The Grifters

Making a good Con Man movie at this point is no easy task. It's always fun to watch con artists pull off a job, but the genre itself is riddled with cliches. I get so tired of when you find out that the con man hero was actually being conned the whole time, by his partner or mark. That was a funny and original twist thirty years ago in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, but a tired old gag by the time it turned up ten years ago in Matchstick Men.

The Grifters is, thankfully, different from the typical con man movie. In fact, it's not like any I've ever seen. It is less interested in the act of deception and more interested in getting inside the characters and exploring the reasons why they make a living out of deceiving. Produced in 1990 by Martin Scorsese, and directed by Stephen Frears, The Grifters is a dark and gritty look at what makes the con artist tick.

John Cusack stars as Roy, a young grifter who focuses only on the small game. He learned from his mentor never to pull a long con, never to work with partners, and never to get caught. Unfortunately, he's maybe not as good as his mentor. At the start of the movie, he gets caught by a bartender he attempts to rip off and takes a baseball bat to the gut, resulting in his hospitalization for internal bleeding.

This brings his mother, Lilly (Anjelica Huston), out of the woodwork. She works at a horse racing track for a dirty bookie, betting on horses in order to mess up the odds. Lilly had Roy when she was only 14, and never has fully forgiven him for ruining her life. The feeling is mutual. Roy has issues with her methods of parenting as well.

Roy's girlfriend, Myra (Annette Bening), is also in the game. Though in her glory days, she worked long cons with the big guys, she now also works small time, largely relying on sex to get the job done. There is an instant dislike between Myra and Lilly upon meeting.

What follows is a story of deception and betrayal, as the three characters demonstrate just how far they will go to get what they want. I loved that there wasn't a "mark" or a con that they all team up to pull on somebody. It was all about the three of them.

In the case of Cusack, he's not willing to go quite as far as the women. He doesn't really have what it takes to be in the game, and that's what makes him likeable, and maybe is why his performance is not as well regarded as Bening's and Huston's, who both got Oscar nominations. He really is just as good as they are, though. This was made not long after Say Anything... with Cusack hungry for the big leagues and ready for more grown-up roles.

As said before, Annette Bening and Anjelica Huston are fantastic as well. They take each of their characters to really dark places. Moreso than with Cusack's character, who really just wants to be loved by his mother, you see through them the kind of damaged person one must be to make a life out of lying.

Stephen Frears is an extremely talented director who has made some great movies in a wide range of different genres. He is perhaps best known, in addition to The Grifters, for directing another John Cusack classic, High Fidelity. These two work together excellently. I'd go so far as to say Frears is the best Cusack director there is. They should make another movie together, it's well past time for that.

I laid off talking about the actual plot of The Grifters, because there are some twists and turns and it actually took me by surprise. The story did not play out remotely how I expected it to, and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible. It's rare and refreshing to see a Con Man movie that doesn't fall back on the usual devices of the genre.

The Lady Eve

Preston Sturges was one of the great comedy directors of the 1940's. 1941's Sullivan's Travels is one of the funniest and most touching films ever made. It's amazing to me that he made that and The Lady Eve, one after the other, in the same year.

The Lady Eve is a screwball romantic comedy starring Barbara Stanwyck as Jean, part of a father-daughter con team that sets her sights on Charles "Hopsy" Pike (Henry Fonda), the heir to a huge Ale company. She arranges a chance meeting with him on a ship on his way home from a year studying snakes in the Amazon. He falls right into Jean's hands, and falls head over heels for her, as she starts planting the seeds for the big swindle.

Things are complicated, however, when Jean starts to fall for Pike as well. When Pike's bodyguard, Muggsy, smells a rat, calls in some favors, and reveals her true identity to him, a heartbroken Pike dumps Jean. Jean, furious at being spurned, then decides to get her revenge by reentering his life as a different woman, The Lady Eve, and bleeding him dry.

