Miller's Crossing, True Grit, and Anthony Head

revisiting a few favorites

The heroes of bloody tales should be flawed heroes, a premise understood perfectly by Dashiell Hammett, who more or less invented the character of the “go-between” — someone comfortable working for the cops or the crooks — in the late 1920s. The go-between in Red Harvest is the Continental Op; in The Maltese Falcon it is Sam Spade; in The Glass Key it is Ned Beaumont.

Hammett wrote The Maltese Falcon as a potential screenplay and the result was the famous adaptation with Humphrey Bogart. There is a film version of The Glass Key with Alan Ladd but it does not honor Hammett’s complexity. Strangely, Red Harvest has never been adapted…

…However, Miller’s Crossing (1990) from the Coen Brothers is a fairly explicit homage to The Glass Key and Red Harvest. Gabriel Byrne plays the ultimate go-between, Tom Reagan, who barely seems to know whose side he is really on. (“Do you always know why you do things?” Reagan asks at one point.) During the latest rewatch last week I marveled at Albert Finney, who portrays gangster Leo O'Bannon. Finney is a hell of an actor: O’Bannon’s face holds no guile. Every emotion is transparent.

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The plot of Miller’s Crossing is exceptional, but even more important than the story is the style. The film is a mood, it is an idiom, it is a singular object.

In writing we call this “voice.” Charles Portis pulled off a rare coup with True Grit (1968), a Western with a voice that is surely all its own. (Miller’s Crossing is a gangster movie unlike any other gangster movie, True Grit is a Western novel unlike any other Western novel.) The narrator is an old woman recounting her great act of revenge when she was 14. It is easy to forget that this is a flashback until Mattie Ross offers one of many sanctimonious asides. The effect can be darkly humorous, as in a few paragraphs describing an actual historical figure, Isaac Parker, the “Hanging Judge.”

I have since learned that Judge Isaac Parker watched all his hangings from an upper window in the Courthouse. I suppose he did this from a sense of duty. There is no knowing what is in a man’s heart.

(…)

For a long time there was no appeal from his court except to the President of the United States. They later changed that and when the Supreme Court started reversing him, Judge Parker was annoyed. He said those people up in Washington city did not understand the bloody conditions in the Territory. He called Solicitor-General Whitney, who was supposed to be on the judge’s side, a “pardon broker” and said he knew no more of criminal law than he did of the hieroglyphics of the Great Pyramid. Well, for their part, those people up there said the judge was too hard and high-handed and too longwinded in his jury charges and they called his court “the Parker slaughterhouse.” I don’t know who was right. I know sixty-five of his marshals got killed. They had some mighty tough folks to deal with.

The judge was a tall big man with blue eyes and a brown billy-goat beard and he seemed to me to be old, though he was only around forty years of age at that time. His manner was grave. On his deathbed he asked for a priest and became a Catholic. That was his wife’s religion. It was his own business and none of mine. If you had sentenced one hundred and sixty men to death and seen around eighty of them swing, then maybe at the last minute you would feel the need of some stronger medicine than the Methodists could make.

Portis is one of my favorites, and True Grit is his most conventional book. What a joy to re-read this timeless classic. While we love Mattie Ross, she is not perfect, and the hooligans she ties in with to get the job done are far worse.

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In just over a year, three actors who starred in Buffy the Vampire Slayer have all passed away: Michelle Trachtenberg, Nicholas Brendon, and now Anthony Head, who played Buffy’s watcher, Rupert Giles, called “Giles” by almost everyone else in the show. Giles’s day job was high-school librarian, and I identified strongly with Giles’s “bookish” qualities. (After all, who is the Rupert Giles of jazz if not myself?)

Neither Giles nor Buffy were “flawed heroes,” at least when compared with those that populate Miller’s Crossing or True Grit. However, the showrunner, Joss Whedon, specialized in epic and uncomfortable reversals that cost the players dearly.

Monia Ali wrote a fascinating essay on Whedon’s relationship with fan expectation.

Writers—including Whedon himself—would frequent the boards to take the temperature of fans’ opinions and receive their criticism and praise. This did influence the show, but not in the way one might expect. Writer Jane Espenson said reading what the fans said, “did affect the show sometimes; if we saw that a lot of people had guessed where we were headed, we could change it.”

In present day, executives paying attention to fandom often leads to them bending to their wishes, so it makes sense that you would expect this crew to operate the same way. But that’s not how Whedon operated. In a way, he engaged in reverse fan service, intentionally delivering pain and heartbreak, and was frequently referred to as evil by his fans.

Many of my readers would know Anthony Head not from Buffy but from the more recent hit Ted Lasso (where, in an amusing nod to tradition, his first name was again Rupert). Ted Lasso was great for a season, but then every character became good or understandable. There were no antagonists! Apparently the showrunners started making Lasso while listening to the fans who loved every character — which is no way to go about making a lasting piece of art.

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The ending to season two “Lie to Me” (1997), written by Joss Whedon, has a particularly good moment for Anthony Head to deliver a tiny soliloquy.

BUFFY: Lie to me.

GILES: Yes, it’s terribly simple. The good guys are always stalwart and true. The bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats. And, uh, we always defeat them and save the day. No one ever dies and everybody lives happily ever after.

BUFFY: Liar.