Why don’t we dress like that anymore? Fedoras, trench-coats, 3 piece-suits, waistcoats, tailcoats, silken dressing-gowns, pocket-watches, it was the zenith of sartorial resplendence back in the West of the 1930’s. The experience of watching films like ‘The Untouchables’, ‘Public Enemies’, ‘The Aviator’, ‘The Godfather’, ‘Road to Perdition’, ’Shutter Island’ is enriched, in no small measure, by the design of their apparel. As a kid, I remember watching ‘The Godfather’ and ‘The Untouchables’ seduced solely by the recurrent visual motif of a dark silhouette cloaked in a trench-coat, fedora pulled low, toting a tommy gun. The cocky tilt of the fedora brim, pistols whipped out of the folds of dark, sweeping coats, cigars vying with glasses of scotch and brandy (usually in speakeasies and go-downs) over games of whist and bridge, these are visual synecdoches that catapult us into their world.
All the movie mentioned above are set in a defined milieu. Exactly half of them were, of course, true stories, and so, most certainly, based on recorded history. The other half despite being fiction, had enough real-life references to convey a sense of verisimilitude to the audience. For instance, ‘The Godfather,’ today, has such a rich legacy, we almost believe the Corleone family existed. Of course, the fictional links to Al Capone, its all-too-recognisable New York City setting and its encyclopaedic knowledge of the Italian-American mafia reinforce that fallacy. It is somewhat similar for ‘Road ...’ and ‘Shutter Island’.
A lesser-known, but no less evocative, movie is ‘Miller’s Crossing’, by the Coen brothers. It is an exception in more ways than one. Unlike the above-mentioned movies, there is no literal indication of time and place in this one. It is set in a nameless town at an unspecified time. But the very evocation of time and place is so strong, that we, the audience can make an unerring guess. The devices used for this purpose are the costumes, the lingo, the story, the nature of the interactions between the characters, and the events that govern them.
The first scene itself sets the tone and mood for what follows. It establishes most of the principal characters who are present either in person or are alluded to. The movie opens with the voice of Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito), indignant, querulous, beseeching. He sits before Leo (Albert Finney), who is clearly the boss, rattling off in his blunt Italian-American accent. Caspar is a large, sweaty, blustering man, complaining about a bookie named Bernie who, apparently, double-deals in fixed matches that Caspar bets on, resulting in heavy losses for him. He wants to kill Bernie, and wants to let Leo know his reasons before doing so. Leo, an imposing, stately-looking old warhorse, refuses flatly, stating that Bernie pays him money for protection. This enrages Caspar, who feels slighted that Leo favours a small-time bookie like Bernie over him. In his indignance, he screams, ‘I’m sick of coming here everytime to kiss your Irish ass. And I’m sick of getting the high hat!’ We see The Dane (J.E. Freeman), a tall henchman with smouldering eyes, fiercely loyal to Caspar, reflecting Caspar’s mutinous rage at having to be under Leo’s thumb all the time. Leo replies with all the considerable authority of his position, ‘You are only as big as I allow you to be’. A mute (but, by no means, helpless) spectator to this tussle of wills is Tom (Gabriel Byrne), who calmly sips whiskey all this while.
After Caspar and his henchman have stormed out of Leo’s office, Tom speaks up for the first time. He warns Leo about protecting Bernie and thus inviting Caspar’s hostility. Bernie’s too trivial to go to war with Caspar, he reasons. Leo in his conceit and power, does not heed Tom’s advice, merely laughing it off. Tom is a man of medium built, with aquiline features, laconic, enigmatic. He talks smart, talks reason, something people around him are often unable or loath to see. Most importantly, he talks mildly amidst hot-headed, bombastic, egoistic men, another reason he isn’t paid any heed. Tom learns that the real reason for Leo’s reluctance to go hard on Bernie is Verna. Leo, at his ripe age, feels the stirrings of romantic love for Verna (Marcia Gay Harden), who happens to be Bernie’s sister. For the sake of his love (actually, more for his pride), Leo ‘can still trade body blows with any man in this town’ as he boasts to Tom. ‘Except you, Tom’, he adds more gently. ‘And Verna’, Tom shoots back softly. A further kink to this chain of events is added by the romantic liaison between Tom and Verna. Tom is torn between his love for Verna and his loyalty to Leo. Verna is an opportunistic slut, a veteran at seducing men of power and turning them into her puppets. Tom sees through this very quality of hers, sees how much of a puppet Leo has become. He tries to make Leo see reason, but fails. He tries to threaten Verna off Leo, but she is just too seasoned a player to back off. She, in turn realises, the only way she can save her brother, is to control Leo. Amidst this deadlock, there is a murderous attempt on Leo’s life which he manages to stave off single-handedly. Tom, rattled, immediately owns up his affair with Verna before Leo. Leo is shocked, and in his rage, fuelled by his insecurity and jealousy, beats up Tom and throws him out of his building, threatening to kill him if he ever appears before him again.
We see Tom join hands with Leo’s rivals, Caspar and the Dane. To prove his loyalty to them, Tom is immediately ordered to pinch and bump off Bernie (John Turturro) at the eponymous Miller’s Crossing, indeed the only named place in the movie. What follows is a tale that is both unbelievably twisted, yet masterful in its unspooling. There are police raids, shoot-outs, double-crosses, murders (some realised, some threatened), scenes of coal-black humour, all played out by riveting dialogue that pays homage to the rapier-sharp, eclectic dialogue of Chandler and Hammett, in their immediacy and colloquialism. Sample these: ‘if you can’t trust a fixed fight, what can you trust?’, ‘take your flunkey and dangle’, ‘I never met anyone who made being a son-of-a-bitch such a point of pride as you, Tom’.
