Pursuing their desire to do something different with each film, the Coens followed the zany comedy of Raising Arizona with a sombre take on gangster movies. According to Joel, ‘we didn’t want to do another out-and-out comedy, like Raising Arizona. We wanted to do something that was a little bit morbid. Less of a comedy, more of a drama. We’ve always liked gangster movies, so it was what we started to think about when we did another script’ (Allen 2006: 37). The result is a film that tips its hat to gangster movies but moves beyond familiar generic formulas to create a story and characters more accurately classified as film noir. In their third feature film the Coens return to the dark world of crime introduced in Blood Simple, but instead of the desert wasteland of 1980s Texas, the setting of Miller’s Crossing shifts to the Prohibition era to tell the story of a cynical and enigmatic gangster, Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne), who knows all the angles and how to play them to his advantage. The intricate and elaborately imagined filmstory, inspired by the novels of Dashiell Hammett, chronicles the clash of two crime bosses, the contentious Italian underboss, Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito), and the ruling Irish mob chieftain, Leo O’Bannon (Albert Finney), who both vie for control of a corrupt municipal government that fronts the criminal subculture of an unnamed east-coast city, circa 1929.
The intricate plot is driven by the conflict caused by Leo’s ill-advised decision to protect a small-time bookie named Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro) who crosses Caspar by selling information on fixed boxing matches. When Caspar demands that Bernie be ‘bumped’ for violating the code of ethics which, he argues, ensures the stability of the underground criminal economy, Leo balks, not, as he claims, because Bernie has bought Leo’s protection, but because the crooked bookie’s sister, Verna (Marcia Gay Harden), has become the object of Leo’s romantic affection. Tom, who serves as Leo’s advisor and confidant, disagrees with his boss, but fails to convince him that he is making a ‘bad play’. Meanwhile, Tom is having an affair with Verna, which he later confesses to Leo, breaking the bond of trust between them and forcing Tom to side with Johnny Caspar against his partner and friend in the impending gang war.
Bernie begs for his life.
To prove his loyalty to Caspar, Tom must reveal Bernie’s whereabouts and is subsequently forced by Caspar’s gunsels, Frankie (Mike Starr) and Tic-Tac (Al Mancini), to execute the chiseling bookmaker at a secluded forest killing ground known as Miller’s Crossing. When Bernie begs Tom to spare his life with dramatic pathos, Tom relents and lets Bernie live. Later, Tom’s failure to murder Bernie leads to unexpected complications when the bookie returns to blackmail him. Additional complications arise when Caspar’s henchman Eddie Dane (J. E. Freeman) insists on double-checking for Bernie’s corpse, which, fortunately for Tom, has been replaced by another belonging to Mink (Steve Buscemi), one of Bernie’s ‘amigos’. Amid the increasing violence of the warring gangster factions, Tom engineers a complicated intrigue. First he persuades Johnny Caspar that the Dane and ‘his boy’ Mink were in cahoots and they, not Bernie, had been double-crossing him, whereupon Caspar murders the Dane brutally, saving Tom from the Dane’s stranglehold. Tom then tells Caspar that he has arranged a meet with Mink that night at his apartment, giving Caspar an opportunity for revenge. Tom also arranges a coinciding parley with Bernie. When Caspar shows up at Tom’s apartment to murder Mink, he is ambushed and killed by Bernie. Tom arrives later to meet Bernie, who believes that with his nemesis out of way, he is no longer in danger. What Bernie has not reckoned with is Tom’s plan to double-cross him and ‘tie up loose ends’. Saying that someone has to take the fall for Eddie Dane’s death, Tom pulls the trigger on Bernie, despite Bernie’s pathetically disingenuous reprise of his woodland pleading. In the film’s final scene, set at a cemetery in a wooded locale much like the killing ground of Miller’s Crossing, Verna and Leo, now engaged, attend Bernie’s burial. Arriving late, Tom is scorned by Verna, who exits with the only car, leaving Tom and Leo to walk back to town. Leo now realises that Tom had made a ‘smart play’ by pretending to cross over to Caspar and forgives him, offering Tom renewed friendship and his former job. Tom rejects Leo’s bid for reconciliation, and when the two men part ways, we sense that something important is still unsaid.
Premiered at the 1990 New York Film Festival, Miller’s Crossing hit theatres at a time when gangster movies were enjoying renewed popularity. Possibly because commentators too were overwhelmed by the surfeit of neo-gangster films also released that year, including Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather III and Abel Ferarra’s King of New York, the popular critical response to the Coens’ third feature was underwhelming. A few critics praised Miller’s Crossing for its intelligent genre deconstruction and for its astute adaptation of Dashiell Hammett. Geoff Andrew of Time Out wrote that the film ‘operates both on the surface, as a genre film, and on a deeper level, as an ironic commentary on that genre which, though witty, never lapses into simple parody’. Steve Jenkins thought that Miller’s Crossing’s ‘particular strength derives from a sense that the filmmakers have tapped a kind of essence of Hammett, outside any specific theme or plot’. Other reviewers questioned the filmmakers’ motives; as with their previous two movies, the critics took issue with the Coens’ presumed emphasis on style over substance. Writing for the New Yorker, Terrence Rafferty sums up this view: ‘The picture seems to have no life of its own, and the Coens’ formal control and meticulously crafted ironies become, after a while, rather depressing.’ Objecting to the movie’s pastiche aesthetic, Rafferty observes that the film ‘is not so much a gangster movie as an extended, elaborate allusion to one’. Roger Ebert agreed, focusing his critique on visual stylisation: ‘This doesn’t look like a gangster movie, it looks like a commercial intended to look like a gangster movie.’ Sheila Benson of the Los Angeles Times thought the Coens’ ‘empty formalism’ made the movie ‘emotionally remote’, as did Gary Giddins of Village Voice, who wrote that ‘Joel and Ethan Coen may represent the apotheosis of classroom cinema [but] Miller’s Crossing is so clever about its sources […] that it has little life of its own’.
