The Grifters

Plot synopsis:
The film opens with a voiceover (done by producer Martin Scorsese) where it's explained that bettors at racetracks will deliberately bet high on certain horses to lower the odds and earn more money.Lily Dillon (Angelica Houston) works for a Baltimore gangster, Bobo Justus, who has her place such bets on horse races. After collecting the earnings, Lily opens a hidden compartment in the trunk of her car and skims several thousand dollars from the payoffs and hides it among the other money she's stolen from Bobo. One of Bobo's associates calls her in New Mexico and tells her to go to the downs in La Jolla. Lily agrees and says she'll stop by Los Angeles to see her son.In L.A., Roy Dillon (John Cusak), Lily's 25-year-old estranged son, works several small-time cons. One of his tricks is showing a bartender a $20 bill then slyly switching it for a ten, fooling the bartender in to giving him change for a $20. One day, Roy is caught by one of his marks who seizes his arm and jabs him hard in the chest with the end of a club. Roy manages to walk out of the bar and make it home. While he lays in pain in his bed, he dreams of his first meeting with the man, Mintz, who taught him how to con people. Mintz' advice to Roy, and one of his steadfast rules, was to never take a partner in a con - it can only end in ruin.That night Roy's girlfriend, Myra Langtry (Annette Benning), a grifter herself, stops by and they have sex. The next day, Lily shows up at Roy's place and the two have a tense conversation where Roy points out that Lily hasn't contacted him in eight years. The conversation becomes more intense, with Roy feeling great resentment over their falling out. Lily notices that Roy is incredibly ill and feverish and has him taken to a hospital where he's treated for internal bleeding to the injury to his abdomen and lives.Both Lily and Myra visit Roy in the hospital and there is instant animosity between the two. Lily sees Myra as a bad influence and Myra believes there may be an incestuous relationship between mother and son. Lily calls in the young and attractive nurse that's been tending to Roy and tells her son that she'd hired the nurse to take care of Roy after he leaves the hospital. Roy rebuffs the nurse by telling her that his mother hired her so he would have sex with her.Meanwhile, Myra returns to her apartment where the landlord insists she pay her past due rent immediately. She tells him she's good for it as she has always paid up, one way or another. He insists he wants cash this time. She tells him to come in and offers sex instead.Driving back to La Jolla, Lily gets stuck in a traffic jam and misses her chance to fix a race with a potentially large payoff for Bobo. When she leaves the track, she's met by Bobo (Pat Hingle) himself who orders her to take him to his hotel. On the way he asks Lily why she missed the race, she tells him she was taking care of her son, whom Bobo had never known about.At his room, Bobo punches Lily in the stomach and orders her to get him a towel from the bathroom. He gives her a few pounds of oranges and asks her about the insurance scam that people use: when someone is hit repeatedly with a towel full of oranges, they get large bruises used to make insurance claims. If the method is done improperly, then it can cause severe internal damage. Bobo makes as though he's going to beat Lily with the oranges and stops, pinning her to the floor and burning her right hand with a lit cigar instead. Lily later leaves on good terms with Bobo.Roy returns to his apartment and sees Myra. They take a train ride for a weekend getaway and during the trip Roy cheats some sailors at a dice game. Myra sees him at work and later tells him she recognizes his work as a grifter. He refuses to admit what he does at first, but then admits it's true. He asks what's her con, and she says she's a long con. He tells her "you can't do a long con alone", and she tells him a long story about how much money she made with her former partner Cole (J.T. Walsh), but that he finally went insane.Myra follows Lily to the track and covertly observes Lily placing her skimmed profits into the concealed compartment in her car's trunk. Myra tells Roy that she saw his mom at the track and tries to persuade him to join her in the long con. Roy is distrustful of Myra. She visits Roy at his apartment and tells him she's found a good con and she needs $10,000 to fund the con. He doesn't believe her, and she implies he's having an incestuous relationship with his mother. Roy strikes her and orders her to leave.Roy calls his mother Lily and asks to meet with her "as adults". He agrees to drive to her place for a visit that night. Myra exacts her revenge on Roy by making an annymous phone call to Bobo by telling him that Lily has been skimming. A friend in Bobo's organization calls Lily and tips her off that Bobo knows about the skimmed profits she's keeps in her car trunk. She leaves immediately and drives away. Two of Bobo's men show up at her hotel room a few minutes later to find her abandoned belongings and