HOLLYWOOD, Feb 24, 2008 (AFP) - An old-fashioned chase movie entwined with a dark contemporary morality tale, best picture winner "No Country for Old Men" sees directors Joel and Ethan Coen at their macabre best.

Adapted from Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel, the film begins with Vietnam veteran Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) stumbling across the body-strewn aftermath of a drug deal that has gone badly wrong on the US-Mexico border.

When Moss decides to make off with a suitcase stuffed with two million dollars in payoff money, a murderous chain of events is set in motion as drug dealers and a psychopathic hitman (Javier Bardem) track him down.

Taking the rugged landscape of 1980 Texas as its backdrop, the dark themes of "No Country" echo some of the Coens' best films, from the stark violence of their 1984 debut "Blood Simple" to the grim humor of 1996's "Fargo".

Bardem's performance earned him the Oscar for best supporting actor on Sunday, while the film also scooped the awards of best director and best adapted screenplay for the Coen brothers.

Offered the opportunity by producer Scott Rudin to adapt McCarthy's novel, the Coens immediately saw the book for what it is - a bleak meditation on human nature and violence.

"The thing for us was to preserve aspects of the book that the studio or the producer might balk at," Joel Coen said in a recent interview.

"So we said, "If we make this, you do know it's going to be very violent?" That's what the story's about."

While the film has been described as a neo-western, the Coens are adamant that "in genre terms, it's closer to a crime story," Joel has said.

"That is a particularly rich vein as far as our movies are concerned. The book was fascinating because it was almost a pulp novel but it took the genre and did some very unexpected things with it," Joel added.

"The three main characters never really meet, they just circle each other, and that was unusual and interesting to us."

The Coens also remained largely faithful to McCarthy's novel, not remotely interested in giving a Hollywood-style ending to the film.

The film's climax has puzzled some audiences, but the Coens are unapologetic. "That's how the book ends," Ethan Coen explained. "That feeling of not having a resolution is how the story ends in the novel.

"We didn't want to be slavish to the book but we loved it and we wanted to be faithful to the spirit of it."

While Brolin and Jones give memorable performances, the film's undeniable star is Bardem, who delivers a terrifying turn as the contract killer who executes his victims using a slaughterhouse bolt-gun.

The bizarre bowl haircut chosen for Bardem was gleaned by studying old photographs from the period.

"The wardrobe department found a photo of a guy in west Texas in 1979 who was just odd-looking, with that haircut," Ethan Coen said.

"We wanted Chigurh to be believable for that place and period, but not like everybody else ... So he's kind of alien, an outsider."