Amazon.com Essentials:
Arguably the best film by Joel and Ethan Coen, the 1990 Miller's
Crossing stars Gabriel Byrne as Tom, a loyal lieutenant of a crime boss
named Leo (Albert Finney) who is in a Prohibition-era turf war with his
major rival, Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito). A man of principle, Tom nevertheless is
romantically involved with Leo's lover (Marcia Gay Harden), whose screwy
brother (John Turturro) escapes a hit ordered by Caspar only to become
Tom's problem. Making matters worse, Tom has outstanding gambling debts he
can't pay, which keeps him in regular touch with a punishing enforcer. With
all the energy the Coens put into their films, and all their focused
appreciation of genre conventions and rules, and all their efforts to turn
their movies into ironic appreciations of archetypes in American fiction,
they never got their formula so right as with Miller's Crossing.
With its Hammett-like dialogue and Byzantine plot and moral chaos mitigated
by one hero's personal code, the film so transcends its self-scrutiny as a
retro-crime thriller that it is a deserved classic in its own right.
--Tom Keogh
