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With Miller’s Crossing, the Coen brothers did for the gangster movie genre what their earlier movies had done for film noir and screwball comedy (Blood Simple and Raising Arizona, respectively)
Grade: B+ (**** out of *****)
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Theatrical release poster
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Loosely based on Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key, and drawing on Chicago’s Capone-O’Bannion gang war, the film pits Irish, Italian, and Jewish gangsters against one another.
Set during the Prohibition, circa 1929, in an unnamed Eastern city, Miller’s Crossing is a put-on gangster, deliberately removed from any discernible or particular reality.
Morally vague, the film suffers from excessive style, motivated by the Coens’ concern to show off familiarity with the gangster genre. Still, what gave the familiar drama of murder and betrayal a different feel were rich visuals and dark, melancholy mood.
Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne) is the right-hand man for Irish mobster Leo O’Bannon, a political boss who runs an unnamed U.S. city. Leo sets off a mob war when he extends protection to his girlfriend Verna’s brother, a bookie named Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro).
Bernie is skimming off the match fixing scheme of Leo’s rival, Italian gangster Johnny Caspar. The situation is further complicated by the fact that behind Leo’s back, Verna is also sleeping with Tom.
When Leo discovers that Tom and Verna have betrayed him, a full-scale gang war begins.
The movie opens with a comic monologue in which Leo’s Italian rival, Johnny Caspar (John Polito), complains about the collapse of ethics. Pompously righteous, Johnny is given to theoretical formulations about honor and loyalty. His grievances disturb Leo’s chief adviser and friend, Tom, a brooding gambler who senses Leo is losing control.
Single Powerful Image
The Coens films usually begin with a single powerful image, which later on becomes a motif.
In Miller’s Crossing, Tom describes a dream in which he chases his hat through the woods, and one of the recurring images is a hat flying in slow motion across the ground.
In Hudsucker Proxy, it’s a circle: Hula Hoops, clocks, the plot’s 360-degree shape.
In Fargo, the vision of a single car driving through vast white snowscapes.
Throughout Miller’s Crossing, the visual imagery is striking. There are closeups of heavy guns, black blood slowly dripping to the ground, sunless skies and serene woods, men clad in black overcoats speaking in coarse voices.
The Coens deliberately exaggerate the genre’s thematic and visual conventions: The mayor and the police chief take orders from the gangsters, who later on violently maul one another.
Unlike Scorsese, whose crime films–Mean Streets and GoodFellas–were based on realistically recognizable characters, what matters to the Coens is not the actual conduct of gangsters but their visual representation, hence the imagery of hatched-faced thugs hiding under fedoras, and occasionally snarling quasi-poetry.
The city in which the story takes place is not mentioned, but the film was shot in New Orleans (in the winter) as the Coen Brothers were attracted to its look.
Ethan Coen explained: “There are whole neighborhoods here of nothing but 1929 architecture. New Orleans is sort of a depressed city; it hasn’t been gentrified. There’s a lot of architecture that hasn’t been touched; store-front windows that haven’t been replaced in the last sixty years.”
Homage: Fedora Flying
The title sequence of a fedora blown off fallen leaves in the forest pays subtle tribute to French director Melville’s crime film Le Doulos (1962), which ends with the shot of gangster’s fedora, alone in the frame, in the soil of the forest.
Context:
In 1990, two other major crime-gangster movies were released: Scorsese’s GoodFellas and Coppola’s The Godfather: Part III, the final panel in his masterful trilogy that had begun with the Oscar winners The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather: Part II (1974).
Cast
Gabriel Byrne as Tom Reagan
Albert Finney as Liam “Leo” O’Bannon
John Turturro as Bernie Bernbaum
Marcia Gay Harden as Verna Bernbaum
Jon Polito as Giovanni Gasparo / Johnny Caspar
J. E. Freeman as Eddie Dane
Steve Buscemi as “Mink” Larouie
Michael Jeter as Adolph
Mike Starr as Frankie
Olek Krupa as Tad
John McConnell as Officer Bryan
Al Mancini as “Tic-Tac”
Michael Badalucco as Sal Caspar’s driver
Frances McDormand as The Mayor’s Secretary
Sam Raimi as Snickering Gunman
Credits:
Directed by Joel Coen
Written by Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Produced by Ethan Coen
Cinematography Barry Sonnenfeld
Edited by Michael R. Miller
Music by Carter Burwell
Distributed by 20th Century Fox
Release dates: Sept 21, 1990 (N.Y. Film Fest); Sep 22, 1990 (US)
Running time: 115 minutes
Budget: over $10 million
Box office $5 million
