In analyzing leadership qualities found in The Coen Brothers’ Miller’s Crossing as outlined in Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince, one should take care to explain how the characters in the movie portray, mimic, and sometimes follow exactly what Machiavelli was affirming over 500 years ago. In doing so, it is necessary to discuss the key characters in Miller’s Crossing that personify certain Machiavellian leadership traits by giving specific examples from the movie itself, i.e. actions taken, dialogue given, and/or particular situations that the characters were facing. Second, each description from the movie should be accompanied by a specific inference or quote from The Prince with an explanation of the correlation that exists between the two. Only then can one grasp the full scale of how we, as thinking observers of a retro-era gangster film made in 1990, can see the perceived leadership traits that Machiavelli was defending during his life in Renaissance Italy.
The first Miller’s Crossing character that deserves much scrutiny is Tom Reagan. Though he is not an official leader of position per se, he is respected as a leader of the streets because of his smarts and calculative abilities. He is, as Johnny Casper describes, “the man that walks behind the man that whispers in his ears.” He’s an operator; the main boss’s trusted lieutenant and counselor. He’s also a shrewd self-confessed “angle” finder. It is by his actions, schemes, strategies, words, and deeds that all the characters in the movie find themselves eventually affected.
Tom exemplifies what Machiavelli espouses in Chapter 18 of The Prince, entitled “In What Mode Faith Should Be Kept by Princes.” It is from this chapter that Machiavelli writes “… since a prince is compelled of necessity to know well how to use the beast, he should pick the fox and the lion, because the lion does not defend itself from snares and the fox does not defend itself from the wolves. So one needs to be a fox to...