Miller’s Crossing (1990)

The Coens’ Masterpiece

Miller’s Crossing is the Coen brothers’ finest film, and one of the great gangster films. It’s a Prohibition-era story of two rival mob bosses, a woman caught between them and a man who works for one of them, and it’s cold, funny, violent and beautifully controlled. Every line of dialogue is sharp, every shot is carefully composed, and the plot is a clockwork of betrayals that only makes complete sense on a second viewing.

Joel and Ethan Coen made it in 1990, their third film after Blood Simple and Raising Arizona. It was a commercial failure, dismissed by many critics as a cold exercise in style, and it has grown in reputation ever since. I give it a 10. It’s the film I’d show anyone who wants to understand what the Coens can do when everything comes together.

An Unnamed City

The film takes place in an unnamed American city in 1929, run by an Irish political boss called Leo O’Bannon, who controls the mayor, the police and the rackets. His rival, an Italian mobster called Johnny Caspar, wants Leo’s permission to kill a bookmaker named Bernie Bernbaum, who has been selling out Caspar’s fixed fights. Leo refuses, because he’s in love with Bernie’s sister, Verna.

Tom Reagan, Leo’s right-hand man and closest friend, tells him he’s making a mistake. Leo won’t listen. Tom is also sleeping with Verna, secretly, and he knows that when Leo finds out, everything will fall apart. When it does, Tom goes to work for Caspar, and the film becomes a game of shifting loyalties in which Tom seems to betray everyone, and nobody, including the audience, knows whose side he’s really on.

The Coens borrowed heavily from Dashiell Hammett, especially The Glass Key and Red Harvest, and the film has the same structure: a clever, cynical man moving between factions, stirring up violence, following a code of his own that he never explains. The Coens took Hammett’s cool, clipped world and made it stranger, funnier and more stylised, and the result feels both classic and completely their own.

Tom Reagan

Gabriel Byrne plays Tom, and he’s superb. Tom is the smartest man in the film, always two steps ahead of everyone else. He’s also a mess: a gambler who owes money to everyone, a drinker who gets beaten up constantly and a man who keeps his feelings so hidden that he may not know what they are.

Byrne plays him with a stillness and restraint that make him fascinating. Tom rarely raises his voice, and he never explains his motives. When someone asks him why he does something, he deflects. The film keeps us close to him and never lets us inside his head. That’s the source of its tension. We watch him make his moves, and we can only guess at the plan.

By the end, we understand some of it: he’s protected Leo, destroyed Caspar and settled old scores. We still don’t fully understand why. That mystery makes him one of the great antiheroes of American film, and it’s why the film rewards so many viewings. Each time, you notice another small moment where Tom reveals a little more than he means to.

The Dialogue

The Coens wrote the film in an invented gangster slang, part twenties crime fiction and part pure invention. Characters ask each other what the rumpus is, tell each other to take their hats and describe people as being on the level. Johnny Caspar gives a long, furious speech about ethics, by which he means the rules of fixing fights, and it’s one of the funniest monologues in any Coen film.

The dialogue is so stylised that it takes a few minutes to tune in, and once you do, it’s addictive. Every line is precise, and much of it is quotable. It gives the film a slightly unreal, theatrical quality, as if the gangsters are all performing a version of themselves, and it fits the film’s world of bluff and double-bluff exactly.

It also carries much of the comedy. The gangsters talk in elaborate, formal, slightly absurd phrases even when threatening each other, and the gap between their language and their brutality is funny throughout. Nobody in the film speaks like a real person, and everybody sounds exactly right.

Danny Boy

The film’s most famous sequence belongs to Leo. Caspar sends two gunmen to kill him in his house at night. They set fire to the upstairs, and Leo, in his dressing gown and slippers, calmly picks up a Thompson submachine gun, steps out of a window and kills them both, then walks down the street firing at their car until it crashes and burns.

Throughout, Danny Boy plays on a gramophone, sung by Frank Patterson, and the combination of the gentle Irish ballad and the sudden violence is impossible to forget. Albert Finney, then in his fifties, plays Leo with a weary, formidable authority, and the sequence shows exactly why the city is his. It’s one of the great set pieces in American cinema.

It also establishes something important about Leo. He’s older, sentimental and in love, and Tom thinks that makes him weak. The Danny Boy sequence shows that Leo is still the most dangerous man in the city when he needs to be, and it raises the stakes of Tom’s betrayal enormously.

