The Man Who Wasn't There: the Coen Brothers' overlooked masterpiece

Joel and Ethan Coen have made 18 feature films since 1984 and moved effortlessly across genres. Their 2001 throwback noir The Man Who Wasn't There remains one of their finest and most overlooked works, a film that was partly buried by the success of O Brother, Where Art Thou?

and is being reassessed as the 25th anniversary of its Cannes premiere arrives this May. The idea for the movie began during the making of The Hudsucker Proxy, when a 1940s haircut poster in a barber shop inspired a story about a small-town barber. Set in Santa Rosa in 1949, Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton) is a taciturn barber who, tempted by a dry-cleaning pitch from Creighton Tolliver, plots to extort $10,000 from department store head Big Dave Brewster after suspecting an affair.

The plan unravels in classic Coen fashion, blending homage to 1940s film noir with a strange science-fiction thread as Ed encounters reports of UFO activity, and drawing on influences from Antigonish and Double Indemnity to Camus’ The Stranger.

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