“Nobody knows anybody. Not that well.”
THE FOREST
Gangland warfare rages in the Prohibition-era city ruled by Irish mob boss Leo O’Bannon and his consigliere Tom Reagan. Tom is furious when Leo refuses the request of would-be Italian godfather Johnny Caspar, who wants to place a hit on Jewish bookie Bernie Bernbaum.
Leo is in love with Verna, Bernie’s sister. Unbeknownst to Leo, however, Verna and Tom are having a torrid affair. When Tom reveals his involvement with Verna, Leo throws his consigliere out of his outfit, and Tom agrees to make an alliance with Caspar — or at least that’s what Tom wants everyone to believe. When Caspar orders Tom to kill Bernie, he balks, and Caspar’s henchman, Eddie the Dane, begins to get suspicious of Tom’s true allegiances.
Tom takes Bernie out to the woods to execute him, but afterward no one is certain whether Tom has gone through with it, whether Bernie is dead or alive. Verna searches for the truth about her brother’s disappearance, Leo searches for the truth about who is really loyal to him, and Tom searches for the truth of his own heart — if he can uncover it beneath all of his emotional armor.
THE TREES
I stood among them, but not of them;
in a shroud of thoughts which were not their thoughts.
Lord Byron
The life of the mind is our most private haven. No one can know our thoughts unless we choose to share them. In Miller’s Crossing, Tom Reagan (Irish actor Gabriel Byrne) conceals his beneath a fedora that serves as his stoic’s crown. Tom is smart, the most intelligent of all the nefarious characters in the film, and he is ruled almost exclusively by reason despite living within the confines of a sometimes-brutal criminal enterprise. While he certainly is armed and dangerous, Tom, unlike many of the gangsters in the film, keeps his aggression in check, killing only when necessary. He attacks only to protect himself or someone he loves, not for vendetta or ego. He acts with considered purpose, weighing the consequences of his actions even if he refuses to share his complicated reasoning with anyone else.
The film begins with ice tumbling into the lowball glass of whiskey that is Tom’s ever-present security blanket. We see the drink before we see Tom, who moves to his post behind his boss, the Irish gangster Liam “Leo” O’Bannon (Albert Finney), from which he stares wordlessly at the Italian crime boss and Leo’s rival Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito).
Caspar has come to see Leo to complain about the Jewish numbers runner Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro). Caspar believes MILLER’S CROSSING Bernie is selling him out on fixed boxing matches, skewing the odds against him by letting other gamblers in on the fact that the bouts are a “sure thing.” Caspar wants Leo’s permission (though he claims not to need it) to kill Bernie, who pays Leo for protection. “I’m talkin’ about friendship,” Caspar whines. “I’m talkin’ about character. I’m talkin’ about — hell, Leo, I ain’t embarrassed to use the word — I’m talkin’ about ethics.”
We soon learn that Leo is reluctant to order a hit on Bernie because he’s in love with Bernie’s sister, Verna (Marcia Gay Harden). Leo’s refusal to whack Bernie, along with his belittling words to Caspar — “You’re exactly as big as I let you be and no bigger, and don’t forget it. Ever” — clearly are the start of a feud.
After Caspar leaves snarling in a huff, followed closely by his main thug, the murderous Eddie “The Dane” Dane (J. E. Freeman), Tom tells Leo that he’s making a mistake by protecting Bernie. Tom fears that his refusal to give up “the sheeny” is sure to start a gang war — a prescient warning, as it turns out.
Here we learn a bit more about Tom. He is deeply in debt to another bookie named Lazarre for a streak of losing bets on horses. Leo offers to clear Tom’s debt to Lazarre, but Tom refuses his help. It’s a matter of principle. Tom’s debts are his own, and he doesn’t want to be beholden to Leo, swapping one debt for another. His sins are his alone, and he’s prepared to bear them, whatever the cost.
Tom is also a heavy drinker. In the next scene, he is passed out at the Shenandoah Club, a private speakeasy run by Leo. Awakened by the bartender Tad (Olek Krupa), Tom is missing his hat, which Tad reminds him that he lost the night before in a poker game — either to Verna, the love interest of both Tom and Leo, or Mink (Steve Buscemi), a nervous, minor criminal who is the Dane’s “amigo” (gay lover).