In contrast to the frenetic cartoon-like exuberance of Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing moves at a stately, almost languid pace, winding its way through a plot that relies less on fast-paced action than on quick-witted dialogue and the complexities of the story’s emotional entanglements. With careful attention to production design and period accuracy, the story unfolds in a fictional gangland milieu where style is paramount and fashion, especially in men’s apparel, takes precedence over the violent action of a generic gangster movie. When asked by cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld how to conceptualise the movie’s visual style, the brothers answered, somewhat cryptically, ‘It should be a handsome movie about men in hats’ (DVD Extra, ‘Shooting Miller’s Crossing’). Ultimately, Miller’s Crossing is about much more than that, but many of the movie’s commentators focused on its elegant style, overlooking the psychological depths explored in the film’s astute study of masculine friendship. If we take the Coens at their word and dismiss Miller’s Crossing as merely ‘a handsome movie about men in hats’, we risk falling into a hermeneutic trap set for the unwary viewer. Despite what the Coens invite us to assume, the film is more than a retro gangster pastiche. Closer study of its intertextual dynamics shows that the ‘handsome’ surface masks a subversive undercurrent challenging established notions of the gangster genre. Like its characters, Miller’s Crossing is a film with hidden motives which are best uncovered by studying the filmmakers’ creative rewriting of Dashiell Hammett’s roman noir.
‘A Shameless Rip-Off of Hammett’
Rafferty’s comment that Miller’s Crossing is ‘an extended, elaborate allusion’ to gangster movies articulates a misperception that the Coens do little to discourage. No doubt, the movie’s self-conscious use of generic conventions gives the appearance of a gangster pastiche constructed from established conventions of setting, narrative and iconography: Prohibition-era mobsters wearing expensive pin-striped suits and fedora hats, driving vintage Model-T autos and drinking bootleg whiskey (called ‘paint’); corrupt city officials upholding a façade of legality while gangsters run the political machine behind the scenes; violent gun fights between warring criminal factions and coldblooded assassinations. Add to these elements a visual style that replicates the cinematographic realism of 1930s gangster movies and it’s easy to see why some commentators could mistake Miller’s Crossing for ‘an abstract distillation of the gangster genre’ (Brown 1991). But the film is more than a pastiche of gangster movie clichés embroidered with clever ‘hard-boiled’ dialogue. In fact, apart from stock generic trappings, the Coens incorporate relatively few recognisable citations actually meriting the derogatory label of pastiche. Some have suggested that the opening scene is a gloss on the opener of Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) (Mottram 2000: 65–66). The low-key lighting and dark wooden décor of Leo’s office is thought to resemble the room where Vito Corleone, surrounded by advisors, receives supplicants asking ‘favours’ on the day of his daughter’s wedding. The Don’s homily about friendship and loyalty is echoed in Johnny Caspar’s opening speech on the necessity of ethics, and in his request that Leo grant him a favour by giving him permission to kill a crooked bookie. Analogously, it has also been suggested that the final shot of Tom at Bernie’s burial recalls the image of Michael Corleone in the final scene of The Godfather II (1974), even as the forest setting of the final scene of Miller’s Crossing glosses the final scene of Carol Reed’s film noir The Third Man (1949) (Mottram 2000: 67).
Other possible references to genre precursors prove equally random and insubstantial. When Tom strikes a match on the police chief’s badge, for instance, we might recall a similar gesture of defiance by Tony Camonte in Howard Hawks’ Scarface (1932). Naming Caspar’s henchman ‘The Dane’ could be an allusion to the protagonist of Robert Siodmak’s The Killers (1949), called ‘The Swede’. These instances and others are plausible points of reference, but compared with Miller’s Crossing’s extensive and fully integrated adaptation of Hammett, these incidental referential in-jokes do not figure prominently in the movie’s overall intertextual design. An intentional reference to Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) – on a poster in Drop Johnson’s room naming his boxing opponent ‘Lars Thorwald’ – epitomises the Coens’ trivialization of movie citations and their view of cinematic precursors as secondary to the film’s central project of mounting a highly literate and fully-realised adaptation of Hammett’s fiction.
The Coens freely acknowledge their homage to Hammett, saying with boastful self-irony that ‘Miller’s Crossing is pretty much just a shameless rip-off of Hammett, mostly his novel The Glass Key [1931], but to a lesser extent Red Harvest [1929]’ (Allen 2006: 120). Emphasising the primary importance of the literary intertext, Joel explains in the film’s production notes: ‘We weren’t thinking so much of gangster pictures, just novels.’ ‘Miller’s Crossing,’ says Ethan, ‘is a gangster story because it’s a genre we’re attracted to – a literary rather than a cinematic genre, by the way’ (Allen 2006: 44). Building on the foundation of Hammett’s early novels The Glass Key and Red Harvest, Miller’s Crossing appropriates the narrative of the former almost wholesale, along with the central characters and a host of minor roles, infusing the dialogue with copious quotations of the novel to shape a unique adaptation that is true to its source, yet playfully inventive in its reimagining of the writer’s fictional world. Hammett’s influence is immediately evident in the dialogue-heavy script, which cribs shamelessly from Hammett’s hard-boiled idiom. Indeed, much of the dialogue is taken directly from The Glass Key, and little is lost in translation. There is, for instance, a chapter in the novel in which the bootlegger Shad O’Rory and political boss Paul Madvig exchange differing views on the state of the underground criminal economy. Shad wants assurance of Madvig’s protection, a service that costs the bootlegger plenty: ‘Politics is politics and business is business,’ says Shad. ‘I’ve been paying my way and I’m willing to go on paying my way, but I want what I’m paying for’ (1999: 648). Johnny Caspar voices similar concerns in his heated conversation with Leo: ‘It’s gettin’ so a businessman can’t expect no return from a fixed fight. […] Listen Leo, I pay off to you every month like a greengrocer – a lot more than the Shmatte – and I’m sick a gettin’ the high hat.’ Neither O’Rory nor Caspar is satisfied with the answer he gets. O’Rory’s warning to Madvig, ‘I’m too big to take the boot from you now’ (1999: 649), is echoed in Caspar’s contentious response to Leo: ‘You think I’m some guinea fresh off the boat and you can kick me, but I’m too big for that now.’ When Eddie Dane calls Tom ‘halfsmart,’ he is quoting Jeff Gardner, O’Rory’s thug, who tells Ned Beaumont: ‘What a half-smart bastard you turned out to be’ (1999: 758). As the Dane drives Tom out to Miller’s Crossing to check for Bernie’s corpse, he assures Tom that he has pegged him correctly as a traitor, describing Tom as ‘Mr. Inside-Outsky, like some Bolshevik picking up his orders from Yegg Central’. The term ‘Yegg’ (in criminal slang meaning safecracker or thief, but used by Hammett to mean Communist) was in Hammett’s time loaded with ideological venom. In The Glass Key ‘yegg’ is used to characterise the senator Madvig is supporting for re-election, implying that the politician is morally corrupt and cannot be trusted (1999: 596).
