MNT Fritz Lang Leite Panton GRIFTERS Anjelica Hustonby Maitland McDonagh he Grifters is a hell of a movie: cynical, toughminded, and relentlessly mean—mean cruel and mean petty both. But when the lights come up you can't help but won- der how it got that way ‘The fact of it is, The Grifters is a pretty poor excuse for a Jim Thompson novel. Not a dazzling psychopath in sight, and precious little of the clean, unforgiving prose that earned ‘Thomp- son his “dime-store Dostoyevsky” label. ‘The book's got a kick-in-the-teeth end- ing, the kind that makes you turn back a couple of pages just to make sure there was no way you could have seen it com- ing; but to get there you've got to wade through an awful lot of dreary stuff. You 30 ‘Anjelica Huston (ily). John Cusack (oy), Anette Bening (Myra. cant help but wonder why Martin Scor- sese, making his producing debut, would gamble on such a marginal prop- erty. Then again, of the the novelist’s sense bitter comedy of inevitable ruin might have caught his attention: Jim Thompson could almost have writ- ten After Hours, except that it would have ended in a bloodbath, or Taxi Driver without the ironically redemptive epilogue. And as to director Stephen Frears, well. . .he’s riding high on a string of highbrow successes, none of which would make you pick Frears as your guide into the heart of noimness. The ol so-archly vicious Dangerous Liaisons, the Joe Orton biopic Prick Up Your Ears, and those exercises in impeccable sexual politics My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid are all fine films. But they dont tell you Frears hhas the edge for Thompson's world of casual criminality. For that, you have to look to his 1984 The Hit, which pre- ceded the lionization of Stephen Frears and which nobody saw, It’s not even as though Frears had a passion for Thomp- son: Scorsese bought the rights to The Grifters and sent it to him; the only other Thompson novel he recalls having read is A Hell of a Woman. Having the prolific and poly- pseudonymous Donald E. Westlake as screenwriter is a plus; recently he scripted the knockout sleeper The Step- father, and sometime back, in tough ‘guy persona Richard Stark, wrote the novel that became Point Blank, Indeed, it’s a wonder he stuck around after Frears coyly suggested he write as Stark this time out as well. Westlake demurred ‘gracefully, pointing out that Stark wasnit a member of the Writers Guild, but Frears still muses, “I really did want Richard Stark, not Donald. I said it to him and I daresay he was a bit annoyed: All in all, The Grifters was anything but an easy call, and is nothing if not a won- derful surprise. he timelessness of The Grifters, published in 1963, proceeds directly from its relentlessly narrow focus: the day-to-day lives of small: hustlers, con artists, and shysters. The marginal world of petty lawbreaking is its own time warp, a state of mind more than a place or an era, The operative concern is that it's about lives on the fringe, not what they're on the fringe of —Frears didn't want to do a period piece Call those cars, you know..."), and didntt have to. The Grifters unfolds in a world in aspic: racetracks, down-at-the- heels hotels, gloomy bars, and low-slung. apartment complexes. It’s not exactly @ Los Angeles of the mind; more like a Los Angeles of the collective uncon- scious, the city you see out of the corner of your eye when you're looking at something else. “Grifters” is an old-fashioned kind of word that’s getting quite a workout this fall—witness Miller's Crossing and Gabriel Byrne's pointed discourse on the hereditary call of the grift, Grifters are con artists trash Lilly (Anjelica Huston) and her estranged son Roy (John Cusack)—are cheats to the bottom of their cold, cold hearts Audiences love a witty con artist— think of The Lady Eve, The Music Man, Paper Moon, The Sting, Bedtime Story/ Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The Flim Flam and the Dillons—whiteMan. There's something endearing about the operator with a smooth line; we admire the cleverness, the skill, the glib talk. We empathize with the slip- ery rogue who puts paid to the notion that there's no such thing as a free lunch, and we buy into his worldview: vietims as lumpen chumps who deserve to get taken. No one likes to be played for a fool, but everyone likes to think he’ smart enough to put one over on the next guy. ‘There's nothing cozy about Thomp- son's grifters, though, trapped in an emotional triangle that’s equal parts repressed lust, selfishness, and greed. Lilly isnt exactly your Hallmark mom; pregnant at 14, she and Roy just about grew up side-by-side in quarters far too close for propriety. What Roy got out of (or didnt) by leaving home ASAP pro- vides the psychosexual subtext that jects each and every relationship. Lik ly’s maternal side is buried but its not dead, and Roy's attraction to predatory Myra Langtry (Annette Bening) isnt just the practical matter it seems. Sure, her ‘marginal lifestyle meshes with his. But when you stack her up alongside Lilly, something else comes into focus. They dont really look alike, but they’te cast ‘out of the same mold. Lilly is a Mob flunky working a long- term racing racket; she parks herself at the track, keeps an eye on the odds, and places strategic bets to tlt them in favor of her boss, bookie Bobo Justus (Pat Hingle, delineating a razor-sharp rube with scary bonhomic). The best thing Lilly has to say for herself is that shes smart enough to see what's coming and tough enough to take it. Babyfaced