Tom goes looking for his hat, his intellectual body armor, at Verna’s apartment, and the two verbally spar before falling into bed. Deception abounds, and nothing is quite what it seems. Later that night at Tom’s apartment, while Verna sleeps in Tom’s bed, Leo shows up in the wee hours, asking Tom to help locate her — Leo has no idea that Verna is asleep in the next room. He’s put a tail on Verna in the form of Rug Daniels (Salvatore H. Tornabene), a toupee-clad thug (and the corrupt mayor’s aide), but he turns up dead in an alley the next morning. Leo attributes Rug’s murder to Caspar, but Tom privately suspects Verna. It’s one more piece of information that Tom weighs judiciously and tucks under his hat, which he’s reclaimed from Verna.
A day or two later, while heavily drunk, Tom confronts Verna in the women’s powder room at the Shenandoah. Brutal verbal fisticuffs ensue when Tom says he wants her to stop seeing Leo. She slugs him, and he throws a glass of whiskey at her head, narrowly missing and cracking a large mirror behind her instead.
Back at his apartment, Tom encounters Bernie, who has let himself in and is seated in one of Tom’s armchairs, an ominous grin on his face. In exchange for friendship (and continued protection), Bernie offers to fix a fight for Tom, to help him settle his debt to Lazarre. “I got that crazy dago mad at me,” Bernie says. “Don’t ask me why. I’m just a small-timer trying to get by like everyone else. I need help from my friends like Leo and you.” On the surface, Bernie’s words are benign and his presence even somewhat meek, but there’s a chillingly sinister undertone to everything he says.
Next, Tom is summoned by Caspar, who also offers to square Tom’s debt with Lazarre if he’ll tell him where Bernie is and put a word in with Leo on his behalf. Tom says he’ll think about it, and then gets a beating from Caspar’s lackeys — Frankie (Mike Starr) and Tic-Tac (Al Mancini) — that knocks his hat off his head. Tom then goes to see Verna at her apartment and tells her that Rug is dead and he thinks she killed him. “You think I murdered someone? Come on, Tom. You know me a little,” she says. “Nobody knows anybody — not that well,” he replies.
Verna goads him about his feelings for her, asking him to admit that he doesn’t want her to see Leo anymore because he’s jealous. “Admit that you’ve got a heart, even though it may be small and feeble, and you can’t remember the last time you used it,” she says. “If I’d known we were gonna cast our feelings into words, I’d have memorized the Song of Solomon,” he retorts snarkily. “Maybe that’s why I like you, Tom,” she says. “I never met anybody that made being a son of a bitch such a point of pride.”
The gangland war is in full swing, played out most spectacularly in the attempted assassination of Leo at his mansion by Caspar’s henchmen. Leo survives and meets with Tom in his office above the Shenandoah, where he tells Tom that he’s asked Verna to marry him. In turn, Tom tells Leo about his affair with her. Furious, Leo brutally beats Tom, and one of the blows knocks Tom’s hat off. As Leo continues the attack, Tom never attempts to retaliate — clambering after his hat instead.
Tom winds up in bed with Verna again after she tells him Leo has broken things off with her. She wakes to Tom smoking (and brooding) on the edge of the bed. He’s thinking about a dream he once had, he tells her. “I was walking in the woods. I don’t know why. Wind came whippin’. Blew me hat off,” he says. “And you chased it, right? You ran and ran. You finally caught up to it. And you picked it up, but it wasn’t a hat anymore. It had changed into something else, something wonderful,” she says, clearly thinking Tom has finally given her a glimpse of the inner world of his mind. “No, it stayed a hat,” he says, nonplussed. “And no, I didn’t chase it. Nothing more foolish than a man chasin’ his hat.”
Tom goes to see Caspar and accepts his offer to turn on Leo and join Caspar’s crew. Whether Tom really switches allegiances from Leo to Caspar, or is just posing as a turncoat in order to undermine Caspar’s power play, remains to be seen. Still, Tom tells Caspar where he can find Bernie. The Dane, Frankie, and Tic-Tac collect Bernie and take him, with Tom, to Miller’s Crossing, a stand of tall trees — the same, we presume, that we saw at the beginning of the film — where a black fedora tumbled through the trees, blown by the wind. The Dane tells Tom that Caspar wants him to be the one who kills Bernie, in order to prove his allegiance. In the film’s most compelling scene, Tom drags a sniveling Bernie to an opening in the trees, draws his gun, and trains it at Bernie’s head. Bernie falls to his knees, begging for his life, utterly humiliated:
Tommy, you can’t do this. You don’t bump guys. You’re not like those animals back there. It’s not right, Tom. They can’t make us do this. It’s a wrong situation. They can’t make us different people than we are. We’re not muscle. I never killed anybody. I used a little information for a chisel, that’s all. It’s my nature, Tom. I can’t help it. Somebody hands me an angle, I play it. I don’t deserve to die for that. Do you think I do? But I tell you what — I never crossed a friend. I never killed anybody, I never crossed a friend. We’re not like those animals. This is not us. It’s a dream, Tommy! I’m praying to you! I can’t die. I can’t die out here in the woods like a dumb animal. In the woods like a dumb animal! Like a, like a dumb animal! I can’t — I can’t — I can’t die out here in the woods like a dumb animal. I can’t die! I’m praying to you. Look in your heart.