As James Naremore points out, Hammett was ‘an unusually “movie-like” author, who possessed an ear for American speech and a strong sense of the texture of modern life, including the tunes people sang, the clothes and hairstyles they wore, the furnishings in their rooms, and way they posed in magazine photographs’ (1998: 63). Hammett’s characters, especially his protagonists, speak in a quirky, unorthodox manner, an act of creative writing that Naremore calls ‘making art out of the vernacular’ (1998: 50). The Coens have studied Hammett’s artful slang and take delight in impersonating the writer’s gangster argot with expressions like ‘dangle’ and ‘drift’ (meaning ‘to leave, make an exit’), and ‘frail’ or ‘twist’ (both meaning ‘woman’). The dialogue is peppered with phrases like ‘What’s the rumpus?’ (meaning ‘what’s going on?’) and ‘giving the high hat’ (meaning ‘to show disrespect’). Paradoxically, the fact that most of this slang is borrowed from Hammett is precisely what differentiates the Coens’ hard-boiled idiom from that of prior gangster movies, giving it the ring of authenticity that is lacking in classic Hollywood adaptations of Hammett, such as Howard Hawks’ The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Stuart Heisler’s The Glass Key (1942), where Hammett’s unique idiom is largely neglected and replaced with a bland movie version of tough-guy slang, presumably in the interest of making the dialogue seem more ‘realistic’ or at least more palatable for mainstream audiences. Clearly, one of the most notable achievements in Miller’s Crossing is the Coens’ faithful restoration of Hammett’s vernacular artistry.
The narrative of Miller’s Crossing also emulates Hammett’s typically complex and convoluted plots. Like The Glass Key, the plot of Miller’s Crossing is structured, in Joel’s words, like ‘a big jigsaw puzzle’, providing a supporting structure for the character development, which the Coen brothers considered the most important aspect of the story (Robson 2007: 77). It was perhaps the puzzle-like complexity of the labyrinthine plot that caused the Coens to experience a rare case of writer’s block as they struggled to complete the screenplay, breaking off at one point to ‘take a vacation’ during which they penned, somewhat miraculously, the entire script for Barton Fink in several weeks before returning to finish Miller’s Crossing. To replicate the jigsaw complexity of The Glass Key, the screenplay imports and synthesises numerous plot points from Hammett’s novel. Like The Glass Key, Miller’s Crossing begins with a mysterious murder that initiates and drives the action but turns out to be of minor consequence. More important, Tom Reagan’s duplicitous scheming, as he pits two warring factions against each other, pretending to switch loyalties as he crosses over from one side to the other, is a tactic used by the protagonist in both Red Harvest and The Glass Key. In Red Harvest, Hammett’s Continental Op resorts to a double-cross scheme as part of a calculated strategy to cleanse a city poisoned by corruption. With a different motive, Ned Beaumont, the political fixer in The Glass Key, shifts his allegiance from his boss, a political powerbroker named Paul Madvig, to Paul’s adversary, the bootlegger Shad O’Rory, with the hidden motive of protecting Madvig. The emotional conflict that ensues between Paul and Ned in The Glass Key is mirrored in Miller’s Crossing by the troubled relations between Tom and Leo, as is their romantic rivalry for the affection of a woman. In all three stories the protagonists are in some way forced to use violence against their better judgement to attain outcomes that benefit others more than themselves.
The principal characters in Miller’s Crossing are drawn almost entirely from The Glass Key. Tom Reagan’s conflicted relationship with Leo is a slightly altered version of the troubled masculine friendship at the centre of The Glass Key. Ned Beaumont is, like Tom Reagan, the right-hand man and advisor of Paul Madvig who, like Leo O’Bannon, is the crooked political boss of a city where the power is divided between bootlegging gangsters and corrupt municipal authorities. Much like Tom’s actions on behalf of Leo, Ned involves himself, at considerable personal risk, in the investigation of a murder. The murder victim is the son of a senator whom Madvig is supporting for re-election and Madvig has become a prime suspect. Analogous to the triangulated relationship of Tom, Leo and Verna, Madvig is in love with the senator’s daughter, Janet Henry, who resists his romantic overtures but eventually begins an affair with Ned. The protagonists of both stories are key advisors to their shady bosses. Like Tom Reagan, Ned Beaumont is, to invoke Johnny Caspar’s words, ‘the man behind the man who whispers in his ear’. Both Ned and Tom are obsessive gamblers, accustomed to taking risks and prepared to lose. If they lose and fall into debt, as both Ned and Tom do, they accept the consequences without complaint. Neither Ned nor Tom is a private detective, but they both think and act like detectives, using reason and calculation instead of violence to solve problems and achieve their ends. Like Tom Reagan, Ned Beaumont is an inscrutable thinker. His inscrutability reflects Hammett’s insistence on the privacy of his characters’ inner life. In The Glass Key, as in all of Hammett’s mature fiction, the reader is never given access to the protagonist’s unspoken thoughts. Any knowledge of his motives must be gleaned from spoken dialogue. Tom Reagan is conceived as a similarly enigmatic figure. A master of language given to witty and often sarcastic repartee, Tom’s carefully chosen words are calculated to hide his real intentions. Like his model Ned Beaumont, Tom is a wise-cracking smarty who uses verbal superiority to maintain a permanent state of ironic detachment. Tom keeps his thoughts ‘under the hat’, a metaphor Ned uses in The Glass Key to signify confidentiality (1999: 695). Literary scholar George J. Thompson advises readers of Hammett who hope to understand Beaumont’s inner life and motivation to pay close attention to ‘the nuances of Hammett’s diction’ and to ‘develop an ability to surmise intention from what is not said but merely implied’ (2007: 147).
