FILM183 opens its new Gangster season with Miller’s Crossing which finds Joel and Ethan Coen bringing their distinctive blend of wit, fatalism and immaculate craft to the gangster film. Set in an unnamed American city during Prohibition, it follows Tom Reagan, the laconic adviser to Irish mob boss Leo O’Bannon, as Leo’s feud with rival racketeer Johnny Caspar turns a dispute over a double-crossing bookie into a full-blown gang war. Caught between friendship, strategy and his dangerous attachment to Verna, Leo’s lover, Tom manoeuvres through a world where every alliance is provisional and every favour has a price.
Drawing on the hard-boiled fiction of Dashiell Hammett and the sharp rhythms of 1930s crime cinema, the film both honours and slyly distorts the conventions of the gangster movie. Its shoot-outs, backroom deals and shifting loyalties are staged with operatic elegance, but the Coens are just as interested in bruised pride, wounded codes of honour and the comedy of men who mistake calculation for control. Gabriel Byrne gives Tom a magnificently opaque weariness, while Albert Finney, Marcia Gay Harden, Jon Polito and John Turturro deepen the film’s mix of menace, glamour and desperation. Stylish, intricate and mordantly funny, Miller’s Crossing is a perfect season entry: a gangster classic about loyalty in a world where loyalty may be the most dangerous racket of all.
Next up FILM183 will be showing Orson Well's restored Touch of Evil (1958) on Monday, 26th October 2026.