The gun fires. For a moment, we think Tom has killed Bernie, but instead, he’s fired past him, sparing his life. Tom has looked in his heart and found compassion. He tells Bernie to run, to disappear, to never show his face in town again, or else he really will kill him. Back in town, one of Leo’s heavies, Terry, finds Tom, punches him (knocking off his hat, which he then brushes off and hands back to him), and says he’s come to deliver a warning from Leo, who believes Tom really has double-crossed him and aligned himself with Caspar. “Tell Leo he’s not God on the throne,” Tom says defiantly. “He’s just a cheap political boss with more hair tonic than brains.” Tom meets with Caspar, who informs him that Mink has disappeared. Meanwhile, the Dane visits Verna, and after killing the two heavies Leo had sent to protect her, tells her that Tom has murdered Bernie, who in the next scene shows up at Tom’s place to blackmail him.
The Dane then comes calling, suspecting that Tom has spared Bernie’s life and betrayed Caspar. Accompanied by Frankie and Tic-Tac, he muscles Tom into the car and drives him out to Miller’s Crossing to find Bernie’s body, which the audience knows isn’t there. Tom is characteristically stoic as he marches to what will surely be his own demise. Finally, the pressure catches up with him and he doubles over next to a tree — his hat tumbling off his head — and retches. He marches on, stumbling, toward the clearing where Bernie’s body should be but isn’t. Just as the Dane is about to shoot Tom, Frankie and Tic-Tac discover a decomposing body. The corpse has been shot in the face, disguising its true identity. But Caspar’s men believe it to be Bernie. (Later we learn that it’s Mink, whom Bernie had murdered and left in the crossing, and that Mink — not Verna — had killed Rug in some kind of mix-up.)
Tom goes to Caspar, hoping to convince him that the Dane is a turncoat and is using Bernie as the scapegoat. Essentially confessing that he has not followed orders to murder Bernie, Tom tells Caspar that Bernie will be at his apartment — the Barton Arms — that night. (When Joel and Ethan Coen were writing their ambitiously complex screenplay for Miller’s Crossing, they famously came to an impasse in the plot. Though they’ve adamantly claimed they weren’t suffering from writer’s block, the Coens took a break from writing what they had tentatively titled The Bighead to visit friends in Los Angeles, where they consumed copious amounts of coffee and donuts and watched cheesy films such as the Diane Keaton romantic comedy Baby Boom. It was during this hiatus that brothers came up with the idea for their next film — Barton Fink, the story of a Jewish New York playwright who comes to Hollywood to write for a movie studio and suffers from near-fatal writer’s block. The Coens returned to New York and wrote Barton Fink in just a few weeks and then returned to Miller’s Crossing, finishing the screenplay.)
When the Dane comes to tell Caspar that Mink is dead, Caspar accuses the Dane of betrayal and shoots him dead. On the rainy street outside Caspar’s lair, Verna confronts Tom with a gun, threatening to kill him for murdering Bernie. Tom tells her that Bernie is still alive. With the gun pressed to Tom’s chin, Verna hesitates. She doesn’t have it in her to pull the trigger. “It isn’t easy, is it Verna?” he taunts, as she runs away weeping.
Back at the Barton Arms, Caspar has arrived to kill Bernie. Bernie, however, hides in the hallway outside Tom’s apartment, catches Caspar by surprise, and kills him. Tom arrives on the scene and double-crosses Bernie, taking a roll of cash from Caspar’s pocket and the gun from his dead hand. He aims at Bernie, who drops to his knees in a repeat of the scene from Miller’s Crossing. “Tommy, look in your heart,” he begs. “What heart?” Tom replies and pulls the trigger.