Roy specializes in short corns—petty bar swindles that keep him in cash while a dead-end sales job gives him a straight ‘cover, lets him blend right into the back- ground. Myras a veteran long-con artist fallen on hard times, looking for a way back into the life of big scores and high rolling, Like all unregenerate con artists, they donit stop at conning everyone who ‘erosses their paths—they con them- selves as well. Roy thinks he can accu- mulate a nest egg and walk away. So does Lilly, whos skimming her employ- cfs take. Myra thinks she can turn back time, remake Roy in the image of her mentor Cole (J:T. Walsh)—whom the con drove insane—and regain the high life. Their contradictory ambitions set up the inevitable clash that leaves two of them dead and the third on the run. It could be tragic if it werent all so sordid. “They're like weasels in a box,” says Westlake. “They snarl and tear at each ‘other, and they're too busy to sce that fone side of the box is open and they could get away.” But its not really a movie about cons. Yes, we see Lilly at the parimutuel win- dows, Roy taking a bunch of sailors for their weekend cash, Myra and Cole (in flashback) pulling off a grand scam involving computerized trading. Buc this is no confidence procedural like David Mamet's grim House of Games, in love with the details of the scam. The Grift ers is like some warped take on Imita- tion of Life; its a film about passing. Not passing for white, but passing for bour- geois, passing for rich, passing for respectable, passing for family, passing for friends. Lilly, Myra, and Roy lie reflexively—theres no percentage in tell ing the truth, and when one of them does, it sounds like a lie wrapped in a joke inside a putdown. “There's a very Attractive young lady here...she says she’s your mother” announces the desk man (Henry Jones) when Lilly arrives unexpectedly at Roy’ hotel. ‘The clerk who tortures guests with homespun homilies thinks he’s seen a thing or two, but he doesn't know squat. Fe cast Bening as Myra, pimp and whore rolled into one, because she reminded him of Gloria Grahame, the eternal not-quite-bright-enough moll whose face Lee Marvin scalded with coffee in The Big Heat. Cusack, making a brilliant transition from the lighter roles with which hes been associated, “came in and told me hed tried to buy the book,” Frears says. Amiable and dis- ingenuous, Cusack resists the urge to make Roy either cuddly or terminally cool. He's assiduously anonymous, just the slightest bit not-there. . .a deliberate stranger who could be something much scarier than a charlatan. But Anjelica Huston is the standout, bleached blond and radiating don'-fuck- with-me vibes: hard, practical, and yet deeply sentimental, she’s the films ful- crum. “I initially said no to this project,” Westlake says, “because I didn't want to spend months with those gloomy peo- ple. But Stephen told me I was looking at it wrong. He told me I was thinking of itas Roy's story, and that if you see it as Roy's story it’s a story of defeat. . .but if you read it as Lilly's story its a siory of aim survival.” Huston was the last person cast and wasnit even Frears’ first choice for the role; Lilly Dillon originally went to Melanie Griffith. Frears ran through a mental who's-who of smart, off-kilter women—Geena Davis, Frances MeDor- mand, and Sissy Spacek among them— but Huston’s intensity blew him away. “She could play the tragedy.” he says. “When she got to the ending she just said, ‘Oh, that’s what it is? And she did it” Brittle and controlled throughout most of the film, Huston brings a power- ful charge to what may be its toughest scene—the one that could have been most easily botched—in which Lilly exploits the incestuous undercurrent t0 her relationship with her son in one last, desperate bid to manipulate him. And in her final scenes she's transfigured—an icon of brutal (and brutalized) pragma- tism. “She looks like the famous English child murderer Myra Hindley,” says Frears. “Anjelica looks like she's going to Hell.” he Grifters is one of three Thomp- son novels to arrive on screen this year (three others—Nothing More Than ‘Murder, South of Heaven, and Savage Night—are in various stages of prepro- duction), and its the one that’s truest to the source. “It was a cheap novel?” says Frears. “You have to humor the spirit of the cheapness; the idea of making a vast production out of it didn't seem right. To spend $20 million turning ic into some- thing polished...it seemed vulgar, somehow.” James Foley’s After Dark, My Sweet is something polished, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. But i's mythopoetie in a big way, just the sort of thing Frears must have in mind when he dismisses ‘Thompson-worshipers. “I dont terribly subscribe to all that.” he says with self deprecating restraint. “Somehow the colt of his writing seems to want him to have suffered and to have had a terrible life. But I'm sure he just found it a source of infinite pain. He wasnt a romantic figure, and the cult wants to turn him into one” Maggie Greenwald's The Kill-Offisnt guilty on the romanticizing score. If any- thing, its base to a fault: the low-budget constraints are true to Thompson, but the result is just plain ugly. Grifters strikes the balance: gritty without being tawdry, tough without lapsing into hard- boiled parody, corrupt without being squalid. In any event, Frears shrugs off the inevitable comparisons. “You must remember” he says, “last year there was a glut of Laclos films. I'm a veteran of these things” ® a