What a great picture to see bumped to 4K … when that grinding Elmer Bernstein cue launches the titles, we know we’re in for a hardboiled experience. Roy, Lilly and Myra are highly attractive ‘poison’ people in their own cheap rackets — hooking, fixing racetrack odds and grifting, aka practicing petty con-man ripoffs on unsuspecting ‘suckers.’ They’re bad enough separately but any combo is toxic. The great director Stephen Frears guides John Cusack, Anjelica Huston and Annette Bening into some of the best performances of their careers. It’s the best filmic adaptation yet of Jim Thompson.

The Grifters 4K
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 1246
1990 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 110 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date January 21, 2025 / 39.95
Starring: John Cusack, Anjelica Huston, Annette Bening, Pat Hingle, J.T. Walsh, Noelle Harling, Charles Napier, Henry Jones, Sandy Baron, Gailard Sartain, Stephen Tobolowsky, Jeremy Piven, Frances Bay, Steve Buscemi, Billy Ray Sharkey.
Cinematography: Oliver Stapleton
Production Designer: Dennis Gassner
Costume Design: Richard Hornung
Film Editor: Mick Audsley
Original Music: Elmer Bernstein
Screenplay by Donald E. Westlake from the novel by Jim Thompson
Produced by Robert A. Harris, Jim Painter, Martin Scorsese
Directed by Stephen Frears

Stephen Frears directed the superior, highly recommended crime fables  The Hit and  Dirty Pretty Things. Movies have been made of Jim Thompson’s books, especially the recommended Coup de torchon by Bertrand Tavernier and  After Dark, My Sweet by James Foley, which is tops for pulp sleaze appeal. But so far, the best slice of Jim Thompson on film is still Frears’ The Grifters. This Criterion release lets it shine in 4K Ultra HD — it’s the kind of movie that benefits from the boost.

Those 200 pages qualify as great literature, sold for fifty cents at the dime store.

The Grifters grabs audiences the way Jim Thompson’s nasty crime tales kept us glued to every page. Thompson’s most celebrated thrillers pull us into the minds of deranged and deluded misanthropes. Trapped in perverse lifestyles and warped by their inner demons, Thompson’s characters conduct cynical inner commentaries that reflect their maladjustment. Thompson’s slightly stylized, acidic dialogue transfers well in author Donald E. Westlake’s screenplay. Some significant and useful changes are made to the characters and storyline.

We know we’re in for a great ride from the first baleful notes of Elmer Bernstein’s superb music score, which has a pounding quality reminiscent of Gerald Fried’s music for Kubrick’s  The Killing. The narrative has what A.I. Bezzerides called a ‘mousetrap’ quality: just a few moving parts aligned to produce the desired result. You can’t remove or rearrange any of the components. It’s irreducible.

Despite having no visible source of income young Roy Dillon (John Cusack) has his own car and keeps a low-rent apartment near downtown Los Angeles. He’s a petty grifter, a conman who cheats at cards and short-changes bartenders. Roy learned his sleazy trade from an old-timer Mintz (Eddie Jones). He uses his good looks and glib manner to prove himself smarter than other people, who he considers squares and suckers. Living quietly, Roy revels in his secret status.

Roy’s mother Lilly (Anjelica Huston) bore him when she was very young. She works as a racetrack odds manipulator for the Mob, and the vicious gangster Bobo Justus (Pat Hingle) won’t let her quit. Lilly is skimming from her operating funds to accumulate a cache of ‘escape’ money. It’s a big risk because Bobo’s men watch everything, and if she’s caught she’ll be killed.

Roy’s girlfriend Myra Langtry (Annette Bening) is a hooker forever on the prowl for a potential new swindle; she is likewise pathologically focused on cheating people. She’s most proud of several years spent working with Cole Langley (J.T. Walsh), a major con-man who mounted elaborate charades to bilk investors like Glouster Hebbing (Charles Napier) for hundreds of thousands of dollars. These days Myra is scraping by. She occasionally must fall back on selling her body, as when the rent comes due.

The story appeals because all three of these very bad people can be charming. Each runs a risky, walk-a-tightrope life. We get a primer on the evil some people will commit in order to subsist without a ‘straight’ job in a society based on money. As the most needy of the three, Myra uses all of her talents to find her ‘in’, a wedge, an angle.

The Grifters gets into gear when Roy suffers internal injuries inflicted by a bartender who sees through one of his cheap tricks. That brings Lilly and Myra together, and sparks fly — each woman is possessive, with a deep mean streak. Myra instantly intuits that Roy and Lilly aren’t on the square, and watches both of them closely. When the opportunity arises she wastes no time figuring out how to separate Lilly from her illicit nest egg.

Screenwriter Donald E. Westlake is a celebrated author as well. His ‘Richard Stark’ novels became the basis for the great picture  Point Blank. It was followed by The Hot Rock,  Cops and Robbers, and  The Outfit. A lot of Jim Thompson’s dialog is retained. Westlake sees to it that nothing is forced or artificial. The words can feel stylized, but never parodic or Chandleresque:

“You’re working some angle, and don’t tell me you’re not because I wrote the book!”

With no extraneous narrative detours, Thompson’s ‘annihilating melodrama’ progresses with a simple logic. Lilly isn’t easily intimidated but her episode with the the mobster Bobo Justus is a harrowing ordeal — she can’t hide her terror. Actor Pat Hingle bests his superb performance in Elia Kazan’s  Splendor in the Grass — from 31 years before. We don’t need to see Bobo again to fear his retribution. J.T. Walsh’s unhinged con artist Cole personifies greed taken to a delirious extreme. Myra Langtry remembers the decadent lifestyle she shared with Cole as pure heaven. Apartment manager Gailard Sartain and investor Charles Napier are pigeons that fall for Myra’s oversexed come-ons; Stephen Tobolowsky is a jeweler who understands her transactional nature.

