A while ago, I was talking iconic films with Rosie from Reading The Subject, and the first one she mentioned was Miller's Crossing; it's an early Coen brothers film. Taken together, those two things were enough to get me to watch it, and I'm glad I did. Set in a prohibition era American town controlled by gangsters, it focuses on Gabriel Byrne as Tommy, sad-eyed son-of-a-bitch-as-a-matter-of-pride right hand man to the Irish (of course) boss, whose territory is increasingly being threatened by the eye-talians; cue intrigues, set-ups, gunnings-down, menacing associates, bought police chiefs and public officials, tough-as-nails molls, fixed fights, and all the other cliches of the genre (with some noirish elements creeping in, too).
There are some distinctively Coen touches - the ways in which the grotesque elements of the characters are often highlighted by the angles from which they're filmed, the deadpan violence, and (most notably) the unsentimental yet oddly affecting tone. Another, I suppose, is the way in which we're kept at a bit of a distance from the characters and the story - initially, there's a confusing swirl of names, events and characters (though the basic story is very simple), and the characters all talk in such literate, wise-cracking sentences that one doesn't take them entirely seriously as real people...rather, they're very much 'screen' characters, inhabiting the idea of the gangster film rather than the gangster film itself. Even so, Miller's Crossing has a humanity to it, thanks in part to clever writing and in part to Byrne's sensitive performance, so that we see Tommy as a moral being (albeit with his own highly individual moral code, and with his choices often severely limited by his circumstances) and take him seriously as such through the twists and peregrinations of the plot and his machinations, and despite our limited insight into his underlying motives. (A reading of Tommy and the film which is supported by the film's title and its resultant emphasis on the decision forced upon Tommy when he takes Bernie out to Miller's Crossing to whack him, and the way that falls out at the end of the film, as well as the recurrent imagery of the woods and Tommy's hat.)
