Blood Simple director's cut differences: what the Coens cut and who the man introducing it really is

Blood Simple is Joel and Ethan Coen's first film, a Texas noir about a bar owner, Marty (Dan Hedaya), who hires a sleazy private detective (M. Emmet Walsh) to kill his wife, Abby (Frances McDormand, in her first feature), and her lover, Ray (John Getz). The Coens raised its $1.5 million budget by showing investors a fake trailer starring Bruce Campbell. It premiered at the New York Film Festival in October 1984 and opened in January 1985. In 2000, the brothers took it back to theaters as a director's cut, and that's the version StudioCanal put on its new 4K release in October.

Why the Coens went back in

They weren't adding lost scenes. They were fixing things they'd been embarrassed by for 15 years.

"We always thought it was rather kind of clumsy, the editing," Joel Coen said.

Ethan put it in medical terms: "Before, the original version was like an old lady with a walker, and now it just has a cane."

What the Coens cut

The cane cost about two and a half minutes. A frame-by-frame comparison by Movie-Censorship.com counts 28 cuts adding up to 3 minutes 16 seconds, against about 40 seconds of extended shots. The biggest losses:

• Meurice's jukebox chat — 30 seconds of the bartender, Meurice (Samm-Art Williams), talking with a customer about the Yankees and Detroit before he feeds the jukebox.
• Abby's visit to Meurice — 51 seconds of Abby at his apartment, telling him she thinks Marty is dead while he tells her Marty is probably fine.
• The pig statue — Ray parking his cigarette in the mouth of a pig statue on his way out.
• The finger — the shots of Abby biting Marty's finger when he grabs her.
• The payoff — small trims to the scene where Marty pays the detective, including the bag of money landing on the table.

Most of the rest is a second or two shaved off the end of a shot. AV Club called the changes "scarcely detectable to anyone who hasn't committed Blood Simple to memory."

What they put back

The director's cut does add things, and one of them is a song. In the theaters in 1985, Meurice's jukebox played the Four Tops' "It's the Same Old Song." Over a rights problem, the 1995 US VHS swapped in Neil Diamond's "I'm a Believer." The director's cut brings the Four Tops back.

The other additions are less cheerful. Ray gets a few more shovelfuls of dirt on Marty's grave. And the climax, where the detective's hand is pinned to a windowsill by a knife, runs about 20 seconds longer, most of it spent watching him work the knife out.

The man introducing it

Before the movie starts, an avuncular older man introduces himself as Mortimer Young of Forever Young Films. He credits Blood Simple with "ushering in the era of independent cinema," says it has been "digitally enhanced and tastefully restored," and explains that the "boring parts" have been removed. He also promises that the restoration reveals the voice of Holly Hunter on an answering machine. That one's true: Hunter does voice the message, uncredited.

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Mortimer Young doesn't exist, and neither does Forever Young Films. He's George Ives, a veteran character actor who played Doc on the 1960s sitcom Mister Roberts and turned up on The Andy Griffith Show and Bewitched. The Coens liked him enough to cast him for real in The Man Who Wasn't There (2001) and Intolerable Cruelty (2003).

The joke keeps going on the commentary track, credited to Forever Young's "artistic director," Kenneth Loring. He explains that the opening car scene was shot upside down and in reverse and that the dog was animatronic. Jim Piddock played Loring.

Mortimer Young came back in 2005 for The Big Lebowski Collector's Edition. That time, he explained that Forever Young had found a pristine print dubbed into Italian, so the cast re-dubbed it in English, and since John Goodman wasn't available, a "master impressionist" did his lines.

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