Watched: 09/27/2025
Format: Criterion Disc
Viewing: Unknown
Director: Coen Bros.
In late summer 1990, I saw the trailer for Miller's Crossing (1990) at my local cinema in Spring, Texas. I don't remember what movie I saw that day, but I remember seeing the lush, lyrical trailer for a movie that seemed to jump off the screen with its imagery, language and violence. Coming off of my first high of mob movies with The Godfather around that time, as well as seeing the guys who had made Raising Arizona were behind the movie, I was ready to see the film on opening day.
But the Coen Bros. were not yet famous, and Fox, which had distribution rights, didn't really push the movie. I kept looking for it in show listings. But it played downtown Houston, not out in the 'burbs, and I was still something like eight months away from my license. And, so it was that I missed the film until it came out on VHS.
I remember knowing when it was coming to tape, and renting it as soon as I could. And whatever I thought I might get out of it from the trailer, instead I got dropped into a movie that wound up having a weirdly profound effect on me as a 15 year old. I mean, blame Marcia Gay Harden giving the hard stare, but I'd also never heard or seen anything quite like it. And a movie with so many characters with so many motivations, all shifting, was something I'd never seen before.
It would be years later when I picked up Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest for a quick read that everything would click and the Coen Bros. would make much more sense to me. I just didn't know anyone who read crime fiction and had no entre to the work of Hammett (or Raymond Chandler). A few years on, I'd read The Glass Key and find myself stunned how much Miller's Crossing reflected those works. Still shocking to me today - no one had the common courtesy to call it out in print where I'd see it and get hep to what I should be reading years before I bumbled my way into those authors.
That said, Miller's Crossing stands on its own.
If there's a movie I would write a chapter of a book on for someone else's collection of essays, it would be this one, I think. We've covered it here before in 2011 and in 2018, and this podcast episode with JimD:
Miller's Crossing borrows from those books, absolutely, but the writing is a trapeze act of rat-a-tat vintage slang and casual gangster lingo. The movie gave a young Barry Sonnenfeld a showcase for what you can do with light, shadow and camera placement (although once in a while, you see some Sam Raimi peek through) - which he parlayed into becoming a director himself. The performances, stylized to fit Hammett's hard-boiled world, are sharp as a tack, even with dialog that must have been hell to get out. It's a mix of mostly unknown talent - although Gabriel Byrne, John Turturro, Marcia Gay Harden and Steve Buscemi would all be household names by decade's end - and Albert Finney, a phenomenal choice for Leo the ganglord, but a giant at the time among the unknowns. JE Freeman and Jon Polito would continue to show up as character actors, but I'm not sure either would be given the reins ever again in quite the way they were here.
It's a film in a world where politicians and cops are just branches of the criminal enterprise, and the only innocent is a chubby kid who is *not* going to be okay in the long run. Everyone's a grifter, a moll, a bookie or muscle. Johnny Casper's belief in what most folks would recognize as ethics is singular, and if anyone else were interested in playing along, or shared his desire to do everything above board, like a legitimate business that happens to employ murder in deal-making, how different the outcomes would be. But in this world, those aren't the ethics that count.
I'd argue that Hammett's books work as cultural commentary, but I wouldn't accuse them of containing much symbolism, exactly. But if you step two degrees in any direction and look at Miller's Crossing from a different angle, the "what does that mean?" of it all stands out. Yeah, it can be read as an intricate crime story - and it is. Keeping track of whom cares about whom, and why. How we track the crossing and double-crossing.
The "ethics" that we start with - that Johnny Casper believes separates us from the beasts in the jungle (and Casper's own bestial nature he barely keeps in check is a testament to his knowledge of how things can go sideways) - are something the movie is centered on. Who has ethics? How do they work? Is keeping your word ethical when you're dealing with cutthroats and liars? One almost has to rewire what we take for granted for right and wrong to follow the plot - after all, our protagonist is setting people up to be murdered, and ends the film by executing a loose end in Bernie, knowing it's a self-damning act, but also necessary to contain the chaos at last.
Over the years, what's made the movie make the most sense to me - and I feel like this is reinforced by reading The Glass Key, and watching the movie adaptation as well - is that Tom's feelings for Leo are maybe more than just loyalty. It still works if it's just loyalty to a boss. It makes far more sense if you see it as something more. It sure can be read as straight, platonic male love and loyalty. But given the casual way the film deals with queerness in other characters, and Tom's closed-off sense of control (see: Tom's hat and when he does and does not have it), not to mention what is clearly Tom's way of sacrificing his own face and everyone else to save Leo - it's love of some sort. And in a movie where so much goes unsaid while it seems like everyone is talking - listen to what Tom is saying to people about "what did I want?"
What's remarkable about the movie is the ability to project so much onto it. Go look at any Reddit conversation about the film, and people are in universal agreement it's great - but what does it mean? And everyone's take is different. And the fact anyone even cares and is trying to sort it out decades later is amazing. And, God bless the Coens for refusing to speak up on the topic. (I did have a fantasy that David Lynch would leave behind a document, completely breaking down Inland Empire's meanings for everyone. Would have been hilarious.).
The movie also has some really interesting mirroring, right up to the appearance of Johnny Casper's twin cousins fresh off the boat from Italy. But the repetition of scenes and sequences is meaningful. O'Doole and the Mayor, O'Doole and Tom outside clubs getting busted. Tom getting hit in the face literally and figuratively. Verna and Tom, Verna walking away from Tom... it's a lot. And it has the ongoing mystery to everyone but the audience of who took Rug Daniels' hairpiece, and why they would do it. Tom's still sorting that out just before he shoots Bernie.
And, the cuts in the film made me miss when they storyboarded movies for exactly those transitions between sequences. I do still see it - but Superman was the last movie where I felt like it was used well.
Anyway, I won't go on here too long. There's a million things to talk about in the film, not least of which is Marcia Gay Harden's star-turn as Verna - the only major female role in the film, and the hinge upon which everything turns.
I can't believe it's been 35 years, but that's the way of things these days.
While I do feel like The Youths have seen Big Lebowski and some have seen Raising Arizona, it's stunning the quality of work the Coen Bros. put together in their first decade and a half of making movies. And it's odd that this movie seems to be forgotten in some ways - but the real ones know.
At this point, it's an odd one to watch. I now take a couple years between viewings of the movie as it's a movie used to be able to quote-along with. And it's a movie that I feel like I'm in a constant state of re-discovery when I re-watch it. But I also have the odd realization that it's one of a handful of movies that I do drop lines from in everyday conversation and I kind of forget that's why I say some of these things. "I'm just speculatin; about a hypothesis" for example. So, yeah, it's a core-movie for me, certainly. And was part of the wave of movies I obsessed over at a certain point in my life, that made me really go from casual movie fan to movie fanatic in a family and environment that wasn't overly concerned with things like movies.
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