Like The Glass Key, Miller’s Crossing is a study in moral ambiguity, a theme emphasised in Johnny Caspar’s frequent return to ‘the question of ethics’. As a man whose loyalties are easily shifted to accommodate changing circumstances, Tom Reagan duplicates Ned Beaumont’s questionable code of ethics. Tom proclaims loyalty to Leo but sleeps with Verna right under Leo’s nose. Then, knowing it will hurt Leo, he confesses his infidelity and apparently defects to Leo’s enemy, Johnny Caspar. The Dane is the only one who has insight into Tom’s duplicity, commenting aptly that Tom is ‘as straight as a corkscrew, Mr. Inside-Outsky’. When Caspar demands that Tom shoot Bernie Bernbaum to prove his loyalty, Tom ‘looks in his heart’ and decides not to execute Bernie, putting himself at great risk, perhaps more for the sake of Verna than for her unethical and unsympathetic brother. His motives are uncertain. Later, he contradicts himself, reversing his previous judgement and coldly murdering Bernie, as he says, in the interest of ‘tying up loose ends’ and restoring the status quo. Is it just that Tom is an ethical pragmatist who regards social codes of morality with a practical sense of indifference? Or is Tom a nihilist who believes in nothing, like his counterpart in Hammett’s novel who claims ‘I don’t believe in anything’ (1999: 744). Tom’s only true belief is that it is impossible to ‘know’ anyone and therefore no one can be trusted. His deep mistrust of others is summed up in the terse dictum: ‘Nobody ever knows anybody, not that well.’ As in Hammett’s fiction, where the universal principle of mistrust goes unquestioned, the relationships depicted in Miller’s Crossing, particularly all forms of friendship, are informed at a deep level by suspicion and fear of betrayal. According to Joel Coen, Tom Reagan is ‘the quintessential Hammett guy. You’re not let in on how much he knows and what exactly he’s up to. He tests the other characters to see what they want and uses that to his advantage’ (Robson 2007: 77). As Leslie Fiedler observes, Hammett’s protagonist is typically defined by ‘a stoic masculine individualism’ which does not permit social and sexual entanglements; ‘Sometimes misogynistic and homophobic,’ Fiedler writes, Hammett’s protagonists exhibit a deep ‘hostility toward bourgeois marriage’ which he thinks ‘often results in latently homosexual narratives about male bonding’ (Naremore 1998: 52–53).
Thematically, both Miller’s Crossing and The Glass Key can be described as meditations on the vicissitudes of masculine friendship, loyalty and betrayal – common themes in the gangster genre but, interestingly, absent in Hammett’s fiction until he wrote The Glass Key. Previously, Hammett’s stories had focused on the tough-guy detectives typically associated with classic pulp fiction. In this regard, The Glass Key represents a significant departure. After perfecting the hard-boiled male in The Maltese Falcon with Sam Spade, Hammett felt he had developed the tough private eye as fully as possible and was anxious to write a story engaging what he thought was the more mature theme of male friendship. Literary scholar William Marling considers The Glass Key’s portrayal of masculine friendship among ‘the classic friendships’ of American literature (1995: 94). More to the point, as a kind of ‘male melodrama’, The Glass Key is thematically unique among Hammett’s writings, a circumstance of particular interest for the Coens. Throughout their development as cinematic storytellers, the Coens take a special interest in changing conceptions of masculine identity. Although Miller’s Crossing might look to many like a gangster pastiche, many of its generic attributes identify it as film noir, in particular the concern with male identity and transgressive representations of masculinity. According to Richard Dyer, classic film noir is often characterised ‘by a certain anxiety over the existence and definition of masculinity and normality’; although seldom directly expressed, this anxiety is, in Dyer’s analysis, related to ‘an implicit set of issues and problems that the films seek to come to terms with without ever addressing them explicitly’ (1998: 115).
It is often noted that classic film noirs feature a detective whose investigations ultimately become self-examinations, raising questions of masculine identity and its troubled relationship to a corrupt patriarchal order. In his analysis of male identity in film noir, Frank Krutnik observes that the narratives of classic film noir are typically structured by a ‘testing of the hero’s prowess – not merely testing his ability as a detective, but also how he measures up to more extensive standards of masculine competence’ (1991: 86). By solving the crime and thus asserting mastery and control, the noir protagonist rehearses his ‘tough’ masculine identity. In some cases his toughness is measured by the amount of physical punishment he can take, as in the case of Ned Beaumont, who at one points brags to Paul, ‘I can stand anything I’ve got to stand’ (1999: 593). This kind of toughness is a trait that Tom Reagan shares with Hammett’s male protagonists, for like Ned, Tom’s prowess is measured by the number and severity of the beatings he can survive. During the course of the story, Tom endures enormous physical abuse. He is beaten by mob goons for refusing Caspar’s offer to take sides against Leo. After he has confessed his affair with Verna, Leo gives Tom ‘the kiss-off’ with his fists, which Tom accepts without protest, refusing to fight back. In fact, each time he is beaten, Tom accepts his punishment with stoic passivity. When the bookmaker Lazarre presses Tom to pay off his gambling debt, Tom tells him to send his muscle over to break his legs, saying ‘I won’t squawk’. Later, when Lazarre’s enforcers show up to collect their pound of flesh, Tom accepts his punishment with cavalier nonchalance, asking the collectors to tell Lazarre that there are ‘no hard feelings’. For Tom, suffering physical abuse is part of doing business in the underworld. In this scene and many others, Tom’s masochistic passivity recalls Ned Beaumont’s motto: ‘Might as well take your punishment and get it over with’ (1999: 593).
‘The Hat Trick’
When French interviewer Jean-Pierre Coursodon suggested that the hat image in Miller’s Crossing is more than a costume accessory and asked about its significance, Joel answered, ‘Everybody asks us questions about that hat, and there isn’t any answer really. It’s not a symbol, it doesn’t have any particular meaning. […] It’s an image that came to us, that we liked, and it just implanted itself. It’s a kind of practical guiding thread, but there’s no need to look for deep meanings’ (Allen 2006: 44). Typically, the Coens shy away from questions concerning the meaning of their films, for reasons Joel makes clear in the same interview with Coursodon: ‘Apparently nobody wants to be satisfied with the movie, as if they absolutely need explanations beyond the images, the story itself. That always surprises me. But if you don’t comply, journalists get the impression that you’re hiding something from them’ (Allen 2006: 43). Nevertheless, if the hat is indeed just an image that came to the Coens and ignited their creative imagination, it seems certain that it came to them by way of Hammett’s The Glass Key, where the hat is a prominent iconic motif, but also serves an important narrative function. When Ned Beaumont says, ‘I’m only an amateur detective, but [the hat] looks like a thing that might have some meaning, one way or the other’ (1999: 606), he verifies the hat’s meaning as a clue which will eventually help him solve the riddle of Taylor Henry’s homicide.
