Miller's Crossing

Miller's Crossing (1990) is about a war between two criminal organisations in a Prohibition era city. Leo is the Irish boss who runs the town. Johnny Caspar asks permission to kill a bookmaker; the man is the brother of Leo's lover Verna and Leo refuses. The war starts there. Tom is Leo's right hand and the film's centre. He appears loyal to nobody: he sleeps with Verna, goes over to Caspar, feeds information to both sides. All the tension comes from trying to work out what he is actually doing, and he never explains. The best scene is in the woods. Tom is taken out to kill a man and the man begs. What he says is the film's best known line. The Coens drew on two Dashiell Hammett novels, particularly The Glass Key. They got blocked writing it. During that block they sat down and wrote Barton Fink, finished it in three weeks, and came back to complete this. The two films came out of each other, and Barton Fink is itself about being blocked. The dialogue is written deliberately in period slang and resembles nothing in current speech. Barry Sonnenfeld photographed it, his last with the Coens. The opening scene is entirely one speech and establishes the film's whole moral frame. Gabriel Byrne, Albert Finney and John Turturro star. It did not do well and came to be counted among the Coens' best. It runs 115 minutes. Good for: gangster films, the Coen brothers, and screenplay structure. Less good for: the plot is dense and the characters' intentions are deliberately unclear.