27 works across 28 centuries, back to Hebrew Bible (Genesis, Job, Ecclesiastes, Daniel) and Iliad.
Following one thread, 3 works from No Country for Old Men to The Postman Always Rings Twice. Back to all 27 works
2007
Film by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
Contemporary American cinema. United States. In English.
The Coen brothers' 2007 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel follows a welder who takes drug money from a massacre site in 1980 West Texas, the killer Anton Chigurh who hunts him, and an aging sheriff who cannot stop either. It follows the novel's plot and dialogue closely and stages it with the spare, suspense-driven style the Coens developed in their earlier crime films.
1984
Film by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
American independent cinema. United States. In English.
The Coens' first feature, a Texas noir in which a bar owner hires a seedy private detective to kill his wife and her lover, with violent misunderstandings following.
Stylistic influence, well documented.
The Coens' first film was already a Texas crime story of a stolen sum, a seedy killer and an aftermath of misread clues. No Country returns to that setting and to the slow, nearly wordless suspense sequences of Blood Simple, such as the long scenes of characters waiting in darkened rooms; Carter Burwell scored both.
Structural model, probable.
Fargo reworks Blood Simple's design: a man hires killers to solve a domestic problem and the plan collapses through incompetence and chance. The Coens carried over the deadpan tone and the habit of letting violence erupt amid flat, ordinary settings.
1934
James M. Cain
Interwar American hardboiled. United States. Written in English.
Short first-person novel in which a drifter and a roadside diner owner's wife murder her husband and then turn on each other.
Direct source, well documented.
The Coens have said James M. Cain was their main model for Blood Simple. The adulterous couple, the murdered husband and the lovers' mutual suspicion follow the pattern of The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity.
Stylistic influence, probable.
Jim Thompson worked in the hardboiled mode Cain established: terse first-hand voices, criminal couples bound by money and mistrust, and plots that end in ruin. The Getaway's fugitive husband and wife who come to fear each other echo Cain's lovers.
The line stops here: cain built the plot from newspaper coverage of the 1927 Snyder-Gray murder case and his own journalism.
