In Stephen Frears’ The Grifters, Roy (John Cusack) is a 25-year-old conman, a grifter who makes his living running petty scams that can be very, very risky. Consider his favorite con – the $20 switch – wherein Roy flashes a $20 at the bartender while requesting a beer. When the mark’s back is turned, Roy covertly switches the $20 for a $10 and hopes the bartender doesn’t notice and gives back too much change. Again – risky. When the con works, Roy nets a few dollars and a free beer. When the con fails, Roy could get arrested, or worse, hit with a baseball bat – precisely what happens in the film’s opening scenes.
Buy The Grifters (Criterion Collection)Roy’s girlfriend, Myra (Annette Bening), is also a con artist who has found her greatest strengths to be her body and her suggestive speech. All men are her marks and she mostly makes her living by never having to pay for anything. This includes trading sexual favors with her landlord to avoid paying rent. Myra and Roy don’t know that they are both grifters (Roy pretends to be a tool salesman), but she is especially sharp and has her suspicions. Myra has worked huge, complicated grifts in the past that involved scores of con men and the potential for millions of dollars. Those were her glory days, and she wants them back.
Lilly is, of all the surprising coincidences, also a grifter. She works for Bobo Justus (Pat Hingle), a bookmaker with mob ties. Lilly’s job is to travel the country, from racetrack to racetrack, making huge bets on longshot horses to lower the odds. This keeps Bobo from losing his shirt on an unlikely winner. Lilly is sent to La Jolla and decides to make a sidetrip to Los Angeles to visit her mostly estranged son, Roy. When she arrives, Lilly realizes that Roy is in excruciating pain from the baseball-bat incident and gets him to the hospital where she meets, and instantly dislikes, Myra.
The triangle is complete: Roy, Lilly, and Myra start to make tighter and tighter circles around each other. Lilly is jealous of Myra in more ways than one, and also a bit too friendly (as the noir genre pretty much demands) with her own son. Myra detests Lilly because she represents her own future while her love for Roy verges on overbearing and manipulative. Roy mostly wants to be left alone, but his relationships with the two women are magnetic as well as repulsive, and extremely complicated.
The Grifters is an especially dark neo-noir film. There is sex and violence and grimy themes surrounding incest, betrayal, and murder. Nobody is safe for even a second. Especially interesting is how there is very little outside influence on the lives of Roy, Myra, and Lilly. They inflict their own pain on themselves and others. Outside influences only affect them when a con goes sideways, which all three characters experience early in the film. But grifters obviously don’t take it lightly when they fail; it makes them feel inadequate and they want revenge. And for grifters, revenge involves finding more marks, better cons, and lots of money.
Stephen Frears and screenwriter Donald E. Westlake have crafted a wonderfully dark tale of people who prefer to be insular while simultaneously being drawn to bad relationships. Ultimately, though, people don’t matter unless they are worth something as a mark. All people. Cusack plays the perfectly trapped man in the middle. He was much younger at release (1990) and was terrifically charming while also looking somehow already jaded. These characteristics help him to center the entire film while Bening and Huston circle around him pulling strings. Jim Thompson fans, Cusack fans, Frears fans, and noir fans are all likely to enjoy this tour de force.
Special Features:
- New 4K digital restoration, approved by director of photography Oliver Stapleton, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- Audio commentary featuring director Stephen Frears, actors John Cusack and Anjelica Huston, and screenwriter Donald E. Westlake
- New interview with actor Annette Bening
- Short making-of-documentary featuring Cusack, Frears, Huston, Westlake, and production designer Dennis Gassner
- Seduction, Betrayal, Murder: The Making of The Grifters, featuring interviews with Frears, Stapleton, editor Mick Audsley, executive producer Barbara De Fina, and coproducer Peggy Rajski
- The Jim Thompson Story, featuring Westlake and Robert Polito, biographer of The Grifters novelist Jim Thompson
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- An essay by critic Geoffrey O’Brien
The Criterion liner notes have the following to say about the master: “The Grifters is presented in the original aspect ratio of 1.85:1. Supervised and approved by director of photography Oliver Stapleton, this new 4K master was created from the 35 mm original camera negative. The original 2.0 surround soundtrack was remastered from the 35 mm magnetic track…The feature is presented in Dolby Vision HDR (high dynamic range) on the 4K Ultra HD disc and high-definition SDR (standard dynamic range) on the Blu-ray.
