THE GRIFTERS (1990)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Stephen Frears
CAST: Anjelica Huston, John Cusack, Annette Bening, Pat Hingle, Charles Napier, J.T. Walsh
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 91% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A small-time con man has torn loyalties between his new girlfriend and his estranged mother, a high stakes grifter working for the mob.


Imagine your favorite film noir from the 1940s and ‘50s.  The Big Heat, say, or Double Indemnity.  Now imagine someone remade it, set it in the modern world, retained most, if not all, of the hard-boiled dialogue and characters, threw in some gratuitous nudity, and added some Freudian subtext that would have made Oedipus blush.  Oh, and imagine David Mamet directed it.  Voila…you’ve got 1990’s The Grifters, directed by Stephen Frears and co-produced by none other than Martin Scorsese.  It tends to move just a tad slow at times, but all that simmering pays off in the movie’s phenomenal final reel.  I am going to have to tread carefully indeed to avoid spoiling some of the movie’s best surprises.  Here goes:

As the movie opens, we are introduced to three very different characters, at least on the surface.  Lilly (Anjelica Huston) works for the mob by visiting horse racing tracks across the country and laying pricey bets on long shots to bring the odds down just in case they pay off.  She also skims just enough off the top to stay under the radar.  Roy (John Cusack) is a young man pulling small-time cons of his own, like the one where he flashes a $20 bill at a bartender, then pays with a $10 bill instead, getting $20 worth of change at half the price.  And Myra Langtry (Annette Bening in her breakout role) is first glimpsed attempting a lame con at a jewelry shop that ends with her offering her body to the jeweler instead.  (I like the fact that nearly everyone calls her “Mrs. Langtry” even though no one seems to have laid eyes on her husband.)

Myra is Roy’s vivacious new girlfriend.  Lilly is Roy’s estranged mother; she had him when she was fourteen years old (yikes) and he left home at 17, as he puts it, “with nothing but stuff I bought and paid for myself.”  Roy values his independence above all else, maybe even more than the money he’s “earned” and stashed away behind the ugly clown paintings in his living room.  So, when Lilly unexpectedly drops by his apartment in Los Angeles (which she always pronounces “Los Ann-guh-leez”) on her way to the track at La Jolla, he lies about his livelihood.  The last thing he wants is a concerned grifter mother trying to partner up with him.  He learned that from a mentor years ago, seen in a flashback: “You take a partner, you put an apple on your head and hand the other guy a shotgun.”

Due to an injury sustained from a bartender who caught him in a grift, Roy winds up in the hospital, where Lilly meets Myra for the first time.  They are not impressed with each other; their introductory conversation is brief, but it plays like Bette Davis clashing with Joan Crawford.  We get a little more information about Myra’s situation when we see her go home to her apartment where she is met by her landlord, Joe, who demands payment on her outstanding bill.  Her response is to bat her eyes and launch into a patter of what sounds like a radio or TV commercial.  “You, too, could learn to dance!  All you need is a magic step!”  After some more back and forth, she lies down naked on her bed and offers Joe a choice: “Only one choice to a customer, the lady or the loot.  What’s it gonna be?”

What makes a scene like that sparkle, along with virtually every scene in the film, is the fierce individuality displayed by the characters.  They are each wholly original, not simply placeholders for foregone dialogue or plot developments.  In classic film noir, the lead character is usually a smart guy (or gal) who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else but gets caught off guard by his own desires.  In The Grifters, all the main characters are smart…and they stay that way the whole movie.  There is not one single plot development that evolves because anyone makes a dumb decision.  You can see that they all have a clear view of all the angles, and no one is going to make a stupid choice for the sake of the script.  I can’t tell you how rare that is.  The plot and the story unwind and are wound up like a precision watch.  By the time the credits roll, you can see exactly why each character made the decisions they did, leading them to the shocking finale in the last reel.

I really can’t say more about the plot without simply retelling scenes or giving away spoilers.  Throughout the film, Huston, Cusack, and Bening deliver performances that would be right at home in a Mamet film.  They’re allowed to show more emotion than can usually be found in Mamet (I’m thinking particularly of House of Games), but their pared-down, hard-boiled dialogue cuts to the heart of the matter without being flowery.  There’s a scene involving Lilly’s boss, Bobo, played by Pat Hingle with a flat-eyed menace that would make Sonny Corleone run for cover.  His deadpan dialogue with Lilly about oranges is one of the tensest gangland conversations I’ve ever seen, and he does it without ever raising his voice.  Brilliantly written.

If this review has been vague, it’s because I am trying to preserve the unexpected twists and turns about who’s who, and who’s hiding what, and why.  If you find yourself wondering why things are moving kind of slow in the first 30-45 minutes, just be patient and let your ears bask in the hum of the crisp dialogue; observe how each character behaves according to their character, not according to a script; and marvel how a movie set in modern day can still have dizzy dames and classy broads and world-weary heroes and not feel like a relic from the 1940s, but instead feels as fresh as a movie that was released yesterday.  The Grifters is nearly-buried treasure that deserves to be rediscovered.