The Glass Key begins with Ned’s discovery of Taylor’s dead body, which, as Ned duly notes, is hatless. As the story approaches its conclusion, Ned resurrects this fact and uses it to contradict Madvig’s false confession to Taylor’s murder, forcing Madvig to admit he has lied to protect the senator and win the affection of the senator’s daughter. Hammett focuses particular attention on the hat image in an early chapter entitled ‘The Hat-Trick’, where Ned uses Taylor’s missing hat as a ruse for collecting his winnings from Bernie Despain, a bookie who has skipped town owing Ned a considerable debt. After acquiring one of Taylor Henry’s hats from his sister, Ned tracks down Bernie and, ‘wearing a hat that does not fit him’, Ned visits the bookie and plants Taylor’s hat in his rented room. Later he extorts his winnings from the bookie by threatening to lead the police back to Bernie’s room, where they will discover Taylor’s hat and, based on that material evidence plus the fact that Taylor owed him money, arrest Bernie for murder.
Generally speaking, hats and masculine apparel receive inordinate attention in The Glass Key. In accordance with the fashion of that period, all male characters wear hats, but the particular emphasis Hammett puts men’s headwear hints at a significance that goes beyond mere fashion. Hats and overcoats are mentioned at the beginning and end of nearly every scene in The Glass Key. When characters enter and exit interior spaces they almost invariably put on or remove hat and overcoat. In a dialogue-heavy novel like The Glass Key, otherwise notably lacking in descriptive details, the focus on hats invites hermeneutic curiosity. The persistent presence of the hat in The Glass Key is not lost on the Coens, who reproduce this iconic leitmotif in Miller’s Crossing with the same attention accorded to it by the novelist, but for different purposes.
Despite its frequent appearances in The Glass Key, the hat image seems to lack discernible symbolic significance. This is how the Coens would have us view the hat in Miller’s Crossing. But the film text contradicts its writers, providing abundant evidence that the hat’s range of signification is greatly expanded in Miller’s Crossing. The film’s first image, a black fedora falling to the ground and being swept away by the wind, is auspicious and arouses suspicion. As the story develops, this recurring image assumes an important function in the shaping of character identity. Primarily, hats function in the male-dominated criminal underworld of Miller’s Crossing as signifiers for masculinity. All male characters wear hats, and most of them consistently wear the same type of hat marking their individual and social identity. In an earlier era, a gentleman of the privileged upper class would have worn a ‘high hat’, fashion signifier for wealth and superior social standing. That is roughly its connotation in Miller’s Crossing, when Johnny Caspar tells Leo he’s sick of getting ‘the high hat’ or looked upon as inferior and lower in the hierarchy of power. When Caspar angrily announces to Leo and Tom, ‘Youse fancy-pants, all of yas’, he is making more than a fashion statement, in effect saying that the expensive clothing they take pride in wearing represents an attitude of superiority that does not intimidate him. A change of hat style signals a shift in social identity. In the final scene, for example, Leo is seen wearing the Jewish yarmulke at Bernie’s burial, a sign that he intends to marry Verna, a Jew, thus surrendering his Irish-Catholic identity and assuming that of his wife-to-be, who, as Leo sheepishly admits, was the one who proposed marriage. Bernie’s duplicitous nature is evident in his ever-changing hat fashions. In his first appearance on screen he wears a bowler, which, along with his flashy suit of clothes, presents a dandified image conveying the self-confidence he enjoys at that point in the story, when he can still assume that he is under Leo’s protection. Later, after Tom frees him at Miller’s Crossing and he goes into hiding, Bernie shows up wearing the nondescript clothes of a working-class nobody. Clearly, his shifting fashion styles are correlated with his shifty personality. As Caspar is at pains to show Leo, Bernie has no ethics. He will do what circumstances dictate and play whatever hand he is dealt.
When characters lose their hats in Miller’s Crossing, they are usually in mortal danger. Bernie is bare-headed when seized at the Hotel Royale and taken to the forest for execution. The significance of a hatless pate is introduced in The Glass Key with the death of Taylor Henry, whose bare-headedness when found dead is a key to the mystery of his murder. The mystery of ‘Rug’ Daniels’ stolen wig goes unsolved, serving only as an opportunity for an irreverent in-joke on Taylor’s bald-headed death. Men without hats are likely to suffer a lapse in rational thinking. Leo and Caspar are seen bare-headed in their first encounter, as they argue heatedly over Bernie’s fate, allowing emotions rather than intellect to determine their decisions. Significantly, as the opening scene comes to an end and Tom tells Leo he ought to start thinking about the pros and cons of protecting Bernie, he punctuates his admonition by donning his hat and pointedly adjusting its brim to the proper angle. As characters ruled by their hearts rather than their heads, Leo and Caspar are seen most often without their hats. Tom Reagan is almost never without his hat, an elegant black fedora he wears with stylish panache. On those occasions when he does lose it momentarily, he is anxious to retrieve it. After a night of drinking and gambling, he wakes up to find his hat missing; he has lost it in a card game, to Mink or Verna; he doesn’t remember. He visits Verna, demanding its return. Here, chasing his hat equates to chasing Verna, an action which will subsequently make him seem a fool when Leo shows up asking about Verna, who listens next door from Tom’s bedroom. Later, when Tom accuses Verna of ‘Rug’ Daniels’ murder (because he was tailing her and thus knew she was cheating on Leo with Tom), the scene ends with Verna removing Tom’s hat and tossing it onto a chair as they fall into an erotic embrace.
The dream about his hat that Tom relates to Verna promises symbolic significance. Verna guesses that he chased the hat, and when he caught it, it turned into ‘something wonderful’. Tom corrects: he didn’t chase the hat and it stayed a hat. His only comment is a condemnation: ‘There’s nothing more foolish than a man chasing after his hat.’
Still, Tom spends a lot of time chasing his hat. Every time Tom takes a beating (which is often), he is separated from his headwear. When, for instance, Tom is about to be beaten by the apish Frankie, he is hatless, but still manages to fend off the assault momentarily, only angering Tic-Tac, who retaliates swiftly. In a memorable moment that mixes comedy and drama, the smaller man avenges his gorilla-sized partner, storming into the room and tossing his hat aggressively in the air, as if to say that his anger has relieved him of all rational self-control. Tom loses his hat (and nearly his head) after confessing his affair with Verna to Leo, who gives Tom the ‘kiss-off’ in the form of a merciless beating, to which Tom passively submits. Each time Leo delivers a vicious body blow, Tom loses his fedora, and each time he bends to pick it up again. Finally Leo brings the one-sided brawl to its conclusion by thrusting Tom’s hat into his stomach (a gesture that recalls a similar incident in The Glass Key).
