SOURCE: A review of Blood Simple, in The Humanist, Vol. 45, No. 4, July/August, 1985, p. 43.

In the following review, Geduld criticizes Blood Simple as lacking in creativity and unable to provide engaging characters.

This nasty little thriller (stylistically distinguished only by some clever uses of extreme closeups) provoked me into recalling the masterpieces of the genre, in particular Billy Wilder's 1944 adaptation of James M. Cain's Double Indemnity. Notwithstanding the work of Hitchcock, Wilder's film remains for me the outstanding movie example of what E. F. Bleiler has called "the inverted detective story," that narrative form in which the focus is on the criminal and on the motives and methods of his or her crime rather than on the detective. The most notable literary examples I know are Ira Levin's A Kiss Before Dying and C. S. Forester's Payment Deferred, both of which received less than satisfactory film treatment.

Blood...