Abstract
The Coen brothers’ Miller’s Crossing (1990) builds on prior Dashiell Hammett texts, especially his novel The Glass Key, to produce a work that, while less affectively powerful than a hard-boiled detective thriller or gangster film, offers intellectual and aesthetic pleasures at least as rewarding. Hammett’s novel sets out a story of the political fixer as detective in a context of the Tammany Hall style government of cities overwhelmed by immigrant populations following the industrial revolution. From the perspective of a half century later, the Coens pastiche Hammett’s world and reverse Hollywood’s repression in two early adaptations, foregrounding ethnic and sexual conflict, as well as introducing Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) as an additional lens through which to judge their allegory of gangsters and assimilation.
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Notes
- 1.
Jameson , 20. Discussing the relationship of Body Heat with Double Indemnity (1944).
- 2.
Internet Movie Data Base.
- 3.
Palmer, 6.
- 4.
Ibid., 160–161.
- 5.
Interview, The Big Lebowski DVD, Universal Home Entertainment, 1998.
- 6.
Smith’s career began in the streets of New York City’s Irish Fourth Ward, and even when he was Governor of New York the buzzwords “Tammany Hall” and “gang rule” linked him to the teeming immigrant city, a refrain taken up again by adversaries during his run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1924 and when he became his party’s candidate against Herbert Hoover in 1928. Thus, the novel becomes a tale of ethnicity and immigration. In showing the competing forces that Beaumont must navigate, Hammett constructs an allegory of successive waves of immigration, each ethnic group competing with those that preceded it.
- 7.
Vivian Sobchack, “Postmodern Modes of Ethnicity.” In Friedman, 329.
- 8.
Ella Shohat, “Ethnicities in Relation: Toward a Multicultural Reading of American Cinema.” In Friedman, 234.
- 9.
Hammett, The Glass Key, 171.
- 10.
For a very different reading of Beaumont’s liaison with Janet, see Sean McCann, Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled American Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000. 122.
- 11.
Letter from B. P. Schulberg to Jason Joy, March 24, 1931. Motion Picture Association of America, Production Code Administration records, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills (hereafter MHL).
- 12.
“Col. Joy’s Resume” of the meeting with Lloyd Sheldon and Bartlett Cormack, March 25. 1931. Motion Picture Association of America, Production Code Administration records, MHL.
- 13.
“By looking over the file,” a 1934 review of the screenplay under Joseph Breen states, “you will see that they have gone a long way themselves to change the picture from the condition which earned Col. Joy’s condemnation three years ago.” Memorandum from Stewart to Dr. Wingate, December 20, 1934. Motion Picture Association of America, Production Code Administration records, MHL.
- 14.
Shohat, 218.
- 15.
Raft’s reputation included real-world underworld connections. Materials in Paramount’s pressbook for The Glass Key not only recommend that Raft’s reputation be at the center of promotions for the film, but that they specifically mention his role in Scarface . (The Glass Key production file, MHL.) Raft’s role here has close parallels with that of Rinaldo as Tony Camonte’s (Paul Muni) sidekick.
- 16.
The violent, antisocial figure of the ethnically identified gangster attracted attacks not only from nativist Protestants, but also from immigrant Catholics and audiences in foreign markets, an important source of film industry revenue (Munby, 105). Stories that dealt with ethnic bigotry were censored wherever raising the issue was seen as “provocative and inflammatory” (Vesey, 137). “Industry policy” led to blurring the ethnicity: “‘Foreignness’ became less clearly associated with particular ethnic and national groups… so that specific interest groups could find fewer grounds for complaint” (Vesey, 101 and 108).
- 17.
Arnold cannot be disentangled from his screen history of playing the rich and/or powerful. A comic version can be seen in Mae West’s I’m No Angel (Wesley Ruggles, 1933) where he plays Big Bill Barton, or his role as a financier in Thirty Day Princess (Marion Gering, 1935). Dramatic embodiments include alcoholic millionaire Jack Brennan in Sadie McKee (Clarence Brown, 1934), the Secretary of War in The President Vanishes (William Wellman, 1934), and, immediately before The Glass Key, King Louis XIII of France in Cardinal Richelieu (Rowland V. Lee, 1935), 26.
