"doesn't miller's crossing feel more like the glass key than
anything else?"
Yes, the relationship in Miller's Crossing between Tom Reagan
and Leo O'Bannion closely mirrors the relationship between
Paul Madvig and Ned Beaumont in The Glass Key. And Reagan
takes a good beating in the film the way Madvig does,
famously, in the novel. But clearly the Coens were pulling
from Harvest in presenting Reagan's simple strategy: like the
Continental Op, Reagan uses the divide and conquer method to
break up a gang war.
As for all of this being "unsubstantiated," I should have
mentioned that for ten years I ran the company, Circle Films,
that distributed Blood Simple, and produced the Coen's
Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, and Miller's Crossing. When
Joel Coen and I discussed the issue, he admitted the
connection, but pointed to hip-hop as another modern art
that, like film, processes direct and indirect influences
into a new kind of whole. Sampling beats, though, isn't quite
the same as lifting entire storylines from novels, so I don't
exactly agree that Hammett's non-credit should be so easily
dismissed. But I do understand his position, and his
point.
Finally, I don't mean to imply that I'm being critical of the
film in any way. To me, Miller's Crossing is a classic and
nearly perfect of its kind. Unfortunately, the picture didn't
"do it" at the boxoffice. Fox, in a stroke of genius, decided
to release the film at the same time as Goodfellas, despite
our protests. The public, choosing to see only one gangster
movie that month, flocked to Goodfellas and virtually ignored
the other film.
Pelecanos
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 14 Nov 2000 EST