her flashy gold and cream colored Cadillac gone. After they leave to report to Bobo about Lily's dissappearance, Roy arrives at the hotel shortly afterward and also finds his mother has left.After driving most of the night, Lily finds a room at a desert hotel in Arizona and Myra follows her. She uses a master key to get into Lily's room and attacks her while she's asleep in bed.The next day the Phoenix police calls Roy and ask him to come to Phoenix and to the hospital to identify his mother's body, who has died of an apparent self-inflicted gun shot to the face. They need Roy to view the body because they don't have any fingerprints or other identification they can use. Her face is disfigured and unrecognizable, but Roy notices that there's no cigar burn on the corpse's hand. He still confirms to the police that the body is his mother's.When he arrives home, he finds his mother Lilly in the process of packing his money stash, hidden in the back of picture frames, into a suitcase. He confronts her, and she tells him she shot Myra in self-defense and arranged the scene to appear as though Myra's body was actually Lilly's. Lily is trying to make Bobo believe she's dead.Lily insists she needs Roy's money to flee, but Roy tells her she has to get a square job and lay low if she wants to survive. He refuses to let her take his money saying he intends to get out of the rackets too. She tells him she'd go to any length to get free of the rackets. She begs him, then tries to seduce him, and even tells him he's not really her son. Roy is disgusted and rejects her. Lilly angrily swings the suitcase containing the money at him and accidentally hits a drinking glass that breaks and strikes his neck, slashing an artery.Lilly sobs convulsively as she picks his his money up off the floor as her son bleeds to death. Dressed in red dress and shoes, she flees the room, leaving her son to die, and descends in the hotel elevator to the parking lot. She gets into her son's anonymous Plymouth K-car car and drives off into the dark.

Tags: neo noir, dramatic, flashback, insanity, tragedy, revenge

Review:
And it's the personal relationships among these three criminals, complex, sometimes dark, and almost always motivated by survival, that make this film a pretty good bet.Roy Dillon (John Cusack), is a trickster, a loner, "on the grift" for the "short con", strictly a nickels and dimes man.
As a bonus, the DVD has an exceptionally good Commentary, with insightful comments from Director Stephen Frears, and actors John Cusack and Anjelica Huston..
There is an odd mother-son relationship, too - very odd, between John Cusack and Angelica Huston who play "Lilly and Roy Dillon." The third person among this trio of "grifters" (scam artists) is played by Annette Bening, who never looked prettier or demonstrated her lack of morals better than she did here as the wicked "Myra Langtry." You can see all of Bening in this movie, and I mean all.
Cusack, meanwhile, gives an underrated performance: one of the best in his career.Three supporting guys in here are fantastic: Pat Hingle as "Bobo Justus," J.T. Walsh as "Cole," and Charles Napier as "Gloucester Hebbing." Overall, this is a wonderful cast that does full justice to this unusual crime story.The story has a mean edge to it most of the way, but that's the style of writer Jim Thompson, who is a very good crime author who wrote the novel on which this movie is based.
Director Stephen Frears, working off a script by Donald Westlake (adapted from the Jim Thompson novel) lets these characters get established before they start to bring us into the tangled web they are all weaving.Roy Dillon (John Cusack) is a con man pulling small jobs every day to slowly build up his savings, while his girlfriend Myra Langtry (Annette Bening) is doing anything she can to get by and his mother Lilly (Anjelica Huston) is working on a long play of her own.
The tagline of "Who's conning who?" always makes me roll my eyes, but it's actually an accurate portrayal here, as these three play each other back and forth, while the film itself is pulling the veil over the audience.The Grifters is a brooding noir that throws back a lot to the '40s and it's Hitchcock roots, including some direct homages that feel appropriate for the story rather than cheap rip-offs.
The film delves into some potentially melodramatic moments at times, but Frears is able to keep things in tune with it's seething roots as opposed to letting things get too theatrical.All three actors are working at top form here; Cusack was just starting to break out and this role should really be considered more among the best of his career, Huston steals the show in every scene and Bening (someone I've always despised) is seductive and very compelling.
This film is about people who cheat, artists in their own ways, but not theatrical producers.John Cusack is handsome in a pale way and delivers a decent performance as a young man who plays "short cons", clipping people out of nickels, dimes, and dollars, although he's been doing it long enough to put away something of a stash.