- 18.
Winokur, 4.
- 19.
Letter from Joseph Breen to John Hammell of Paramount Studios, May 9, 1935. Motion Picture Association of America, Production Code Administration records, MHL.
- 20.
Hammett, The Glass Key, 91.
- 21.
Ibid., 185–186.
- 22.
128.
- 23.
Veronica Lake was seen as a rising star on the slender basis of two films, most importantly Sullivan’s Travels (Preston Sturges, 1941). But on the set of This Gun for Hire (Tuttle , 1942), in production when The Glass Key was being cast, the chemistry between Lake and Ladd was recognized. Paramount wanted to promote Ladd as romantic lead, so in this version of The Glass Key, Beaumont is represented as a prize catch.
- 24.
This was possible because the PCA, under pressure of an antitrust suit filed, was narrowing the scope of its censorship. As Richard Maltby writes, “The affairs of the late 1930s suggested that mechanisms for the control of content had become too extensive… The censorship of the movies—as opposed to the movie content—was in danger of becoming the issue.” 36.
- 25.
In The Great McGinty, the political boss coded as ethnic is played by the Armenian actor Akim Tamiroff with a vaguely Russian accent. The boss takes a liking to McGinty because he recognizes himself in McGinty’s tough insubordinate way of being. “He thinks he’s me!” the boss proclaims, and in The Glass Key, Donlevy has indeed become the boss, though he is more assimilated than Tamiroff’s portrayal. Released by Paramount on August 23, 1940, The Great McGinty would inevitably have come to mind for studio executives and with regular moviegoers considering The Glass Key.
- 26.
Calleia was well established with audiences as both a gangster and a foreigner. John T. McManus had described him in a review of Tough Guy (Chester M. Franklin, 1936) as “probably our favorite public enemy” (44). Varna in The Glass Key is a direct continuation of Calleia’s role as Italian gangster Eddie Fuseli in Golden Boy (1939).
- 27.
See Vesey. In Munby’s words, “For the gangster to be recognizable as such, he must be specifically demarked as an ‘ethnic’ outsider (which, in this context connoted someone of Irish, Southern or Eastern European, Catholic or Jewish stock)” (43).
- 28.
The PCA made a point of telling Paramount not to present Randolph surrounded by white men (Letter to Luigi Luraschi, February 6, 1942). Motion Picture Association of America, Production Code Administration records, MHL.
- 29.
The Adventures of Sam Spade and The Fat Man radio series were broadcast from 1946 to 1951, the second inspiring a movie, The Fat Man (William Castle, 1951). The Adventures of the Thin Man radio series was broadcast from 1941 to 1950, followed by seventy-two episodes of a television series, The Thin Man , aired from 1957 to 1959, starring Peter Lawford and Phyllis Kirk as Nick and Nora Charles.
- 30.
July 10, 1951.
- 31.
This time he was not imprisoned, but, according to the New York Times obituary eight years later, “Hammett’s novels were plucked from the shelves of seventy-three of the 189 American libraries overseas as a result of State Department confidential directives, based largely on testimony before the McCarthy Committee” (January 11, 1961).
- 32.
See Kessler-Harris, especially 244–249. Hellman credited Hammett for giving her the subject of The Children’s Hour and for mentoring her through the play’s writing. The last section of her best-selling memoir, An Unfinished Woman (1969), was a celebration of Hammett, and the chapter entitled “Julia” from Pentimento (1977) was made into a successful film, directed by Fred Zinnemann and starring Vanessa Redgrave and Jane Fonda; Jason Robards won an Academy Award for his portrayal of Hammett.
- 33.
Pentimento and Hellman herself achieved additional notoriety when the character of Julia was discovered to have been invented rather than remembered.
- 34.