The two leads are perfect in their roles. Stanwyck is excellent as the manipulative and hard-hearted Jean/Eve, who keeps her vulnerability always under the surface, and Fonda is the perfect mark as Pike, filled with a nearly endless supply of naivete and trust. When Jean reappears in his life as Eve, Pike rationalizes that Jean would never come into his home without a disguise, so the resemblance must be a coincidence.

The Lady Eve is one of the great comedies. It's smart, silly, and romantic, all at once. The dialogue is endlessly clever, and loaded with the kind of snappy one-liners that the best movies of the time (many of them Preston Sturges movies) were known for. I do like Sullivan's Travels more than this, but you really can't go wrong with either.

Paper Moon

The con man movie is a fairly limited genre. It's always fun to watch the con artist at work, but as clever as these characters can be, there are only so many tricks the filmmakers can play on the audience before we start to recognize them. After Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, it seemed like every con man movie ended with the con man himself getting conned. I'm sure that happened before D.R.S. too, but that's the earliest one I remember seeing that happened in. It was funny the once, but felt lazy and dissatisfying every time afterward. I'm looking at you, Matchstick Men!

Paper Moon probably needs no introduction, but here's a quick one anyway: It's a charming comedy from the 1970's that stars Ryan and Tatum O'Neal as a depression-era father-daughter con team. 9-year-old Tatum won an Oscar for it, and it was well deserved, because she really does own this movie.

Paper Moon is one of those classic movies that has eluded me for years. It's always nice to get to sit down and watch one of those. I had never seen a Peter Bogdanovich film. For whatever reason, when I was watching all the movies by those seventies guys, I passed him by. My theory: I had prior knowledge that while Coppola, Altman, Allen, Lucas, Scorsese, Friedkin, etc. were drawing heavily from the films of Europe and Asia for their inspiration, Bogdanovich looked to America's past, emulating the films he saw when he was a kid, instead of some foreign new wave. At the time I was watching all these directors, I hadn't really gotten into American films of the 30's and 40's, so I guess I just bypassed Bogdanovich. Now I've matured a little, seen and enjoyed a lot more of those old movies, and my mind is more open, I guess.

So, anyway, back to Paper Moon:

Ryan O'Neal stars as Mose, a guy in the midwest in the 1930's, who runs the old bible salesman grift. I say the "old" grift, because I swear I've seen it in something before, but I don't remember where. An old fling of his dies and he stops at the funeral to pay his respects, only to be tasked with the chore of taking her daughter, Addie, to extended family in Missouri. They suspect he might be the father (they have the same chin), but he vehemently denies it. We, of course, go into the movie with the knowledge that they're real life father and daughter, so the audience has no doubt of the truth. And they do have the same chin.

They give him $200 to get her there, and he quickly squanders it, without realizing that she knew about the money too. This leads to a hilarious showdown at a Coney Island diner where she demands her money back. He folds to her stubborn demand, thus putting the two of them on equal ground. Mose takes Addie on the road with him and uses the bible grift to raise the cash to pay her back. He soon realizes that Addie is clever and observant, far more observant than he is, and they become a team.

Ryan and Tatum O'Neal are really fun to watch play off each other. Their chemistry as father and daughter is real, and the fun they're having is infectious. My favorite chunk of the movie is when Mose picks up a woman at a carnival (Madeline Kahn). Addie can tell she's bad news, and feels threatened by the lack of attention she's getting, so she conspires an elaborate scheme to get rid of her.

Bogdanovich shot Paper Moon in black and white, as a throwback to the comedies of the 30's. He didn't go all the way with the cinematography, though. The camerawork is much more fluid than it was back then, and as a whole the movie looks and feels like a mix of the old and the new. It's also loaded with that snappy brand of old-timey dialogue, and a seemingly obsessive attention to period detail in the production design. I don't feel like the movie was particularly groundbreaking like the films of many of Bogdanovich's contemporaries, but a movie doesn't have to be groundbreaking to be great. Sometimes traditional is the way to go.

I'm glad I finally saw Paper Moon. It was a fun little conman comedy with a lot of heart and a satisfying ending that didn't make me feel like I, too, was getting conned.