Myra is a master at convincing men that they mean something to her, but her wiles don’t work on Roy, whose loner philosophy doesn’t accommodate permanent relationships. Roy looks young and green, but Myra is a fool to think that he’ll succumb like one of her suckers. When he hears the wrong words, Roy’s defenses go up . . . he trusts no-one, not even his own mother.

Director Frears and his actors manage one of the few fully believable incestuous relationships we’ve seen. Lilly all but abandoned Roy emotionally when he was a child, which may account for his cosmic-level need to strike back at the world in general. Their hurtful exchanges take a pause, making a reconciliation seem possible. Will Roy suggest that they escape their dangerous lifestyles together?  The story instead dives into full-on tragedy. When really desperate, Lilly will pull the same tricks that Myra does.

John Cusack is mainly known for youthful hipster, but I’ll take The Grifters as his performance that impresses me most. Roy Dillon is a ‘hollow’ personality. He must maintain a bogus persona, as with his gentleman act for the seedy apartment manager (Henry Jones).  Just as Lilly’s thoughts never stray far from the secret compartment in the trunk of her car, Roy’s existence is tied up with those awful clown pictures on his wall. Some people claim that we all sell our souls for money, but Roy and Lilly make the tragedy explicit.

With her talent for calculating racetrack bets to affect the odds of individual races, Lilly must be a mathematical genius. Her special talent is prefigured by a math prodigy in Abraham Polonsky’s  Force of Evil, who also places targeted racetreack bets to fix the winners for the Mob. Lilly makes her exit in an old-fashioned elevator, a visual that echoes Mary Astor’s exit in one of the final shots from John Huston’s  The Maltese Falcon.  ↓

A quick comparison of book and movie shows Donald E. Westlake’s few but pertinent changes. In an attempt to push Myra out of the picture, Lilly tries to set Roy up with an affectionate nurse (Noelle Harling). The shift in time from 1963 to 1990 means that the nurse cannot be a victim of medical experiments from a concentration camp, as she is in the book. That wrinkle sounds a bit extreme anyway. But the perverse Jim Thompson spin is still there, with Lilly casually pimping for her son in the name of motherly love.

In the book Myra only dreams of wild cons that could bankroll an extravagant lifestyle. Myra is such a flagrant liar, perhaps we need to consider that the backstory she tells about Cole may be nothing more than a lie to help her gain access to the money she’s sure Roy has stashed somewhere. After all, her tale about a stock swindle is as wild as the con in the hit movie  The Sting.

Martin Scorsese produced with his frequent partner Barbara De Fina and the film restoration expert Robert A. Harris. Variety once described Scorsese as ‘a maker of films about people we wouldn’t like to know.’ Stephen Frears is slightly warmer and less academic in his filmmaking, in that we end up investing our emotions in these sordid characters. They’re thoroughly heartless crooks, but they cultivate their charisma just as much as do corporate executives.

The end of the film returns to an ordinary nighttime view of L.A.’s 6th Street, which in this context comes off as coldly indifferent to the anguish of the lone driver in Roy’s junky used car. Crime thrillers often make city lights look sinister. Title designer Julian Rothenstein stays away from crime movie graphic clichés and lends a real Jim Thompson pulp veneer to the main titles. this is a Hard city about Bad people doing Bad things. The Grifters is faithful to Thompson, which is a real accomplishment.

The Criterion Collection’s 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray of The Grifters 4K always looked great. The sharper, brighter image really pops; the 4K digital restoration’s more sensitive contrast finds new values of black in the darker shots. Roy Dillon lives at the Bryson near MacArthur Park. Don’t go looking for it now because the district has become really scary.

As the show reaches its peak the menace of Elmer Bernstein’s music seems even deeper. It’s one of his most effective scores.

It’s a combo disc with the feature in both formats, 4K and Blu-ray.

Criterion brings back some good extras that the 2021 Paramount Blu-ray skipped. Stephen Frears shares an entertaining commentary with Cusack, Huston and Donald E. Westlake; Frears tells a story about the film’s last shot that’s really funny.

Paramount had produced an older making-of documentary and an excellent piece about author Jim Thompson that resurface here. The Thompson featurette posits the biographical theory that Thompson was writing about his own psychology, substituting criminal obsessions for alcoholism. Another long-form making-of docu, Seduction, Betrayal, Murder is from 101 Films.

Criterion’s disc producer Abbey Lustgarten adds an excellent new item — a great retrospective piece with Annette Bening. She marvels at the costumes and hairstyles for herself and Anjelica Huston — that they both wear the same dress is an important part of the plot.

Geoffrey O’Brien’s insert folder essay is a smart, efficient analysis of the show.

Released by Paramount on September 17 is a  plain-wrap DVD version of The Grifters. It looks fine; I include the link here because I told the distributor I’d review it. The movie is of course the same great story.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

The Grifters 4K
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Audio commentary with Stephen Frears, John Cusack, Anjelica Huston, and screenwriter Donald E. Westlake
New interview with actor Annette Bening
Making-of documentary featuring Cusack, Frears, Huston, Westlake, and production designer Dennis Gassner
Making-of documentary Seduction, Betrayal, Murder with Frears, Stapleton, editor Mick Audsley, executive producer Barbara De Fina, and coproducer Peggy Rajski
Docu The Jim Thompson Story featuring Westlake and Robert Polito, biographer of Jim Thompson
Insert folder with an essay by Geoffrey O’Brien.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: January 7, 2024
(7256grif)

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