Miller’s Crossing
AT THE START of production for Miller’s Crossing in January 1989, cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld asked writer-directors Joel and Ethan Coen an obvious but necessary question: how did they want the film to look? “It should be a handsome movie,” Ethan told him, distinguishing it instantly from the madcap, camera-whirling antics of the trio’s previous collaboration, Raising Arizona. “A handsome movie about men in hats.”
The Coens had long been fans of the gangster genre, one well-known for its wealth of hat-wearing men. They particularly enjoyed the way it was explored by novelist Dashiell Hammett, whose Red Harvest and The Glass Key were the main inspirations for Miller’s Crossing. “He took the genre and used it to tell a story that was interesting about people and other things besides just the plot,” said Joel in 1990. “In Hammett, the plot is like a big jigsaw puzzle that can be seen in the background.
It may make some internal sense, but the momentum of the characters is more important.”
However, notwithstanding the film’s debts to Hammett, Joel and Ethan’s overriding creative concern was to make something different. Not just from their previous two pictures (it was “a conscious effort not to repeat ourselves”) but also from what people expected of the genre. Before the co-screenwriting brothers became embroiled in their own big jigsaw puzzle — so complicated by double-crosses and love-triangles they were stricken with writer’s block and paused to come up with another script (Barton Fink, a movie about writer’s block) — Miller’s Crossing originated with a simple, striking image in their shared mind’s eye: big guys wearing long overcoats and broad-brimmed hats, out in the woods. This appealed to the siblings because they dug “the incongruity of urban gangsters in a forest setting”.
This blend of appreciation for the genre’s iconography and an urge for incongruity is what marks Miller’s Crossing out from any other gangster film, including those that piled up in the same year it was released, including Dick Tracy, The Godfather Part III and Goodfellas. Set in an unnamed city during Prohibition and focused on an Irish-versus-italian Mob war, it does not stint on speakeasy-busts, bloody beefs and Tommy-gun action. Yet it is an incredibly talky film, with impressively verbose characters whose dialogue is so spiced by period argot (partly genuine, partly fabricated) that foreign distributors were given a Coen-penned glossary for the subtitle-writers.
It is also, despite consciously not being an “out-and-out comedy”, as Joel put it, funnier than most out-and-out comedies. Take the scene where Irish Mob consigliere Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne) suddenly bashes gigantic goon Frankie (Mike Starr) with a chair, causing him to stomp off like a hurt child and send in the far more dangerous little, old guy Tic-tac (Al Mancini) to work Tom over. Or the hysterical non-sequitur where a tense meeting is interrupted by the
excited child of Italian boss Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito) shrilly, repeatedly shouting, “Poppa, poppa, I got a prize from the sisters!”, until his dad slaps him, then comforts the wailing boy, saying “What’s a matter, somebody hit you?” Then there is the moment during the astonishing ‘Danny Boy’ sequence, in which Tom’s boss Leo (Albert Finney, simultaneously loveable and fearsome) turns the tables on a group of Tommygun-wielding assassins to the strains of Frederic Weatherly’s beloved ballad. Leo shoots up one assailant so viciously, they become a bulletridden puppet, improbably blasting the walls, a chandelier and their own toes in an ultraviolently slapstick manner. “It’s about time at that point to shed a little blood,” Ethan deadpanned to Premiere magazine. “The movie’s in danger of becoming tasteful, you know?”
Yet, for all the Coens’ mischievous tendencies, Miller’s Crossing is thoroughly tasteful. Sublime, even. That forest setting mentioned by Joel is the fictional hinterland which gives the film its title (far better than the working name of ‘The Bighead’): a beautifully, forebodingly overcast woodland visited four times during the story, beginning with the opening credits sequence, likely a dream, where a black fedora is blown along the forest floor. The hat is at the mercy of elemental forces, snatched and dropped by an uncaring breeze, though it also seems to swirl purposefully, as if it somehow knows where it’s heading. You could say this foreshadows the journey of its supposed owner, Tom, who is buffeted from beating to brutal beating, while playing his own side off against the gang of upstart Caspar in a manner that can either be seen as the machinations of a hoodlum Machiavelli, or the wily luck of a quick-witted opportunist. (Our money’s on the latter.)
Tom himself will return to these woods for the film’s signature scene, to hold a gun to the head of troublesome bookie Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro), who’s been sneakily selling tips on Caspar’s fixed-fight bets, before heeding Bernie’s desperate plea to look into his heart and spare him. He’ll come back again to narrowly avoid execution himself at the hands of Caspar enforcer the Dane (a deliciously menacing J.E. Freeman), and finally to attend a funeral, where he will lose — and/or reject — both his friendship with Leo and the love of Bernie’s take-no-shit sister, Verna (Marcia Gay Harden).
How much of a tragedy this is depends on how you read Tom’s motives; does he have a heart? The Coens give the character plenty of Hammettian momentum, but while they often show him chewing things over, they never give us a taste. Their disregard for insight and interpretation is echoed in Tom’s own dismissal of Verna’s pillowtalk attempt to decipher his hat-blowing-in-thewoods dream. He never ran after the hat. It never symbolised anything. “Nothing more foolish than a man chasing his hat,” Tom growls.
That shouldn’t stop us from drawing our own conclusions. And if it takes us several viewings to make our minds up, we’re only richer for the experience, whether we’re untangling the strands of the plot, marvelling at the articulate rhythm and flow of the dialogue, or just appreciating the whole sheer, damn artistry of everyone involved. Not just Joel and Ethan, but also the cast, production designer Dennis Gassner, who made late-’80s New Orleans pass for a late-’20s Eastern US city, and Sonnenfeld, whose stately, wide-angle-lens work surpassed anything he’d done before or since. It is impossible to imagine how the movie could be more handsome. Or, for that matter, more men-in-hatty.