The Coen Brothers: Miller's Crossing

We are getting started early, as this Friday Fright focus is the Coen brothers--and we are attempting to watch every film the two ever made.

I've been on a bit of crime wave recently, movie wise that is, and I personally think that this is one of the best fictional movies ever made about organized crime in Chicago roughly set during the "reign" of Al Capone.  It does a great job of showing the serious rub between 3 major ethnic groups within Midwestern mobs:  Italian, Irish and Jewish, all the while doing a very good job of depicting the actually dirty business, day to day, of the criminal grind.  The script is subtle enough to turn one mobster's bugging the hell out of another to be allowed to kill yet another, into a whine fest that comes off as rather banal considering the subject matter.  The Coen's are extremely good a constructing scripts where death and murder are not sensationalized at all--in fact, some scenes, like as in Blood Simple are even a bit funny.  In Miller's Crossing, the talk of murder is very adeptly contrasted by extreme violence of real murder.

I admit to a fascination with organized crime, fictional or not.  Making period films on the subject can easily fall flat; if the violence is over the top, it will look cartoonish.  If there is not enough violence, the movie will just be boring; too "talky."  In Miller's Crossing a smart and well written script allows all the shooting not to seem at all forced; there is no glorification of killing.  Somehow, they even get away with a gun battle with "Danny Boy" playing in the background!  

With an all star cast that includes Gabriel Byrne, Albert Finney, Marcia Gay Harden, and Coen "perennial" actors John Turturro,  John Polito, and Steve Buscemi--with many, many capable actors filling the numerous roles--the movie is one the biggest that the Coen's have produced thus far.  The sets are intricate, the shots perfectly framed (meticulously so) and the cast is huge.  And the score by Carter Burwell, the Coen's often used film composer, is well themed and even though it is slightly more upbeat than the characters themselves, it still works some how.

At a point of trivia:  the character of Eddie Dane was specifically written for Peter Stormare, and was to be called "The Suede," as Storemare is actually Swedish.  When he declined to take the role, because he had a chance to produce and star in a stage production of "Hamlet," the part went to J. E. Freeeman, and was renamed "The Dane."

Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro) is repeatedly called "the Schmatte."  It is a Yiddish term for an old rag.

This was the last Coen Brothers movie that Barry Sonnenfeld was the director of cinematography for.

Although the city is never named, and many fans suppose it to be in New York, many of the acts written  into the script actually took place in the 1920's and 30's in Chicago by various real life mobsters (quite a lot of Al Capone's acts of violence made it into the film).

Specs:

Runtime:  115 min.

Rated:  R

Color (Panavision Cameras and Lenses)

Release Date:  1990

Filming Location:  New Orleans

Language(s):  English, Irish, Italian, Yiddish

There's nothing more pathetic than a man chasing his hat--Tom Reagan