When characters die in Miller’s Crossing they are invariably hatless. Eddie Dane loses his hat as he is beaten to death by Caspar for his betrayal. Caspar loses it when ambushed and murdered by Bernie. Bernie, in turn, loses his hat when cruelly dispatched by Tom. In each of these scenes the camera is positioned at floor-level to show a hat lying next to a bare-headed corpse. When the Dane escorts Tom to Miller’s Crossing to verify Bernie’s execution, he removes Tom’s hat just before the gunman takes aim at his head. Significantly, this scene reconnects the viewer with the film’s opening credits sequence which introduces the hat – a black fedora identical to Tom’s – that will become the central image of the story. In this enigmatic establishing shot, a languid low-angle tracking shot, looking upward to the sky through a network of tree branches, ends with a close-up of a black fedora hat falling into the foreground, where it is wafted away on a breeze into an autumnal forest. This is the hat and the scenery of Tom’s dream, as told to Verna: ‘I was walking in the woods. I don’t know why. Wind came whipping. Blew me hat off.’ Although Tom’s dream may not be, as he insists, meaningful to him, it is nevertheless the portent of an event yet to come. The dream becomes reality at Miller’s Crossing, as Tom is about to be executed by the Dane.
Visionary rather than symbolic, the dream and its central image do not sustain a psychoanalytic reading as a product of the dreamer’s unconscious which, according to Freudian dream analysis, produces dreams as coded expressions of repressed conflicts and desires. Tom’s dismissive reading of the hat dream and the later revelation of its premonitory function essentially foreclose a Freudian reading. Erica Rowell sees the hat as a symbol of ‘the indeterminate’, like Tom’s unknowable inner thoughts and desires: ‘We cannot know for sure what’s going on in that furtive place underneath his hat’ (2007: 75). Losing the hat, as Tom frequently does, precipitates a descent into irrational dream states alluded to by Bernie at Miller’s Crossing as he pleads with Tom that ‘it is a dream’. ‘The hat and its symbolism,’ writes Rowell, ‘point to a dichotomy between the known, represented by the city, and the unknown, symbolized by the woods,’ marking the ‘boundary between real and surreal, truth and lies, order and disorder, masculinity and femininity – in other words, the threshold of the “other”’ (ibid.). Tom’s hat is as a ‘cover-up’ literally and metaphorically, and ‘all signs point to the implicit wild card of love as the unrevealed secret, the thing that Tom keeps under his hat’ (2007: 78).
‘The Kiss-Off’
The conclusion of The Glass Key stages a final meeting of Ned Beaumont and Paul Madvig. Like Leo in Miller’s Crossing, Paul has given Ned ‘the kiss-off’ because they disagreed about Paul’s commitment to Senator Henry, motivated by his affection for the senator’s daughter, Janet Henry. In the final scene of the novel Paul, like Leo, tries to defuse their antagonism and make peace. Ned has solved the murder mystery that drives the novel’s plot and in doing so, he has won the affection of the woman Paul had hoped to marry. Ending the novel with an uncharacteristic outcome, Hammett allows Ned to emerge as a triumphant romantic hero who solves the mystery and gets the girl – something that otherwise never happens to Hammett’s tough-guy loners. As Ned and Janet Henry are making preparations to leave town, Paul appears at Ned’s apartment, surprised to see them together. Seeking reconciliation, Paul tells Ned, ‘I’d like to think that whether you went or stayed you weren’t holding anything against me, Ned.’ Ned assures him that he harbours no resentment, then, in an act of unexpected desperation, Paul implores Ned: ‘Don’t go, Ned. Stick it out with me. Christ knows I need you now. Even if I didn’t – I’ll do my damndest to make up for all that.’ Ned assures him that he hasn’t got anything ‘to make up for’, but insists that his decision to leave is final. At that point Janet enters the room and Ned announces that she is going with him. Paul, practically speechless, mumbles something unintelligibly, and exits, leaving the door open behind him. The final lines of the novel read: ‘Janet Henry looked at Ned Beaumont. He stared fixedly at the door’ (1999: 777).
The Coens reconfigure this parting of ways in the final scene of Miller’s Crossing, where the men’s roles are reversed: Leo and Verna are to be married and Tom has been dealt out of the romantic triangle. Like Ned Beaumont, Tom has resolved the conflicts that threatened to topple his boss from power; but unlike Ned, Tom does not win the woman’s affection, although throughout the narrative it has seemed clear that Verna favoured Tom and was exploiting Leo’s affections as a ‘grift’ to protect Bernie. In all other respects, however, the movie mirrors the novel, where Paul first asks for forgiveness, then implores Ned to stay. The Coens alter little of this exchange. Leo acknowledges Tom’s loyalty and expresses gratitude, saying ‘It was a smart play all around.’ And, like Paul, Leo offers a heartfelt plea for reconciliation: ‘Jesus, Tom, I’d do anything if you’d work for me again.’ Then, in words that ring with the sentiments of lovers rather than friendly business associates, Leo begs Tom: ‘I need you. Things can be the way they were.’ Now it is Tom’s turn to give Leo ‘the kiss-off’. When Leo forgives Tom for his indiscretions with Verna, Tom’s response is cold: ‘I didn’t ask for that and I don’t want it.’ Tom utters a final ‘Good-bye.’ As the two men stare at each other, the distance between them seems unbridgeable. Like Paul Madvig, Leo is speechless; he turns and walks away. As Tom watches him leave, the camera captures a highly stylised gesture: Tom pulls the brim of his hat down over his face then slowly raises his head to reveal his eyes and, translating the final words of The Glass Key into cinematic imagery, Tom stares ‘fixedly’ at Leo’s departing figure, the close-up of his face capturing the intensity of a gaze that wordlessly voices his emotional desolation.
