Up is down. Black is white.

Y'know, I think I wrote about the shock I felt when I realized that Renoir's Boudu Rescued From Drowning has the same plot as that awful Down and Out In Beverly Hills movie. It shook me up so much that I had to quit Boudu until I could get over it. When I finally watched it all the way through, the simple pleasure of Boudu felt like the rich, beautiful, humanist tone-poem that I believe it is, not the echo of the shrill celluloid crap-heap of Down and Out.

Anyway, I don't know what this has to do with anything, because Hammett was a genius and Miller's Crossing is a work of genius.

Is Go worth watching? I got it from Netflix, but I've lost interest.

I remember it being a lot of fun -- kind of a teen pop Pulp Fiction. It's got a great soundtrack.

I read The Glass Key knowing that Miller's Crossing was based on it (so it's hardly a secret) and afterwards I still had to see the 1942 movie to understand how one could become the other.

The 1942 version (Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, for those of you without a horse in this race) isn't all that great. The one thing I really enjoyed about it was the raw physicality of Ned in the fight scene. I'm always surprised when black-and-white actors take off their neckties and physical in a really expressive way.

The situation is the same, definitely. The plots are different. The Glass Key is a mystery. When the murder is solved, the story's over. In Miller's Crossing, a murder sets the plot in motion, but it's essentially trivia. Tom eventually finds out whodunnit and why, in a couple of casual conversations, but nobody cares. That's not what the story is about.

I wrote a very long essay about the two at one point, essentially to prove that the trajectory of both film and novel is the lead's changes in station mirroring his changes in emotional life. Which is to say, at the end of The Glass Key, boy and girl rip up their previous lives and skip town together, frightened and heartsick and determined to be acontextual; in Miller's Crossing, boy and girl could have done the same, and don't. I always thought that Hammett's story was the one that made me wonder what happened after; the Coens' version is quite a bit more cynical, and final.

When you look strictly at "what plot events drive the action?" then they are very different films. (For one thing, they take place in different cities. And for all Hammett was writing contemporaneous fiction and the Coens are creating a period, the film has so much more real-world context.) But when you look at the emotional throughline of the lead and his best friend, they are identical. When you look at specific scenes and events, they have a very large number of striking similarities. Even the death-symbolism of the titles: the glass key to the door that keeps out the snakes shatters in Ned's hand, and the snakes come in and eat them up; the hat swirls through the titular execution ground, and Tom has too much dignity to chase it.

(I use "plagiarism" in this case with some affection, because Miller's Crossing is quite a good movie, but, I think it's an even better movie when you know its source materials. I for one was never informed of the literary antecedents of the film, and I think the filmmakers would come across better if they openly stated their intent to homage.)

I remember it being a lot of fun -- kind of a teen pop Pulp Fiction. It's got a great soundtrack.

That sounds okay, maybe I'll give it a try tonight (I hate sending things back without watching them). It's so hard with netflix sometimes, because what you're in the mood for on Friday, won't be what you want to see on Tuesday.

Y'know, I just re-read 3 Hammett novels about two weeks ago, including The Maltese Falcon. I'd read 'em before seeing Miller's Crossing, back in the early 90s, and when I hit on "what's the rumpus?" in The Maltese Falcon, I almost jumped out of my bed and began machine gunning would-be assassins to the tune of Danny Boy - that's how surprised I was.

So they're plagiarizing an emotional throughline, but not in a bad way?

I still think we're defining most of the key words differently. I don't think Miller's Crossing is an homage, for that matter, which is probably another example of the problem.

As I said, the Coens almost always play off (or rip off, if you prefer) old movies and books and, well, epic poems. They did give Homer a credit, but I think the only other time they mentioned specific sources within a movie was when they said Fargo was based on a true story. Which was a lie. I think explicitly identifying everything they use would make their movies significantly less fun. For me, anyway.

So they're plagiarizing an emotional throughline, but not in a bad way?

I don't think it's plagiarizing to steal a storyline. You have to steal the actual words.

If stealing a storyline is plagiarism, then Shakespeare is in BIG trouble.