Miller’s Crossing

Director’s Cut

In Conversation

  • Mark Danner has written about war and politics for three decades for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and other publications and is the author of The Massacre at El Mozote and five other books. He holds the Class of 1960 Distinguished Chair in Undergraduate Education at UC Berkeley and serves as a resident curator at the Telluride Film Festival. His writing has won many awards, including a National Magazine Award, three Overseas Press Awards, an Emmy, a Guggenheim, and a MacArthur Fellowship.

featuring

Gabriel Byrne, Marcia Gay Harden, John Turturro, Jon Polito,

The Coens’ third film found the pair applying their neo-noir filmmaking chops (proven in Blood Simple and Raising Arizona) to a Prohibition-era period piece conjured from Dashiell Hammett’s influential novels The Glass Key and Red Harvest. Tom (Gabriel Byrne) is the right-hand man and advisor to a corrupt town’s reigning mob boss, Leo (Albert Finney). Playing rival gangs against one another, Tom’s intricate stratagems, and his affair with Leo’s lover, Verna (Marcia Gay Harden), leave him in a perilous position. Replete with crackling dialogue in fluent gangster-ese, elegant production design, and affecting performances, Miller’s Crossing is classic Coen and quintessential Hammett.

Kate MacKay
FILM DETAILS 
Screenwriter
  • Joel Coen
  • Ethan Coen
Cinematographer
  • Barry Sonnenfeld
Print Info
  • Color
  • Digital
  • 113 mins
Source
  • 20th Century Studios/Criterion Pictures