Where the Coens’ rewriting of Hammett gradually becomes apparent is in their subtle excavation of the novel’s homoerotic subtext, as the revisionists search for the key to unlock the enigma at the heart of The Glass Key. Their investigation into this mystery is guided by clues which the novelist disguises by a clever use of misdirection and displacement, projecting the repressed homoeroticism of his principal characters onto secondary characters. In The Glass Key, Ned Beaumont’s disavowed homosexuality is projected onto Jeff Gardner, a brutish thug who takes perverse delight in beating Ned. Ned endures numerous assaults in the course of the story, but none as vicious as the beating he takes in the chapter entitled ‘The Dog House’, where Ned is held hostage by bootlegger Shad O’Rory who, like Johnny Caspar, uses primitive methods to coerce the protagonist to betray his loyalty. Thus, to persuade Ned that he should sell out Madvig and cross over to him, O’Rory subjects Ned to a series of torturous beatings, dealt out by his sadistic enforcer, Jeff. Ned tries repeatedly to escape, and each time he is subdued by Jeff, who attacks him so savagely that his partner finally shouts, ‘Jesus, Jeff, you’ll croak him.’ To which Jeff replies: ‘He’s tough. He’s a tough baby. He likes this.’ Then, holding Ned on his knee like a child (or a frail), Jeff asks him: ‘Don’t you like it, baby?’ (1999: 665–666). The pleasure Jeff so obviously derives from dealing these repeated ‘body blows’ signals an ulterior motive for his violence as a sublimation of repressed (or just unspoken) sexual desire. Pushing the perversity of these assaults to the limit, Hammett veers close to exposing the homoerotic subtext with almost pornographic explicitness. At one point, Jeff pushes Ned down on a bed and says ‘I got something to try’, whereupon he scoops up Ned’s legs and tumbles them onto the bed, after which, as Hammett suggestively words it, ‘he leaned over Ned Beaumont, his hands busy on Ned Beaumont’s body. Ned Beaumont’s body and arms and legs jerked convulsively and three times he groaned. After that he lay still’ (1999: 667).
Tom watches Leo’s departure.
Hammett gives equal time to Ned’s masochistic tendencies, which are brought out in fairly explicit terms, as when Jeff says of Ned: ‘I never seen a guy that liked being hit so much’ (1999: 668). Unable to resist teasing, Jeff says to his partner: ‘You see, he likes it. He’s a God-damned massacrist.’ Leering at Ned, Jeff then asks, ‘You know what a massacrist is?’ Ned answers simply, ‘Yes’ (1999: 751). In Miller’s Crossing, Jeff Gardner’s sexualised sadism is transferred to Eddie Dane, Caspar’s menacing enforcer, who, like his model in The Glass Key, recognizes his victim’s latent masochism and mockingly calls attention to it, labeling Tom ‘little Miss Punching Bag’. In a climactic scene late in the movie, as the Dane is about to strangle Tom to death, he makes his sadistic intentions explicit, telling Tom, ‘I’m gonna send you to a deep, dark place, and I’m gonna have fun doing it.’ Taking their cue from Hammett, the Coens recreate the apish Jeff in Eddie Dane, the sadistic complement to Tom’s passive masochism. Interestingly, Tom and the Dane are both cast in the role of trusted advisors to their respective bosses. They are both men ‘who walk behind the man and whisper in his ear’, a wording that insinuates an intimacy exceeding mere confidentiality. Even though he outwardly expresses deep mistrust and dislike for Tom, the Dane has a grudging respect for him, articulated in their sarcastic verbal back-and-forth. When Tom, for instance, asks the Dane, snidely: ‘Is there a point? Or are you just brushing up on your small talk?’ the Dane replies, ‘I like that. Cool under fire. I’m impressed.’ The Dane takes pleasure in their verbal intercourse, sensing perhaps an affinity with Tom, a connection that goes beyond their shared identity as right-hand men. More than anyone, the Dane seems to understand Tom, who is to all others an enigma. He expresses his insight clearly in a speech delivered en route to the Miller’s Crossing to check for Bernie’s corpse:
You’re so goddamn smart. Except you ain’t. I get you, smart guy, I know what you are. Straight as a corkscrew. Mr. Inside-Outsky. Down is up. Black is white. Well, I think you’re half-smart. I think you were straight with your frail and queer with Johnny Caspar. And I think you’d sooner join the Ladies’ League than gun a guy down.
The Dane knows ‘what’ Tom is. He figures him for a guy who will sometimes play ‘straight’ but also ‘queer’ a deal and cross over from one side to the other, suggesting that Tom has no genuine loyalties or moral commitments. More to the point, the Dane insinuates with telling rhetoric that Tom ‘goes both ways’, playing it ‘straight’ with his frail, but also playing it ‘queer’ with Caspar, using terms that can be construed either as Hammett-like gangster talk or as sexually-charged innuendo. His crack that Tom is more at home in ‘the Ladies League’ than in the hyper-masculine underworld of gangsters punctuates the Dane’s insinuation. Leo seems also to sense Tom’s duplicity when he says, ‘Goddamn kid is just like a twist’, slang for female, but with hidden connotations brought out in the Dane’s ‘corkscrew’ metaphor. In the scene immediately following Leo’s ‘twist’ reference, Tom tells the bartender, ‘Gimme a stiff one.’ The barman quips, ‘No small talk, huh?’ Innocent enough, perhaps, in another context, but here such an exchange invites speculation.
Miller’s Crossing not only works subtly to uncover the psycho-sexual dynamics of the conflicted male friendship at the centre of The Glass Key but also expands the novelist’s treatment of homoeroticism to create a larger, more visible network of homosexual men, suggesting that the gangster underworld is a homo-social hideout from the sexual prohibitions of straight society. Thus, along with the friendship of Tom and Leo, there is another set of interconnected ‘friendships’ involving Bernie, Mink and Eddie Dane, which adds a homosexual romantic triangle to the heterosexual triangle of Tom/Verna/Leo. Of these characters, Bernie is most openly identified as gay. The suspicion that he is homosexual is implicit in Caspar’s nickname for him, ‘The Shmatte Kid’. In Yiddish, shmatte means rags or shabby clothing, but in this context a ‘lowlife’ or degenerate, thus establishing a link between clothing fashion and sexual identity that is reiterated and developed in other parts of the story. Bernie’s sexual preference is also implicit in Verna’s defense of her brother: ‘Yeah, sneer at him like everyone else. Just because he’s different. People think he’s degenerate. People think he’s scum. Well, he’s not.’ Bernie himself comes close to admitting his sexual preference when he tells Tom that Verna once tried to seduce him, implying that it was an attempt to convert him to heterosexuality. ‘She’ll sleep with anyone, you know that,’ Bernie tells Tom. ‘She even tried to teach me a thing or two about bed-artistry. Can you believe that? My own sister. Some crackpot idea about “saving me from my friends”.’ Bernie’s ‘amigos’ – Mink and Eddie Dane – are more discretely suggested to be lovers. Caspar is the only main male character portrayed as unequivocally heterosexual. With a wife and child, Caspar is a strong believer in the traditional family. He is aware of his associates’ preferences, but appears to be tolerant. When Tom tries to persuade him that Mink and the Dane have been cooperating with Bernie to ‘queer’ the fixed boxing matches, Caspar says: ‘I know Mink is Eddie Dane’s boy, but still, I don’t make it like that.’ Caspar believes the Dane wouldn’t cross him, saying ‘We go back.’ Nevertheless, as Tom reminds Caspar, there is always a ‘wild card’ when love is involved.