Then comes the actors – and my word, are they fantastic in their roles – John Cusack is sly yet undeterred in a role that is a slightly more edgier variation on Humphrey Bogart, with a cross of Lee Marvin, to boot; Annette Bening is simply drop-dead sexy as the woman who thinks she knows it all, yet is a timebomb waiting to explode.
The real star of the show is Angelica Huston in a well-deserved Oscar nominated performance, perfectly balancing the ruthless, desperate act with a honest, focused, motherly concern that doesn't feel cliché at all.Who knew modern day, sunny Los Angeles and Phoenix can be the backdrop of so seedy a neo-noir, perhaps the best since Chinatown?
This film is tense, exiting, and well-acted, but make no mistake about it, even though Cusack is more or less the main character, this IS Anjelica Huston's movie through and through.
One of my favorite movies.My Grade: A DVD Extras: Commentary with Director Stephen Frears, Screenwriter Donald Westlake and Actors John Cusack and Angelica Huston; 16 minute Making of featurette; The Jim Thompson Story featurette; Publicity and Production stills); and Trailers for "Serendipity", "High Fidelity", Grosse Point Blank", & "40 Days And 40 Nights" Eye Candy: The future Mrs. Warren Beatty shows everything.
this movie has a dark film noir atmosphere that is somewhat intriguing but there is no plot whatsoever.The 3 main characters are one-dimensional and totally unlikable with various degrees of nastiness.One simply doesn't care what happens to them.One expects for a plot to develop at some point,like a scheme or something but it never does.We just get more of the same nasty attitude until some completely needless and superficial ending.Huston and Benning do the best they can with the material.There are movies about con artists that don't bother very much with character development but the good ones have some plot going and especially concentrate on smart con tactics,this movie does neither.The characters are too dumb to impress anyone and too nasty for anyone to care.Boring and wildly overrated..
THE GRIFTERS (1990) ***1/2 John Cusack, Anjelica Huston, Annette Bening, Pat Hingle, J.T. Walsh, Charles Napier.
Donald Westlake's slick, serpentine screenplay adaptation of noir author Jim Thompson's novel offers up a juicy, ripe slice of pulp fiction with hip Cusack a slick con artist strictly small time, Huston as his duplicitous, estranged Mobbed up mother on the take and Bening as his slinky gal pal with a few cards up her collective sleeve.Excellently executed in the rhythms of a perfectly coiled con game about to be sprung with slick precision thanks to fine acting all around and a jolting climax thanks to a steady helm by director Stephen Frears..
John Cusack plays Roy Dillon a Grifter who plays small time tricks with the various 'marks' who he discovers in various dives and race tracks.
A devilish, twisted modern day noir with style to spare.Director Stephen Frears handles the morbid material expertly -- it walks a razor thin line between dark comedy and "too disturbing to enjoy." John Cusack plays the con-man at the film's center, torn between the affections of his mother and his lover.
Sexual tension is ripe, Westlake's adaptation doing justice to Thompson's novel, while the three leads – and Pat Hingle in super support – are on fire, bringing complex characters vividly to life as they trawl through the devilishly labyrinthine plot, adding biting humour and shallow savagery into the bargain.A top draw neo-noir that doesn't cut corners or pull its punches, from the split screen opening salvo to the pitch black finale, The Grifters delivers high quality for neo-noir fans.
His mother Lilly Dillon (Anjelica Huston) works in La Jolla for the powerful bookmaker Bobo Justus (Pat Hingle), who owns the Justus Amusement Company in Baltimore, placing bets to change the odds at the track but also stealing some money for her that she stashes in her Cadillac.
When Roy turns Myra and her offer down, the greedy women set in motion a betrayal that brings tragic consequences to each player."The Grifters" is an original and sexy film-noir of the 90's.
In the best con games, the mark doesn't realize he or she has been "taken".Roy Dillon (John Cusack) is a small-con grifter who was taught by an older con artist and magician.
Lilly is skimming off the top, betting less money than the mob has given her, and she hides the extra in the trunk of her car.The wild card is a young female grifter name of Myra Langtry (Annette Bening) who was once in a big con game with a man name of Cole (J.T. Walsh).
Annette Bening is Cusack's girlfriend and is working her way back up to a con of her own.The film is shot in an authentic 1940's film noir style and the story is a classic piece of thriller writing.
