By the time the Coen brothers made Miller’s Crossing, their third movie, it had become obvious that their films weren’t really set in the real world. Like Blood Simple and Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing is set in an adjacent reality constructed entirely from moviescapes and populated with characters we seem to have met before.
That it works brilliantly, both as pastiche and as a drama in its own right, is the difference between the Coens and some others who try the same thing. That it also manages to be funny when it should be and tense as hell when necessary, marks them out as something really special.
The film is built around askew relationships, most of them on the downlow for various reason, and centres on Tom Reagan, consigliere and fixer for a gangster whose time at the top is being challenged by a low-class upstart. Tom has a gambling problem – he’s really bad at picking horses and owes the wrong people money – and he’s also in a secret relationship with his boss’s woman.
Over the course of the movie Tom, his name an echo of Tom Hagen, consigliere of Don Corleone in The Godfather, will switch allegiance, play one mob boss off another and attempt to help his lover’s brother, whose gay relationship with another character is strongly hinted at but stated so quietly it would be easy to miss it.
Gabriel Byrne plays Tom, the watchful, clever right-hand man, Marcia Gay Harden is Verna, the girl of mobster Leo (Albert Finney), sister of Bernie (John Turturro), and the weak spot (along with his gambling debts) through which Tom will put himself in jeopardy when rival gangster Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito) comes calling.
Miller’s Crossing is the name of the place where guys are taken to get whacked, making it the Coen brothers’ equivalent of the Big Sleep, one of many films they seem to have in mind. Dashiell Hammett’s book The Glass Key is also high on the list of reference points, alongside the work of Jean-Pierre Melville, whose gangster films (like Bob le Flambeur, The Snitch, Le Samouraï and The Red Circle) have also been lovingly plundered.

Funny, wiseguy lines abound in this film, with Verna getting many of the best ones, which Marcia Gay Harden squeaks out in a gangster’s moll voice, but the standout presence is really Jon Polito as the mobster who would be king, a buffoon bad guy given to much sweating and explosive eruptions.
The tone is Who Framed Roger Rabbit, really, which had come out two years earlier and also mined film noir for all it was worth. There is violence in this movie, which in almost every instance the Coens push to cartoonish excess, to the point where it becomes funny. If there’s a shootout there will be hundreds of guns. If it’s fists, bodies will be pulverised.
Talking of which, stalking the territory and acting as a corrective when things get too flighty, is JE Freeman as Eddie Dane, the henchman of Johnny Caspar who is as mean as the day is long. There are no laughs while he’s on screen.
Barry Sonnenfeld, in one of his last films as a cinematographer before going off to direct films like The Addams Family and Get Shorty, makes it all look polished and a touch artificial. There’s a deliberate aping of 1930s gangster movies, with Joel Coen (the sole director, say the end credits) tying scenes together using the sort of visual tricks Fritz Lang or Rouben Mamoulian might have used back in the day.
Sonnenfeld and the Coens also give us lots of long, brown corridor shots – Barton Fink, the Coens’ next film, would go even bigger on those. And there’s an abundance of symmetrical compositions, often to make a humorous point.
This was the first film that the Coens would make featuring Steve Buscemi (in it only in passing) and John Turturro, and Turturro gets some great opportunities to show what he can do, in the film’s big turning points. And Frances McDormand also turns up, in a role so small she doesn’t even get a credit. What a future awaits all three.
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© Steve Morrissey 2025