‘Running Wild’
Among the many clues pointing to homoeroticism in Miller’s Crossing, one of the most revealing (but still well concealed) is planted, significantly, in the ladies’ room at the Shenandoah Club. Seeking out Verna, to discuss her relationship with Leo, Tom enters the women’s lounge with the odd announcement, ‘Close your eyes, ladies, I’m coming through’ (as though he, rather than the ladies, might have something to hide). As he enters, we catch a momentary glimpse of Leo dressed in drag as a maid. Reinforcing the visual cue, the soundtrack plays the song ‘Running Wild’ which was Marilyn Monroe’s first musical number in Billy Wilder’s cross-dressing gangster comedy Some Like it Hot (1959). Accompanied by the song, this brief shot exposes Leo’s psycho-sexual duality, suggesting that he occasionally likes to ‘run wild’, a metaphor linked with the animal motifs that also run wild in Miller’s Crossing. Character names are identified with animals: Leo (the lion), Eddie (the great) Dane, Bernie (referred to by Tom as ‘Saint Bernard’), and, of course, Mink. Significantly, these characters are all active in the hidden socio-homo community, thus their relationships are also described in animal metaphors: Bernie and Mink are said to be ‘cozy as lice’ and ‘jungled up together’. Other characters are linked to animals by analogy, as when Leo says of Johnny Caspar, ‘Twist a pig’s ear, watch him squeal.’ In his long opening speech on ethics, Caspar warns that if Bernie’s chiseling is allowed to go unpunished, ‘then you’re right back with anarchy. Right back in the jungle.’ As Caspar goes on to explain, ‘That’s why ethics is important. It’s the grease that makes us get along, what separates us from the animals, beasts of burden, beasts of prey.’ Bernie Bernbaum, however, is ‘a horse of a different colour, ethics-wise’. Later, as Bernie begs for his life, he confesses his chiseling to Tom, saying ‘I couldn’t help it, Tom, it’s in my nature.’ He then beseeches Tom, ‘I can’t die! Out here in the woods! Like a dumb animal!’ Tom rarely resorts to physical violence, even if it means, as it usually does, that he must submit to a terrible beating. Tom is a pure strategist, a thinker who, for the most part, disapproves of violence as a solution to problems. Bernie reminds him of this as he begs for his life, saying ‘Tommy, you can’t do this. You don’t bump guys. You’re not like those animals back there.’ Bernie’s claim that ‘they can’t make us different people than we are’ carries several implications: that Tom and Bernie are not cut out to be gunsels, but also that Bernie (a homosexual) and Tom belong to a ‘different’ breed altogether.
There is much to suggest that the proliferating animal imagery in Miller’s Crossing constitutes another instance of intertextual dialogue with Hammett, whose protagonist in Red Harvest characterises the citizens of ‘Poisonville’ variously as monkeys, pigs and wolves. In The Glass Key, the poison of corruption and criminal violence has spread to all levels threatening to infect the entire social body, which is slipping into the primitive anarchy of the jungle. Hammett was fascinated with the hidden social structures of the criminal underworld, and particularly obsessed with the idea that criminal gangs could take over an entire community or society and operate as a covert government, as seemed to be the case in the 1920s and 1930s. Hammett’s fascination with hidden regimes is preserved in Miller’s Crossing, but instead of offering social commentary on organised crime, the Coens shift the focus to the culture of homosexuality within the criminal underworld, where ‘running wild’ assumes a quite different set of connotations and presents an alternative image of hard-boiled masculinity previously missing in the gangster genre. The ideological critique in Miller’s Crossing is not of the economic politics of capitalism, but about the economy of sexual relations – the hidden politics of homosociality. Usually addressed obliquely in classic gangster movies, if at all, only a few pre-code Hollywood films imply homosexual themes, as in Warner Bros.’ Little Caesar (1932), where it is suggested that the jealous attitude of gangster Rico Bandello toward the girlfriend of his best friend and partner, Tony Massara, signals his repressed homosexual desire. A reference to this gangster classic is perhaps implied with Mink’s surname, LeRouie, which may allude to Mervyn LeRoy, who directed Little Caesar. In any case, the depiction of homosexuality in Miller’s Crossing, however ambiguous, departs from the typical treatment of male homosociality in the gangster genre, where it is generally considered simply another immoral perversion complementing the outlaw’s already criminally transgressive nature. Revising genre, Miller’s Crossing takes the representation of hard-boiled masculinity an important step farther, expanding the scope of Hammett’s social critique to examine themes of male homosexuality that had hitherto been suppressed.
Interestingly, a queer reading of The Glass Key is noticeably absent in the scholarly writings on Hammett. In fact, many commentators consider The Glass Key Hammett’s least successful novel, mostly because the motives of its main character, Ned Beaumont, are never adequately explained. Philip Durham argues that ‘other than for certain loyalties, [Beaumont’s] motions are mechanical and his emotions were not there. What he did, or how, seemed not to matter’ (Thompson 2007: 134). Even George J. Thompson, considered by many the pre-eminent interpreter of Hammett, skirts the issue of homoeroticism, observing that ‘the bleakness of Hammett’s vision is not due to his protagonists’ lack of moral feeling, but instead to the modern social condition, a world in which the protagonists’ great depths of feeling cannot find expression’ (2007: 135; emphasis added). How these ‘great depths of feeling’ might be understood seems to be the question that interests the Coen brothers most. There is abundant textual evidence that Miller’s Crossing achieves more than a skillful simulation of gangster movies, instead exploring the depths of emotion in The Glass Key and bringing to light its unspoken secrets by de-sublimating Hammett’s homoerotic subtext. The fact that they chose to adapt The Glass Key rather than Red Harvest (which has never been adapted for film) indicates the Coens’ sense that something unspoken in the novel should come to expression.
