Look­ing into the heart of Miller’s Crossing

Way back yon­der, in the year 1994, after a view­ing of the futur­is­tic action movie Demo­li­tion Man from a VHS rent­ed from Ritz Video in Palmers Green, Lon­don, I pro­fessed to any­one who would lis­ten that this was my all-time favourite film. I think it was relat­ed to the fact that the final-lev­el bad guy is turned into ice with liq­uid nitro­gen and then smashed to smithereens with a swing­ing hook.

This moment was impor­tant because it was the first time that I felt con­fi­dent enough to make such a procla­ma­tion – to foment the lean­ings of my artis­tic taste and to bold­ly choose a hill (a rather small and unsight­ly one, I can now see with hind­sight) on which I was will­ing to die.

That first favourite film is always a mile­stone. Just like your first favourite book, or t‑shirt, or Pog, it’s some­thing that you nev­er for­get, a hard point from which you can mea­sure change. But then so is the sec­ond, which arrived maybe three or four years lat­er on the back of a view­ing of the Coen broth­ers’ third fea­ture, Miller’s Cross­ing. This is, to be clear, not a sec­ond favourite film – this is the point at which Demo­li­tion Man was top­pled from its vaunt­ed posi­tion and a new cham­pi­on was anointed.

This hap­pened, I recall, due to the fact that my father had pur­chased a VHS copy of the film, so it meant that I was able to watch it over and over again (as one tend­ed to do with movies at that age, and at a time when pri­vate movie hold­ings were severe­ly lim­it­ed, so the act rewatch­ing was a neces­si­ty). The thing I loved about this film was the styl­i­sa­tion of its dia­logue, even if I didn’t know to call it that at the time. It was also the real­i­sa­tion that lan­guage is mal­leable, has evolved a great deal, is geo­graph­i­cal­ly spe­cif­ic, and most impor­tant­ly, can be employed in the same man­ner that you might cold-cock an ene­my with the butt of your trusty Roscoe.

I got end­less replay val­ue from the film and would occa­sion­al­ly try to insert hard­boiled quo­ta­tions from the script into idle school­yard ban­ter or even my Eng­lish home­work. I yearned for a sit­u­a­tion where I could march from a room and, per Jon Polito’s pen­cil-mous­tached gang­ster boss John­ny Casper, turn around and utter the immor­tal line, ​“Y’s all fan­cy pants,” but it nev­er real­ly came to be.

The film was the prod­uct of Joel and Ethan Coen’s per­sis­tent writer’s block, and that duly led them to move away from this for a time and write a screen­play about writer’s block, which became Bar­ton Fink. Miller’s Cross­ing draws heav­i­ly from the plot of Dashiell Hammett’s 1931 crime mas­ter­piece, ​‘The Glass Key’, in which slick, smart-mouthed under­world oper­a­tor Ned Beau­mont places his neck on the line for his boss and retain­er Paul Mad­vig. His loy­al­ty is such that he even engi­neers a sce­nario where he cross­es the tracks to work for Madvig’s bit­ter rival, but only, it tran­spires, to bring down the rival from the inside.

The Coens light­ly shear back wider intrigues of Hammett’s text, main­ly the por­tions which con­cern California’s rot­ten polit­i­cal class and Ned’s lengthy sojourns out of town. They instead zero the plot in on an unnamed north Amer­i­can town­ship lord­ed over by Albert Finney’s dap­per Irish strong­man Leo. Whis­per­ing in his ear is Gabriel Byrne’s Tom Rea­gan (nick­named ​“Big­head”), a booze-soaked con­fi­dence man up to his ears in gam­bling debts who hap­pens to be a mas­ter of psy­cho­log­i­cal manip­u­la­tion as well as Leo’s clos­est conspirator.

