In The Grifters, No One’s the Wiser

According to popular lore, the word “grifter” comes from an amalgam of “graft” and “drifter.” It applied to the types of petty, nomadic con men who traveled around following circuses and carnivals hoping to make a quick buck. This is not the world of high-stakes casino break-ins by the Rat Pack or elaborate stings orchestrated by Newman and Redford. This is novelist Jim Thompson’s world: strictly small time for small people, which might explain why it took so long for many of his works to reach the screen. Stephen Frears’s 1990 film of The Grifters, which enters the Criterion Collection this month, was among a bumper crop of late ‘80s adaptations, and distinguished itself from the pack by garnering three Oscar nominations. But the decades since have only made it more elusive, a neo-noir whose genre allegiance is as slippery as its characters. Even something as dark as Double Indemnity had a detective for a moral compass. Here everyone’s out to pick your pocket, or even knock you around a bit. If you only walk away feeling fleeced, consider yourself lucky. 

Frears made his Hollywood debut with The Grifters; before that he was working in his native England, most recently on Dangerous Liaisons, another film with complicated power dynamics. He’s never been an auteur in the classic sense, with a recognizable style or recurring themes. But that efficient sensibility makes him an unexpectedly good fit for the material here. In some ways, he’s hustling as much as his central trio. Roy (John Cusack), Lily (Anjelica Huston), and Myra (Annette Bening) are all introduced on the make, sharing a slick split-screen – one of Frears’s few flourishes. What these people mean to one another will be revealed slowly. For now, we simply watch them work. 

Roy is clearly the greenest, with his baby face and rickety self-confidence, which hangs off him like a shirt two sizes too big. He sticks to pulling cheap swindles in dives, switching tens for twenties to bilk bartenders out of change, at least until he gets a baseball bat to the gut. Lily has the calcified bearing of a pro, with her ice blonde wig and icier demeanor. She has a steady gig for a mob boss fixing races at the Baltimore tracks, skimming off the top of each take for herself. Later we’ll learn she’s Roy’s mother; she had him as a teenager and used to pass him off as her kid brother. Myra is a confident swindler, reduced to passing off junk jewelry for cash, or her body in a pinch. She met Roy two months ago and thinks he’s a matchbook salesman. Though none of them share a scene for over fifteen minutes, the collision course they’re on is fated as Frears tightens them around one another like a noose. 

For viewers accustomed to the hyper-stylized, self aware performance style of film noir, the varying registers of the three leads might come as a bit of a shock. Cusack, only a few years removed from his iconic turn in Say Anything, embodies the sort of desperate flop-sweat that comes with wanting to prove oneself. There’s the sense that the hard-boiled dialogue he’s adopted doesn’t come naturally to Roy. Decades before she actually played Gloria Grahame, Bening’s effervescent work as Myra recalls that screen siren’s unique charisma. Dressing this sex kitten in animal print is almost gilding the lily. The fact that she bears a passing resemblance to Roy’s mother will eventually come into play, but Huston’s emotional rigor mortis is a study in contrasts. It’s the film’s toughest role, where the flashes of vulnerability Lily shows come to seem like just another survival instinct she’s honed. What ultimately unites them is that their disguises have become so ingrained that there may no longer be anything underneath. 

The plot kicks into gear when Lily is dispatched to La Jolla and decides to stop in Los Angeles (which she pronounces with a hard “g”) to visit the son she hasn’t seen in eight years. In Frears’s rendering, the city’s abundant sunshine only serves to lengthen its shadows. The usual designators of glitz and glamor are nowhere to be found. Until a computer shows up during a late second act sequence, it’s not even clear what time period The Grifters exists in. Thompson’s source novel was published in 1963, and screenwriter (and fellow crime writer) Donald E. Westlake wisely doesn’t stray far from it. Where era markers like the Cold War or McCarthyism once stood in for societal decay, Frears and company coat their story’s nihilism with a distinctly late-capitalist sheen; the freelance scraping of the main characters will be recognizable to any gig worker. Meanwhile the action is goosed along by an Elmer Bernstein score that recalls the work Bernard Hermann did for Hitchcock more than the synths and electric guitars of the decade.

To reveal too much of what happens wouldn’t be sporting, but suffice to say, an early line of dialogue dropped by Roy’s mentor is key: “Grifters got an irresistible urge to beat a guy who’s wise.” The best scores come from outsmarting the guy who thinks he’s outsmarted you. Once Myra and Lily meet and clash over Roy’s future prospects, the trio’s deadly dance takes on the contours of a Greek tragedy, down to the incestuous undertones that come suddenly, and horribly, to the surface. There’s only one direction for this story to end, and as the final character standing rides an elevator that might as well be going to Hell, we’re left with the unshakeable knowledge that they’re already there.

“The Grifters” is out now on 4K UHD and Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection.

Sara Batkie is the author of the story collection 'Better Times,' which won the 2017 Prairie Schooner Prize and is available from University of Nebraska Press. She received her MFA in Fiction from New York University. Born in Bellevue, Washington and raised mostly in Iowa, Sara currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

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