• The ending of Miller’s Crossing makes even clearer reference to the immaculate final scene of The Third Man: a funeral, a protagonist abandoned by his car, who watches as the last person he cares for in the world walks away down a dirt road hemmed by trees. (Yes, the love interest and best friend roles are inverted here, but you get the point.) And while it may be more of a stretch, I’ve always heard echoes of All the King’s Men throughout the film as well, with Tom standing in for Jack Burden, Leo for Willie Stark, and Verna (Marcia Gay Harden) for Anne Stanton. And despite the different roles the locales play, “Miller’s Crossing” sure seems to evoke “Burden’s Landing.” Did I give this too much thought in my early twenties? Yes, I did.

• Of course, plenty of films that abound with clever references nonetheless make for lousy cinema. But Miller’s Crossing is an aesthetic pleasure of the highest order on nearly every level. Begin with its almost intolerably sumptuous cinematography, with reds and greens so deep one is in danger of falling into them. This was the last film that Barry Sonnenfeld shot for the Coens—and one for which he persuaded them to use long lenses instead of the wide-angle variety they had favored—and no one involved has mustered a better-looking work since. The production design by Dennis Gassner is comparably extraordinary: the long, long oak rooms with their endless oriental rugs and all the furniture seemingly tucked into one corner.

• And did I mention the score? It is not only the best work Carter Burwell has done for the Coens (or anyone else), it set a model that he would later follow for his almost-as-good scores for Fargo and True Grit: taking a traditional piece of music with some culturally relevant connection and using it as the central motif of the broader arrangement. In this case, it was the Irish ballad “Limerick’s Lamentation.” (It’s usually played on a fiddle, I think, but here’s an interesting version on a hammered dulcimer.) Burwell’s score has lived on since: It was used for the trailer of the (astonishingly bad) Melanie Griffith vehicle Shining Through as well as that of at least one other 1990s movie I can’t quite recall at the moment. [Update: It came to me after publication that the trailer I was thinking of was for the 1995 movie Powder. In addition, I was reminded that the score was used in the trailer for The Shawshank Redemption(!) in 1994.] It also served, as I recently discovered, in an ad for Caffrey’s Irish Ale. It is one of the truly great film scores of the last 30 years.

• Befitting its Hammettian roots, the plot of Miller's Crossing is fairly convoluted, a fact that is made all the more noticeable by the extraordinary informational density of the dialogue. Characters are discussed before they’re introduced, unfamiliar slang (e.g., “twist” for woman) peppers the chatter, and the plot rarely slows down long enough to be usefully untangled. One exchange, following the attempt on Leo’s life, is so abbreviated that it’s almost as if the characters are speaking in code:

Tom: Who's winning?

Terry: We are, for the nonce.

Tom: What's the disposition?

Terry: Four to one. Dana Cudahy went up with the house.

Tom: And theirs?

Terry: One burned...

Tom: The other three...?

Terry: Lead...

Tom: Whose?

Terry: Leo's... the old man's still an artist with a Thompson.

One could make the case that this willful complicatedness is a flaw. (It is certainly true that Miller’s Crossing benefits from a second—or probably 22nd—viewing.) But it is of a piece with the rest of the movie, which plays less like a classic gangster film than like a 99 percent pure, Heisenberg-quality, blue-crystal distillation of all the tropes and themes and moods of the classic gangster film. It is an intoxicating achievement in cinematic chemistry.