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 Red Harvest. 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.
1929
Dashiell Hammett
Interwar American hardboiled. United States. Written in English.
Hammett's novel in which the Continental Op sets the gangs of a corrupt mining town against one another until the town is soaked in blood.
Direct source, well documented.
The Coens took their title from Red Harvest, where Hammett's Op says that too much killing makes a man go 'blood simple.' The film's corrupt detective and spiraling murders draw on Hammett's view of violence feeding on itself.
The line stops here: hammett drew chiefly on his years as a Pinkerton detective and the pulp magazine Black Mask rather than on identifiable literary models.
