Leave it to the ever-contrary Coen Brothers to produce the first "director’s cut" that’s actually shorter than the original. Though the 1984 original was released just as Joel and Ethan wanted it, they decided looking back the movie needed a little pepping-up before it hit theaters again, so a few lines have been snipped and a few shots shortened, but by and large, this Blood Simple is the same as when it was first released. The Coens’ first feature takes its title from Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, but its tone is closer to Hammett’s less-reputable pulp cousins. (Harvest, along with Hammett’s The Glass Key, was also the source for much of the plot of the Coens’ Miller’s Crossing.) Dan Hedaya plays a cuckolded Texas bar owner who hires private eye M. Emmet Walsh to exact revenge on his two-timing wife (Frances McDormand) and her lover (John Getz, the weak spot in an otherwise exceptional cast). Double-crosses and multiple murders — one character is "killed" at least three times — follow, and the titular fluid flows dark and thick. Simple borrows too much from the Coens’ mentor Sam Raimi, and in the light of their later work, the film often seems like a dry run for techniques they’d come to perfect. But it’s amazing how early on the Coens knew exactly what they were aiming at, if not how to get there; the morbid humor and escalating atmospherics have been at the center of everything else they’ve done. The film’s justly celebrated climax, a textbook example of how to achieve extraordinary effects with next-to-no money, and Walsh’s sly-mouthed, dead-eyed performance is a masterpiece of timing. Two notes: One, despite the directorial trimming, the reissue’s running time is exactly the same as the original’s 97 minutes, due to an added introduction by a pompous Robert Osborne-type who credits the film with "ushering in the era of independent cinema," but cautions viewers that at the time, "filmographic techniques were in their infancy." And two, this version differs significantly from the video in one area; due to inadequate legal clearance, several music cues from the original had to be replaced on the video version. Here, they’re restored, including the deafeningly ironic use of the Four Tops’ "It’s the Same Old Song."