The film goes even further than Gores in using the author’s fiction to animate his biography, citing aspects of Hammett’s Pinkerton apprenticeship while creating scenes that evoke The Glass Key (in which the fictional Hammett’s imprisonment replays Beaumont’s) and The Maltese Falcon (a fat man á la Gutman appears and the fictional Hammett’s hands shake like Bogart’s in the 1941 film). The sense of the film’s memorializing a lost past is underscored by its use of old Hollywood faces: Sylvia Sidney, Samuel Fuller, Hank Worden, and especially Elisha Cook Jr., Gutman’s “gunsel” in The Maltese Falcon who now, forty years later, plays Hammett’s taxi-driving sidekick; referring indirectly to Hammett’s politics, he explains himself as “an anarchist with syndicalist tendencies.”
- 35.
One reviewer wrote that the Coen Brothers were lucky not to have been sued by Hammett’s estate. John Harkness, Sight and Sound (Winter 1990–1991), cited by Horst, 96.
- 36.
Robson, 72.
- 37.
Ibid., 81.
- 38.
New York Times, September 21, 1990.
- 39.
Chicago Sun-Times, October 5, 1990.
- 40.
Village Voice, September 25, 1990.
- 41.
Robson, 68.
- 42.
98.
- 43.
Miller’s Crossing’s final farewell scene, set in a cemetery, for example, transforms a scene from the 1942 film where they gather to bury Janet Henry’s beloved brother and Opal Madvig denies her own brother the opportunity to take her home; in Miller’s Crossing they are burying Verna’s brother, and Verna takes the car, making the men walk home. And the slap that sets off Madvig’s love for Janet in the 1942 film is parodied in Miller’s Crossing when Verna punches Reagan, after which Reagan falls for Verna, losing her to Leo just as in the earlier film Madvig lost Janet to Beaumont. The raid on the Sons of Erin Social Club in Miller’s Crossing echoes Red Harvest , while also showing an awareness of films inspired by Red Harvest , Yojimbo (Akira Kurosawa, 1961), and especially A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone, 1964), by copying the way members of the opposing gang are shot as they emerge from the burning building; in this instance the Coen Brothers emphasize the path that leads from Hammett to their film.
- 44.
120.
- 45.
There are various accounts of how the Irish characters acquired accents, but all agree that Gabriel Byrne—born in Dublin with a mother from Galway, who claimed that he took his cue from the rhythm of the writing—suggested reading Reagan’s part with his Irish accent. “’We were skeptical,’ says Joel, ‘but we said fine, go ahead. He did it and we liked the way it sounded.’” (Robson, 70).
- 46.
An irony that would not be lost on the Coen Brothers is that John Turturro’s family roots are in Sicily and Puglia. Audiences for Miller’s Crossing when it was released in October 1990 would have associated him with the loudly bigoted Italian American Pino in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, which had appeared to great acclaim in June 1989. Miller’s Crossing was filmed the following winter.
- 47.
Robson, 78.
- 48.
Ibid., 70.
- 49.
Ibid., 88.
- 50.
As Eddie Robson writes, “It’s worth considering that there is a possible gay subtext in the dynamic between Tom and Leo, a reading that has become popular with many Coen commentators” (94). This reading centers on the idea that Reagan expresses little passion for Verna and that it is jealousy of Verna’s closeness to Leo that drives Reagan to sleep with her. Rowell looks for evidence of Reagan’s passion for Leo in a dissolve from the blowing curtains at Verna’s place to those in Leo’s bedroom, where he is about to be attacked (84). By pushing a queer reading of the film to its limits, Rowell does us the service of testing conclusions that run the full gamut from the obviously valid to the highly speculative.
- 51.
Hutcheon, 4.
- 52.
Chicago Sun-Times, October 5, 1990.
- 53.
Jameson, Postmodernism, 6, 10.
- 54.
Hutcheon, 11.
- 55.
392.
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Mooney, W.H. (2021). From Dashiell Hammett to the Coen Brothers’ Miller’s Crossing (1990). In: Adaptation and the New Art Film. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62934-2_8
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