Bernie Bernbaum is a fascinating character, the first explicitly Jewish character the Coen brothers created for the screen. He possesses all of the negative anti-Semitic stereotypes of classical depictions of Jews. A modern-day Shylok, he is sneaky, untrustworthy, and motivated largely by lust for money. Throughout the film, racial and ethnic slurs are bandied about with abandon, particularly when it comes to Bernie, who is called, variously, “the shmatte kid,” “the sheeny,” and a “Hebrew.” (“What’s one Hebrew more or less?” Tom says to Leo after Caspar first asks to have the bookie bumped off.)
The Coens are Jewish, but seem to be comfortable employing the ethnic prejudices that would have been commonplace in the 1920s, in order to advance their plot. While religion is never explicitly addressed in the film, it contains a religious subtext. The Irish and Italian gangsters share a common Roman Catholic tradition, if not faith, and it would have been scandalous at the time for a Catholic to marry a Jew, as Leo plans to wed Verna.
Tom uses the money he takes from Caspar’s corpse to square his debts with Lazarre, and then places another bet. A few days later, in the final scene of the film, Tom turns up in the woods — a location that looks a lot like the crossing — for Bernie’s burial. Apart from a rabbi, who reads a prayer over the grave, the only people in attendance are Verna and Leo, who is wearing a yarmulke.
“Big turnout,” Tom says mockingly to Verna, who tells him to “drop dead,” before getting into Leo’s chauffeur-driven car and driving away, leaving Tom and Leo alone. Leo pleads with Tom to come back to work for him, saying that he wished Tom had told him about his scheme to double-cross Caspar. Leo really believed that Tom had betrayed him, but now he knows now it was all a hoax. He says that he and Verna, who proposed to him this time, are going to get married. “I forgive you,” Leo says about Tom’s affair with Verna. “I didn’t ask for that, and I don’t want it,” Tom snaps. “Good-bye, Leo.”
The film ends with a tight shot on Tom’s face as he watches, wistfully, Leo walking away. Tom adjusts his hat, pulling the brim down tightly over his eyes, and the credits roll.
THE MORAL OF THE STORY …
Throughout the film, Tom’s loyalty has been to Leo, the Lion, the pater familias. It’s never clear why this is, though some critics have speculated that Tom is in love with Leo and that his affair with Verna is a way of getting close to the man he loves. Homosexuality surely is a subtext in the Coens’ most complicated plot, but I think romantic love is too simplistic an explanation for Tom’s undying devotion to Leo. Who knows what the backstory between the two men really is? Perhaps Leo brought Tom from Ireland to the United States, to give him a better life. Maybe Leo reminds Tom of his own father, or the father he never had. Whatever the explanation, when it comes to Leo, Tom is ruled by his heart, which terrifies him. Tom is, above all, a reasonable man, and when he allows compassion to rule his head in sparing Bernie, the consequences are disastrous.
Perhaps it is better — safer, at least — for Tom to remain ensconced in the world of his mind, with all of his emotions and wounds hidden safely under his hat. He remains in the woods, where at one point it seemed that God had intervened to save him by producing a body that wasn’t supposed to be there. Just as some observant Jewish men keep their heads covered by a hat or a yarmulke as a sign of their respect and deference in the presence of God (who is always present), Tom’s hat may be a symbol of his reverence for the Almighty in some fashion.
The Coens have been asked many times about the significance of the hat in Miller’s Crossing. The brothers based their film in large part on Dashiell Hammett’s hard-boiled The Glass Key, borrowing some plot points, characters, and even dialogue directly from the 1931 detective novel. In Hammett’s book, the hero, Ned Beaumont (a political fixer), asks about a missing hat. When another character asks him why he’s so interested in the hat, Beaumont says, “I don’t know. I’m only an amateur detective, but it looks like a thing that might have some meaning, one way or another.”4
While admitting that they began the screenplay with the simple idea of a hat blowing through the woods, the Coens, in their typically oblique way, have declined to reveal its intended meaning, even to Gabriel Byrne, who played Tom himself. In an interview after the release of the film in 1990, Byrne said, “It was really weird that nobody mentioned the hat all the way through the movie. I said to Joel at one point, ‘What is the significance of the hat? Is the hat significant?’ And he said, ‘Mmmm hmmm.’ And that was it.”5
BARTON FINK