At first, I thought this was going to be a film about a big grift that would tear down our characters one by one with disgust and distrust, but instead Frears changed it to this wild dynamic between Cusack and Huston.
Stephen Frears's 1990 film noir "The Grifters" takes a different approach to the topic by emphasizing the characters pulling the cons, as opposed to the tricks.
Roy (John Cusack) is a typical grifter in LA, his mother Lilly (Anjelica Huston) places bets at horseraces, and his girlfriend Myra (Annette Bening) likes to seduce men.
That the opening sequence shows the screen split three ways only serves to emphasize the intensity that's about to follow.I wouldn't call this Frears's best movie - my personal favorite of his is "The Snapper" - but you can't deny how he masterfully sets up the story and films each scene.
Huston is dynamite as a cold-hearted con-artist who gets involved in a juicy triangle with her grown son (John Cusack) and his sexy girlfriend (Annette Bening).
John Cusack, Anjelica Huston and the gorgeous Annette Bening form an intriguing love triangle and all give good performances.Unfortunately Donald E Westlake's plot (from Jim Thompson's novel) never quite manages to pull you in and you find yourself watching 'from a distance'.
A small-time conman (John Cusack) has torn loyalties between his estranged mother (Anjelica Huston) and new girlfriend (Annette Bening) -- both of whom are high-stakes grifters with their own angles to play.This is an interesting part of John Cusack's career.
The basic premise is straightforward: small-time conperson Roy (John Cusack) tries to prosper while trying to sustain his relationships with mother Lily (Anjelica Huston) and girlfriend Myra (Annette Bening).
The Grifters also was nominated for Best Director for Stephen Frears and Best adapted screenplay for Donald Westlake.Huston, Cusack, and Bening three of the worst and yet most fascinating characters you might ever meet.
This is a 'best work' film for its featured players, young and old: John Cusack, Angelica Huston, Annette Bening, Pat Hingle -- and icon Henry Jones as the quintessential night clerk.
For a story where the three main characters have almost no redeeming traits, this is one of the most absorbing movies you will ever see.Roy Dillon (John Cusack) is a small-time con artist.
Adding to all the bad chemistry is Mrya Langtry (Annette Bening), Roy's girlfriend.Their world is peopled with men like Bobo Justus, Lilly's brutal bookie boss and Mrya's ex-partner, Cole Langley, a master of the long con.
The film is set in the late 1980's.Roy (Cusack) loves Myra (Bening), but Lilly (Huston) isn't so sure they are right together.
Through several plot twists, you find out why Myra wants Roy, why Lilly objects to Myra, why Lilly wants to hold on to Roy for herself, and the tragic ending all of them face.Huston, Bening, and Cusack all provide stunning performances in this film..
At the center of the story is John Cusack as Roy Dillon, a small-time con artist who makes a tidy enough living by scamming bartenders and cheating drunken sailors with loaded dice.
The hapless Roy, despite being a low-level thief, is a relatively decent guy, who just wants to be left alone with his penny-ante dreams; he's on to the games that Lilly and Myra play, but he nonetheless proves to be easy prey.However, the only truly successful con any of them seem to playing is in fooling themselves into believing they are leading anything but pointless, desperate lives.Yet, as bleak as it sounds, THE GRIFTERS is not a grim or depressing film.
Bening and, especially, Huston turn in pretty good performances but I've never much liked Cusack, and there's nothing in this film to improve his standing as far as I'm concerned.
(Perhaps that's a good thing.)All in all there's some nice grifter atmosphere in the movie and Cusack is interesting as a baby-faced little hustler, and Bening is sleazy, sexy and desperate, while Huston is both fawning and cowardly, and sneaky strong.
Three con-artists cross paths in Los Angeles: John Cusack is a small-time grifter waiting for his chance to cross into the big time; Anjelica Huston is Cusack's estranged mother, a cool-as-ice platinum-blonde who bets on horses for an underworld kingpin to change their odds; and Annette Bening is Cusack's sex-kitten neighbor who had a successful 10-year run working a brokerage scam.
For director Stephen Frears, the film differs from his more prestigious works, say THE QUEEN (2006), it certainly has a more noir-ish tone in assembling the intensified thrills with an uneven script (just take one example, it never quite explained how the money being left in the car after the accident, so Lilly, Huston's character, has to steal the money from her son).
