• Hats off to first time directors Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy for the narrative and formal achievement in 2019’s crime comedy thriller Blow the Man Down
  • It is clear Savage Cole and Krudy studied the Coen brothers like crazy. This is part Fargo and part Blood Simple (the Coen’s own debut)
  • Set (and shot on location and it shows) in a snow-bound fishing town in Maine—chowder, lobsters
  • The score even has a Fargo-like jig, like Fargo there’s a giant landmark figure on the side of the road (here it is a lumberjack instead Paul Bunyan), and like Fargo– the directors brilliantly flip traditional gender roles
  • It opens on a luminous blue fog— and goes right into a great triple-profile shot of fisherman singing the title song—like we’re in a musical with the singing posing and a quick crisp montage. It is a great opening, but also it is the directors setting the form—they’d go back to the singing three/four separate times after.
  • The film is darkly funny—“lovely flowers”  “they weren’t cheap”
  • The blue day for night isn’t just in the beautiful foggy opening—during the murder scene there is a great frame as well— there is the dead man in the foreground, the harpoon sticking straight up across the screen and the blue background
  • Film form—Savage Cole and Krudy go back to the singing interludes at 22 minutes, 63 minutes, and again at 80 minutes (and at the end with the three power player women singing)
  • I think another key film of reference is Rian Johnson’s Brick (2005). Johnson takes the crime genre and puts it in the hands of teenagers. Here, Savage Cole and Krudy take the framework of a crime or gangster story and puts it in the hands of small-town older women. The two girls caught in the middle of this crime are women too of course, but notably the three powerful women running the town are women as is the head gangster Margo Martindale character. The only men in the film are the buffoonish police that are puppets for these women (and once this husband walks into a meeting of the women running the town and he spouts off about sports and the women are like “that’s nice- go back and watch”- haha). There’s a great line about how these three women are all about “casseroles and crochet” (delivered by Martindale). From the very beginning (the film starts at a wake) – we have these powerful women toasting a fallen friend with a drink of whiskey. I love it—this is Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar

The whiskey-drinking Enid Nora Devlin is played by Martindale and this is the role Martindale has probably been pining for—for decades. She’s sublime here.

  • The whiskey-drinking Enid Nora Devlin is played by Martindale and this is the role Martindale has probably been pining for—for decades. She’s sublime here.
  • Recommend—could see it going a half-grade higher upon revisit