The film opens on antag­o­nist John­ny Cas­par, a two-bit bookie/​hustler who’s fed up of being giv­en the ​“high hat” by the cig­ar-chomp­ing Leo, and is cir­cling the option of tak­ing a shot at the king. The very basic plot involves a Cas­par tak­ing advan­tage of a pub­lic rift between Leo and Tom in the hope that he can take a stran­gle­hold of the town. It is styled as a labyrinthine crime saga in which dou­ble, triple and quadru­ple cross­es are the only way to make it out alive.

There’s a super­fi­cial plea­sure to be had from the sim­ple act of watch­ing a bunch of char­ac­ters who under­stand that truth and sin­cer­i­ty (and, by exten­sion, love) are weak­ness­es, and so their every utter­ance is either a lie, a scold, or some vari­ety of awk­ward­ly hyper­bol­ic flat­tery. It’s cin­e­ma as a game of chess, where the Coens know all the sneaky open­ings and fin­ish­es, and the audi­ence just has to sit back and puz­zle over how they did it. They’ve even got some mag­nets under the table to shift the pieces when you look away.

As so often comes up with the Coens, it’s easy to poo-poo some of their ear­ly films as jaw-drop­ping tech­ni­cal mas­ter­works in which the writer/​directors’ own crafts­man­ship is the real star of the show. It’s intrigu­ing, how­ev­er, that they made a film so ear­ly on in their career that focus­es on a man (Tom) who is con­stant­ly and des­per­ate­ly asked to draw on a pool of latent human­ism and prove to every­one that he is, in fact, a per­son rather than a heart­less machine. Miller’s Cross­ing is proof that any human endeav­our, how­ev­er cold it may seem, must be medi­at­ed by the stir­rings of the heart.

There’s an irony to the fact that, between high-wire grifts, Tom is seen gam­bling away mon­ey he doesn’t have, to the point where he’s duffed up in the hall­way by the hench­men of his bemused, out-of-pock­et book­ie (“Lazarre said he’s sor­ry about this. It’s just get­ting out of hand. He likes you, Tom. He said we didn’t have to break any­thing”). Yet when it comes to gam­bling on human impuls­es, on deci­sions peo­ple might make, actions peo­ple might take, the flighty (but, sad­ly, often pre­dictable) whims of the human heart, then Tom’s some­thing of an earth­bound sooth­say­er. Maybe the film may seem cold, but it dares to sug­gest that there’s some­thing sim­plis­tic and cal­cu­la­ble about per­son­al destinies.

Like all for­ma­tive pet movies, the act of return­ing to them after a long break can seem daunt­ing. Why would you want con­fir­ma­tion of your ear­ly-years lack of refine­ment? Maybe it even makes a mock­ery of the whole notion of hav­ing a ​“favourite movie of all time”, because that very idea elides the real­i­ty that we change as peo­ple and our taste evolves along­side the things we see or the art we consume.

So the rewatch for this piece arrived with no small amount of trep­i­da­tion. And yet it deliv­ered, once more, in a very big way, and cement­ed my love for the Coens’ clas­sic-era genre work­outs (this and 2001’s bone-dry noir homage The Man Who Wasn’t There being two under-loved favourites). It might be down to the fact that the film has tak­en on a sud­den con­tem­po­rary per­ti­nence, as John­ny Caspar’s open­ing mono­logue espous­es the impor­tance of ethics, char­ac­ter and friend­ship, but from with­in a world of crim­i­nal endeav­our where these traits are entire­ly unsta­ble and meaningless.

We are see­ing this world of grifts, angles and plays in real time in the US and beyond, where polit­i­cal and crim­i­nal worlds con­verge and over­con­fi­dent oper­a­tors pro­fess right­eous­ness from a pedestal of blood and vice. Miller’s Cross­ing offers a haunt­ing pre­view of a world in which moral­i­ty is, to quote John Turtoro’s Bernie Bern­baum, ​“cold and stiff.”

As so often comes up on our favourite social media plat­form Twit­ter Dot Com, there’s no accord when it comes to nam­ing a best Coen broth­ers movie. I love Miller’s Cross­ing even though I would no longer claim it to be my favourite of all time. But I’m cer­tain­ly proud to have called it that once upon a time.