of delicious, gory, awful, bloody, horrifying little tricks and details that will pull the sweat from your dry, popcorn-stained hands: the searching hand out the bathroom window, the girl in the dark next room, the hammer, the nail, the missing cigarette lighter, the cornfield in the dark, the German shepherd salivating in the corner, the gun with exactly three bullets, the knife, the headlights far down the highway, the shovel. Simple.

“Blood Simple” is a gift from brilliant filmmakers who went on to make even better stories. This one, from out of the past, out of the dark, is here for you to enjoy.

J.P. Devine is a former film and screen actor and the author of “Will Write For Food.”

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