In this, their third feature, Joel and Ethan Coen started to grow up, jettisoning – or at least honing – many of the over-the-top stylistic tics and tropes they had deployed in Blood Simple and Raising Arizona. Here they deal with deeper emotions – grief, guilt and despair – but without losing their essential, wacky Coen-ness.
Approaching the Depression-era gangster movie with their customary nerve, they construct (confect is a better word) a note-perfect, midwestern, "wide open town" and fill it with action and characters redolent of wicked-city novels such as Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest and James M Cain's Love's Lovely Counterfeit (in which people actually do say, "What's the rumpus?"). The town is populated with faces (mainly gargoyles and grotesques) reminiscent of Warner Brothers character players, or the Ten Most Wanted List. Larded with more cartoon "Oirishry" than The Quiet Man, and more gunplay than The Godfather and Goodfellas combined, it unfolds in a thoroughly rotten and broken municipality over whose still twitching corpse two gangs war mercilessly. Gabriel Byrne's independent gangster-gunsel simply sets the factions against one another and watches everybody die. Marvellous!