Miller’s Crossing

The film’s title refers to a patch of woods outside the city where people are taken to be killed. Caspar, suspicious of Tom’s loyalty, orders him to take Bernie to Miller’s Crossing and shoot him. Tom walks Bernie into the woods, with Caspar’s men watching from the car, and Bernie begins to beg.

John Turturro plays Bernie, and his performance in this scene is devastating. He falls to his knees, weeps, pleads and tells Tom to look into his heart, over and over, and the scene is both pathetic and terrifying. Bernie is a cheat and a manipulator, and we still feel for him, because Turturro makes his terror so real.

Tom fires his gun into the air and lets Bernie go, telling him to disappear. It’s the one moment in the film where Tom’s heart seems to overrule his head, and it’s the decision that sets up the rest of the plot. Bernie, of course, doesn’t disappear, and his return makes everything much worse.

The Hat

The film opens with a dream Tom describes later: he’s walking through the woods, the wind blows his hat off, and he watches it blow away and doesn’t chase it. The image of a hat blowing through the trees appears in the opening credits and recurs throughout the film. It’s the film’s most famous symbol.

The Coens have always refused to explain what it means, and it doesn’t need a single explanation. It suggests a man who has lost control, who refuses to chase what he’s lost, who keeps his dignity by pretending not to care. Tom is forever straightening his hat, keeping it on through beatings and gunfights, and the last shot of the film is of him pulling it down over his eyes.

The Supporting Cast

Jon Polito is excellent as Johnny Caspar, a volatile, self-pitying, oddly sentimental gangster obsessed with ethics and friendship, and his scenes are some of the funniest and most frightening in the film. J.E. Freeman plays his enforcer, Eddie Dane, a cold, suspicious killer who never trusts Tom, and he’s menacing.

Marcia Gay Harden plays Verna, sharp, hard and as tough as any of the men. Her relationships with Tom and Leo are the film’s emotional center, and she’s as much a player in its games as anyone. Steve Buscemi has a small, memorable role as Mink, the fast-talking bookie at the heart of the betrayals. There isn’t a weak performance in the film.

Several of these actors became part of the Coens’ regular company, returning in film after film. Turturro, Polito and Buscemi all worked with the brothers again, and Miller’s Crossing is where that company really took shape. It feels like a film made by a group of people who understood each other perfectly.

How It Looks and Sounds

Barry Sonnenfeld shot the film in autumn colors, browns, greens and golds, with the precise, painterly compositions that became a Coen trademark. The city, filmed in New Orleans, is all dark wood, leather and cigar smoke, and the woods at Miller’s Crossing are beautiful and threatening at the same time. The tall, bare trees, the fallen leaves and the pale light make every scene there feel like a place where terrible things are decided quietly.

Carter Burwell’s score is built around an Irish folk melody, a gentle, melancholy tune that gives the film an unexpected sadness. It’s among Burwell’s finest scores, and it suggests something the characters never say aloud: that under all the plotting and killing, this is a story about loyalty, love and loss.

The Ending

By the end of the film, Tom has turned Caspar and his men against each other, eliminated Eddie Dane and Bernie, and left Leo free to marry Verna and run the city again. Everything has been arranged. Leo offers to take Tom back, to forgive him and restore their friendship.

Tom refuses. He stands at Bernie’s grave, in the woods, as Leo walks away, and pulls his hat down over his eyes. The film ends there. We never learn whether he was acting out of loyalty to Leo, or love for Verna, or simply out of a need to win. Tom has saved everyone and lost everything, and he won’t tell us why.

Why It Flopped and Why It Lasts

Miller’s Crossing was released in 1990, the same season as Goodfellas and The Godfather Part III, and it was overshadowed by both. Audiences found it cold and confusing, and some critics dismissed it as a stylish exercise with no heart. It made back only a fraction of its budget, and for a while it looked like a costly misstep for two young directors who had seemed unstoppable.

It has lasted because it rewards every viewing. Once you know the plot, you can watch Tom’s moves unfold and appreciate how carefully the film is built. The dialogue gets funnier, the performances get richer and the ending gets sadder. It’s a film that gives you more the more you give it. It’s the best thing the Coens ever made.

Craft Note

The Verdict on Miller’s Crossing

Absolutely. It’s a 10 and the Coen brothers’ best film. Watch it twice: once to follow the plot, and again to watch Tom play every hand. It’s funny, violent, sad and endlessly rewarding.

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