The insight the Coens offer us into the lives and backgrounds of these people with their acute sense of detail is immense. For instance, take the scene in which Caspar’s go-down is raided by the police ostensibly to bust all the illegal liquor in there. But the real motive of the raid is to free Tom who has been captured by Caspar’s men and is being worked on. The police carry out this raid at Leo’s behest. In this one scene, Leo’s power over the town, and its pervasive corruption are established, along with a masterful evocation of the Prohibition era. In a bravura directorial flourish, we see Tom nimbly grab a bottle of fine Scotch off a table, just as the table is kicked over by the rampaging police. As the entire godown with its illegal liquor is trashed, Tom calmly swaggers out, glugging straight from the bottle, escorted by the police. The way the camera frames the juxtaposition of Tom walking out untouched, with the chaos of the police running amok, smashing everything and everyone in their way, is sheer class.
The rivalry between Caspar and Leo is a representation of the clash between two of the most dominant groups of American immigrants: the Italian- and the Irish-Americans respectively. The reasons for their rivalry go deeper than mere greed and lust for power. They are ethnic, as evidenced by Caspar’s reference to Leo’s ‘Irish ass’ and to Bernie as a ‘schmutz’ (an orthodox Jewish word for filth). It is details like these that lay bare the worlds of these characters.
The movie nearly bursts at the seams with plot and character. I’ve just tried to present the bare essentials here. Filled with a dozen more subplots, each blending into the others, this is surely one of the most dense screenplays written in Hollywood. It bears a strong resemblance to ‘Red Harvest’ by Hammett and ‘The Big Sleep’ by Chandler, both watersheds in noir fiction. ‘Miller’s Crossing’, though, is more of a gangster flick awash with noir imagery and plot devices. It would have been complete noir had the central character been a ‘private eye’ or a ‘Pinkerton dick’. The Coens famously suffered from writers’ block while writing it. It doesn’t show in the final product. There is seamless meticulousness and flawless mise-en-scene at work here. Barry Sonnenfeld’s cinematography is studied, deliberate yet adept at capturing every nuance, every contour of expression and ambience that places the viewer right in the middle of shifty, treacherous world inhabited by the characters.
Carter Burwell’s sparse, moving score lends a touch of pensive poignancy, grand tragedy and human warmth to this tale of loyalty, betrayal and rivalry.
Albert Finney as Leo, is so scarily effective in the scene when he shoots down half a dozen men sent to kill him, single-handedly, that when another character says of him, ”the old man’s still an artist with the Thompson’, we cannot but agree. Yet he is vulnerable, insecure and sincere in his love for Verna, and in his admissions to Tom whom he considers a friend and close confidant. The most interesting aspect of the relationship between Leo and Verna is that it is never shown onscreen, just talked about, despite being the driving force of the story. It is a measure of the writing and the performances that we feel the strength of the invisible bonds that tie them together. The same goes for the relationship between Verna and her brother Bernie, another focal point of the conflict in the story.
Marcia Gay Harden’s Verna is a tougher, darker and more hard-boiled take on the femme fatale. She seduces Leo, knowing he has the power to protect Bernie. She carries on a stormy affair with Tom who she perceives as a heartless man, yet is excited by his unruffled, devil-may-care demeanour and his city-slicker ways. Yet she isn’t above crossing him, and creating a rift between him and Leo in order to protect her brother. An extremely complex role pulled off effortlessly by Marcia Gay Harden.
Gabriel Byrne’s act is just like his character: understated, mysterious, ruggedly stylish, yet fiercely intelligent. His craggy features couple with his slightly drawling, mangled Irish accent heighten his mysterious allure. His face displays emotion, subtly yet surely. In a character whose very actions, motivations and their modus operandi form the core of the film’s suspense, hidden to the audience, until a grand moment of epiphany, he excels.
But the scene-stealer of this ensemble remains John Turturro as the human Macguffin, the knot that entangles the threads of this story irrevocably. As Bernie, the bookie everyone’s after either to protect or to kill, he is simply a stunning knockout. Throughout the film, there are references to him being gay. Turturro’s body language, hairstyle, lisp and voice tone scream ‘Gay!’ The scene with Gabriel Byrne in the clearing in the woods, is his crowning glory, hands-down. Forced to walk at gunpoint by Tom, on the way to be shot in the head, Bernie’s blithering, flailing, paroxysmal cries for mercy and forgiveness manage to raise gooseflesh, something remarkable in a film filled with cynical, twisted, pitiless characters. ‘I can’t die in the woods like some dumb animal’, he bawls uncontrollably as Tom bears down inexorably on him. Turturro’s submission to his character has to be seen to be believed.
A film like this is meant to be savoured, mulled upon, viewed repeatedly to enjoy treasures supplied anew with every viewing. Soaked in rich dialogue and wonderfully intricate detail, steeped in musings about the workings of the human heart, ‘Miller’s Crossing’ elevates a tale of gangsters and their ilk, in all their noir trappings, to the level of serious art.
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