It isn't about the score, it's about the people who can't live without the score.Three characters, each with a different type of "grift." There's Lily (Angelica Huston) who works racetrack odds for the mob like most people have a regular job, her son Roy (John Huston) who sticks to smaller fish like switching a $20 bill with a ten a few times a day, then there's Myra (Annette Bening), Roy's girl, who likes long cons with big payoffs in the Mametian sense.
ANGELICA HUSTON is the mother from hell whose complex relationship with her crooked son (JOHN CUSACK) is the grist for some superb story-telling of crime and manipulation--rendered even more disturbing when you realize it resembles the real life mother-son grifters who killed several people in their quest for riches and are now serving life sentences in prison.
The story is completely engrossing from beginning to end, never letting up the pace, with suspenseful twists and turns occurring one after another so that nothing is the least bit predictable--let alone, the stunning ending.All concerned have done an excellent job, a film noir for the '90s that is every bit as gritty and satisfying as any of the best noirs from the '40s.Summing up: ANGELICA HUSTON's Oscar-nominated performance is spellbinding and ANNETTE BENING is excellent in an interesting supporting role..
The Grifters, adapted from Jim Thompson's unforgettable novel BRILLIANTLY by Donald Westlake, is by far the best film noire I've seen in at least 20 years...maybe even 30 years.In late 1990 I stood in line for my ticket with my John Cusack crazed best friend having no idea that I was about to be completely blown away.
The three main roles were played very well by Anjelica Huston, Annette Bening, and John Cusack.
The screenplay was generally spot-on and the acting was good, but I think the casting and approach were a bit off.John Cusack is a fine actor, but the Roy Dillon I read about seemed to have fun playing his tricks.
As the story unfolds, Roy finds himself caught in the middle of a three-way, sexually charged power struggle involving his scrappy, sexy, and somewhat doting mother Lily (Anjelica Huston), and his part-time, promiscuous girlfriend Myra (Annette Bening).
Cusak is excellent as pulling his viewers in with a naïve charm that makes you hope there is at least one good guy in this story.While Roy's girlfriend Myra, played by an enchantingly devious Annette Bening, uses her alluring sex appeal to get what she wants, you know there is an even more sinister side to her character.
The Grifters sees John Cusack play Roy Dillon, a grifter whose loyalties are split between his con-artist girlfriend (Annette Bening) and his estranged mother (Anjelica Huston) in a tangled web of deceit with bloody consequences.Cusack puts in a good performance as the grifter, playing the short con, making money from people wherever he can, whilst trying to avoid being seduced into the long con by Myra (Bening), while also trying to resolve a bizarre, almost Oedipal relationship with his estranged mother Lilly (Huston).
This doesn't take away from the film at all-this is a lifestyle where violence is constantly bubbling beneath the surface and many emotions are felt while watching this film as the viewer is drawn into the dark world of the grift-as the events unfold and your emotions go from fascination, horror, and a kind of despair and back again you won't be able to take your eyes off the screen-and that is a good thing because every word uttered, every action taken is pivotal to the film.(MINOR SPOILERS?)Benning's character and her complete contempt of the world particularly men is broadcast in every action she takes(she laughs uncontrollably while having sex-the laugh of contempt for her lover)-Amazing performance that should have resulted in an academy award.The relationship between Cusack and Huston is played so well and the two have so much chemistry that it's both fascinating and repelling.The final scene between them is one of the most shocking I've seen in cinema and will have to be watched VERY carefully to fully understand the final outcome which I myself was a bit confused by.To be drawn into a world like what these three inhabit-a world where everything and everyone touched is nothing but a means to an end-another game- is the true heartbreak of these people and the world they live in.
Roy Dillon (Cusack) in middle of his job gets the crap beaten out of him, and we see the two leading ladies, his mother Lilly (Huston) and his seductive girlfriend Myra (Benning) visit him in the hospital.
It tries hard to be a modern day film noir, but has neither the depth nor the range to be considered a success.John Cusack is a small time con artist (or grifter).
I'm no expert, but I think The Grifters may be the only movie about con artists where the story isn't all about whether they can pull off the big conand it's all the better for it.Instead, the story focuses on what sort of people want to make a living trying to cheat other people out of their money, what that life entails and how it ends.