'In films, murders are always very clean,' once said Alfred Hitchcock. 'I show how difficult it is, and what a messy thing it is, to kill a man.'

Equally convinced that blood was a harder stain to remove than burgundy, two young directors from Minneapolis made their feature film debut trying to show just how horribly accurate Hitch was.

Seeming deceptively straightforward at the outset, Blood Simple is a wonderfully gripping noir woven around basic human themes like infidelity and a paycheck, but the Coen brothers are masters at detail, and bestow this modest little film with masterfully intricate plotting as well as a banality that borders on the brutal.

The film's macabre starkness is best expressed in this one scene, where a flustered Dan Hedaya offers private detective M Emmet Walsh $10,000 to kill a man. The matter-of-fact ruminations take place in a car so silent you can feel the actors' sweat, Walsh comparing that sum with what he think is a Russian's wage. It's an incredible, musicless scene, and giving more away about the film would be just criminal.

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