20 Things You Didn't Know About Miller's Crossing
The Coen Brothers' most underrated crime drama...
Joel and Ethan Coen are some of the best and most idiosyncratic filmmakers of their generation. When discussing their films, we always remember the iconic ones, like Fargo, No Country for Old Men and The Big Lebowski, but one that remains highly underrated is their 1990 gangster drama, Miller’s Crossing.
Miller’s Crossing is the third film from the Coens, after 1984’s Blood Simple and 1987’s Raising Arizona. It includes an all-star cast, including Gabriel Byrne, Marcia Gay Harden, Albert Finney, John Turturro, Jon Polito and J.E. Freeman.
The film is an attempt to subvert and skewer a particular genre - t=his time being the gangster drama epic genre, in the style of The Godfather. And, like pretty much all of their movies, the film has gained a cult following, and a (albeit, small) legion of fans, and there will definitely be people out there who call it their favourite Coens film.
20. The Script Was Originally Conceived With The Image Of The Black Hat
One of the strangest and most arresting images from Miller's Crossing is the image that opens the film, in which a black hat in the woods drifts through the wind.
The image was in fact the first image that the Coen brothers came up with when developing the script. It was this one strange, mesmeric image that influenced them to write the whole script, and without it, Miller’s Crossing might not exist today.