Miller's Crossing Film Analysis

The Coen brother’s neo-noir film Miller’s Crossing is classified as a film noir based off the style and genre that it is a film that is marked by a mood of pessimism, fatalism, and menace. This film has a lot of dark lighting and people being killed so it sets the movie to have a dark tone. There is a lot of menacing throughout the movie between Tommy, Leo’s gang, Johnny Casper’s gang, Bernie, and of course Verna. This movie neo-noir gangster film with a hint of black comedy especially from Tommy. He really never just took everything with a grain of salt. There were multiple times throughout the movie where he is beat up by different bookies or members of the mafia, and he would have some type of smart comment. In the article notes of Film
Since prohibition, gambling, and gangster mob related issues where made to be on the hush hush it wasn’t the normal that everyone knew especially the police or town officials. In Miller’s Crossing it was like everyone in the town was in on the corruption in one way or another, so it was comical to see the police dealing with both sides of the corruption and you weren’t sure what side they were with at the moment. I felt that Tommy added a lot of black comedy to the whole movie especially when he was in the certain of the corruption. He was constantly getting beat up for having gambling debts or for saying or doing something dumb. Also in this era sex would have been a taboo yet that was one of the root arguments between Leo and Tommy, since Tommy was sleeping with Leo’s girl Verna. I thought that Tom’s hat was a bit of a black comedy throughout the movie. The scene that explains the hat is the conversation between Verna and Tom. When Tom says that he had a dream once that his hat blew off in the wind in the woods. Verna asked if he chased the hat and if it turned into something wonderful. Tom said he would never chase his hat since it would look foolish of a man chasing his hat. However; throughout the movie Tom is always losing his hat. He loses his hat in a gambling game which Verna ends up with the hat and almost every time he losing control of
One difference is that in Red Harvest the town has a name Personsville (Poisionsville) but in Miller’s Crossing the town is never named but it also resembles New York or Chicago. In Miller’s Crossing the characters used slang words or the 1930’s slang.
I wasn’t a big fan of the movie Miller’s Crossing when we watched the film since I found I was extremely confused the whole time, due to I was not sure who was on the same side and who was mad at who and why Tommy got beat up a lot. I am assuming Tommy got beat up a lot because of his gambling problem, being the middle man in the whole rivalry between Casper and Leo, being crooked, and his involvement with Verna and Bernie. Violent or gangster movies are not my style so when you put them together I then get lost and really