Part of Noir-November

“You wouldn’t do that.” “You don’t know what I’d do—you have no idea—to live.”

The word “grift” originated in the early twentieth century as an amalgam of “graft” and “drift,” a way to describe those itinerant conmen who followed the era's traveling circuses and sideshows swindling folks out of a buck or two. It’s a perfect word, really—descriptive and textured, with hints of both hard work and dishonesty, a combination of attraction and repulsion that any con artist brings with him. A common thief steals out of desperation or greed or ill will, but a grifter...well, a grifter doesn’t want to take your money so much as convince you to give it to her. She aims to…

Stephen Frears' "The Grifters" is a competent con-person drama that blends touches of light, dark, crime, and family politics. It is an engaging piece of work that is at its best when Frears focuses on his characters' criminal streaks but becomes slightly sodden when their interactions with one another take center stage.

At times, "The Grifters" is a jazzy crime drama where criminal machinations and the long and short grifts of its characters are capably entertaining. When the film's narrative sensibilities turn to the drama linking its three main characters, the whole affair seems to tire. Its twisty plot, however, still offers enough to compel.

The production has a limited scope, but Frears puts together something that feels more expansive.…

“You’re working some angle and don’t tell me you’re not, because I wrote the book.” – Lilly Dillon

Explored is the seedy world of the con artist game, film noir style. The Grifters informs us that there are two different kinds: the short con and the long con. Roy Dillon (John Cusack, marvelously subtle) is a maestro of the short con. Dice games. Pool games. Typically, he walks into a bar to ask for a beer, flashes a $20, slides it under his wrist, slides the bartender a $10 bill. In due time he gets caught by the wrong bartender, and takes such a wallop he is forced to the hospital. It is there that his mother Lilly (Anjelica Huston)…

I've been a fan of Stephen Frears' work for many years now. From My Beautiful Laundrette to Dangerous Liaisons, The Queen to High Fidelity, he's managed to engage his audience for over thirty years with a series of high quality films across a whole spectrum of genres. The Grifters from back in 1990 saw him tackle a crime neo-noir, one with more shocking twists than Kevin Spacey's dating history. I'd seen this six years ago, but couldn't remember much about it apart from a lot of nudity from Annette Bening. Featuring John Cusack, Anjelica Huston, and the aforementioned Bening, this has cons and grifts, shocks and surprises, as what looks like a straightforward story takes a very surreal and unexpected…

In the climatic scene, the camera bounces back and forth between Lily and Roy. We can tell the scene needs to be tense: the music is saying it, the dialogue is saying, the body language is saying it. But the tension feels forced. There's an ingredient missing: interaction. Neither Lily nor Roy share the screen for most of the exchange. It's a brief interplay, but it stands out in a film that wants to make us feel desperation, anger, and deception. When they finally share the screen, moments later, it just feels like too little to sell the moment.

This film just misses its mark in a lot of ways. The grifting we see is strong for characterizing our three…

I think you'd have to love the book to love this film, or maybe even like this film. It's a very faithful adaption of the novel, most of the dialogue ripped straight from the text, but it comes across as a bit barebones without the witty Thompson prose or in-depth social commentary; partly because you're not inside everyone's heads, some of the nuance of the characterization, relationships and sweeping economic ruminations that make the story great are a little lost. But I feel like it's not the movie's fault, because it's still a good representation of the world and ideas depicted in the source. The noir atmosphere is there. The performances are solid. The sense of humor is intact. The…

The 80s and 90s Neo-Noir Project

The Grifters is not really Stephen Frears at his best, mainly because it never quite nails whatever tone he's looking for here.

He had shown an ability to mix crime with black comedy a few years earlier with the splendid The Hit but I'm not sure if that's what he was going for with The Grifters. But that's what it comes off as at times, and I just wonder if part of the problem was Annette Bening's character.

It's doubly a problem because Bening is the life and soul of the party here in a beautifully carefree and charmingly devious performance. She's SO charming though, and funny, that it almost feels like it throws…

It’s the story of a woman, her son and his girlfriend.

They’re all in the same line of work and they’ve all survived. Are they good at it?
Let’s say they all have had their ups and downs.

Anjelica Huston, John Cusack and Annette Bening are the players listed above, respectively.
Mother Lilly is the veteran, working with the mob. Her angle is old school. She puts money down on horses that could go off as longshots. Better to put some money down to cut the odds of a longshot than for the mob to pay a lucky horseplayer off at long odds.

Roy plays the short con and makes a little money here and there. That is, unless he…

This film lost me right in the first scene and never won me back. The opening scene was supposed to establish the principal characters as scammers, but Cusack's scams are really stupid (the bait and switch bill scam has to happen SO MUCH faster than it does in the movie to work) and we don't even get to see what the women are doing. Huston is doing some kind of horse race scam and Bening is doing something or other involving jewelry but the actual scams aren't detailed or shown, yet I felt like we were supposed to start the film off convinced that these people are master scammers. At first, I thought the idea was to show that Cusack…

I think you'd have to love the book to love this film, or maybe even like this film. It's a very faithful adaption of the novel, most of the dialogue ripped straight from the text, but it comes across as a bit barebones without the witty Thompson prose or in-depth social commentary; partly because you're not inside everyone's heads, some of the nuance of the characterization, relationships and sweeping economic ruminations that make the story great are a little lost. But I feel like it's not the movie's fault, because it's still a good representation of the world and ideas depicted in the source. The noir atmosphere is there. The performances are solid. The sense of humor is intact. The…