The lowdown Texas noir that hatched the Coen brothers onto the independent film scene. It’s not much more than a genre exercise as the Coens pick up a bunch of old crime story cliches and take ’em for ride, but that’s all right. The Coens have seen a million movies like this and they understand that gallows humor and memorable character-actors—in this case, the great sleazy presences of Dan Hedaya and M. Emmet Walsh in the plum roles—are the butter on the bread. Hedaya’s the angry husband of a cheating wife (Frances McDormand), and he hires Walsh, a greasy private eye who’s into yellow leisure suits, cowboy hats, and betraying his clients, to kill both her and her man-on-the-side. Double-crossings and fatal misunderstandings follow, of course, along with bullets to the stomach, spurting blood, dripping sweat, and a classic live burial.