Rating: 
Summary: "A thing like this rarely happens..."
Review: Those of us who love this film, love it a lot. It is one of my all time top films that I watch shamelessly for record numbers of times and love the same, if not more. So, The Grifters is right up there on my big board along with Body Heat, Black Widow, Peggy Sue Got Married, Hannibal, Silence of the Lambs, Diabolique (the original)and Splendor in the Grass (the original)and The Long Good Friday. Atmosphere, performances, dazzling movie style and grace, heart and soul.I will never understand how Jeremy Irons, during his visit with James Lipton on Inside the Actor's Studio, could possibly state that American films lacked soul while the British films had long since cornered the market in that particular quality. The Grifters is as loaded to the gills with every quality necessary to film greatness as the greatest British, or any other European film ever made. This film always has impressed me as a very close relation to the fabulous "Long Good Friday" with Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren (English Gangster film par exellence). These folks are not burdened with the need to justify their lives or livelihoods. Remember Bob Hoskins character reminiscing fondly about his boyhood start as a gangster doing some scam with cars and intimidation. Whenever the grifter or the gangster gets a big dose of self-righteous indignation, it is alway for his or her own benefit and never applied to another victim, harmless or otherwise. I love the blurring of eras in the Grifters, the feeling that although the story is depicted in the 1980's, it has the rich, indefinable quality of Alfred Hitchcock's films from the 1950's. The Grifters takes the American film to the top of the world's cinema and challenges the rest of the world to do better. On a sadder note, it is also the pinnacle of American short-sightednes and just plain old bourgeois lack of artistic sense, not to award films like Grifters the big awards that are so well deserved. Perhaps the Academy feels that you can only let a good independent film have its day every ten or so years and let the Cannes Film Festival, or Sundance, or whoever take care of the rest of the finest productions of cinematic artistry.
Rating:
Summary: Film Noir Nouveau.....With Angelica!!!!
Review: We love all the actors....Pat Hingle and CIGAR included. Scripts in film noir, are a challenge.....NOT SO HERE! The director takes them to a true masterpiece of suspense/terror. Benning has never been better/Huston made my spine tinkle. Cusak a male totally between rock and hard place with his females.
Rating: 
Summary: Great cast amid some plot contrivances
Review: What Lilly Dillon (Anjelica Huston in a long tight dress) is doing in this movie is laying off a bookie's bets. But, like a lot else in this plot-challenged movie, it's not really realistic. The way it's suppose to work is this: the bookie takes in some big time money on a long shot. This understandably scares the bookie since the fix may be on (or the nag might win legitimately) and if so, he's out a whole lot of money. So to protect himself, HE bets on the nag (using a confederate at the track). This is called hedging. Hedging, whether in sports betting or in the stock or commodities markets works like an insurance policy. But it comes at a price. Take a simpler case. The Yankees are entertaining the Dodgers at Yankee Stadium. The bookie gets a couple of $10,000 bets on the Dodgers. Since his daily handle is usually about half that, he begins to sweat. Sure, he'll have a $20,000-day if the Yankees win, but what if the Dodgers win? Then he's out big bucks and maybe out of business. So what does he do? He hedges; that is he goes to a bigger bookie or to his Lilly in Las Vegas and lays off the action with a $20,000 bet on the Dodgers. Now if the Dodgers win he breaks even and lives to book another day. If the Yankees win, he still breaks even (instead of winning $20,000). But that's the price he pays for laying off, for hedging. Call it insurance. Now the problem with all this in the movie is that Lilly cannot be at every race track in the country. So for Director Stephen Frears to make the action plausible he needs to show that Lilly's regular job is to hang out in California (by the phone!) to cover the West Coast tracks in case a lot of strange money comes in that the bookie needs to lay off. Presumably this is what Lilly is doing in the movie. For more realism, Frears could have shown Lilly hanging by the phone, working for several bookies. Frears has a great cast and they do a fine job. But the plot contrivances keep this from being a really top notch noir flick. Worse stupidity is the scene in which Myra (Annette Bening) finds a motel key on her 100-plus key ring to open Lilly's motel door. Even though Lilly is on the run, apparently she doesn't bother with a second lock, or the chain lock. (Sure.) Second worse stupidity is Lilly sitting in the track's parking lot in full view of the grandstand overhead (although admittedly many feet away) with the trunk of her car open and a drawer full of money exposed for all the world to see. She doesn't have to play with her money in the parking lot. She can wait until she gets to her motel. But this contrivance allows Myra to see the money with binoculars. And as for Roy Dillon (John Cusack) hiding his money inside some strangely thick clown paintings in his living room...I don't think so. And Dillon finding one die on the floor of the dining room car of the train doesn't work either because later he has to "find" the other one (an action we don't see) so he can fleece the sailors with his loaded dice.
Not all the action is unrealistic however. Roy Dillon's little hustle with the flashing of the twenty and the switch to the ten is an actual con done innumerable times; and the reaction of bar keep who catches Dillon in the act is perfect, illustrating how people who work at cash registers feel about people who work little cons on them. And the business beginning when Lilly doesn't lay off the money on "Troubadour," and hears the very sad news on the radio that the horse actually wins the race, and then gets punished by her boss, is realistic because he is out some serious money. By the way, a person in Lilly's position, in effect becomes a bookie herself, if she wants to. She can bet a little less on the nag and pocket the change when the nag loses, as the nag usually will. Of course if she bets nothing, the tote board odds don't go down and so the bookie will know. Worse is when she doesn't bet and the nag comes in. Now she has to pay the bookie out of her own money. In the case of Troubadour, a 70 to one shot, obviously she couldn't afford to pay off and so had to take a beating, literary. The dialogue between her and Bobo (Pat Hingle) is perfect if you understand that he knows that she steals a little, here and there. Be forewarned that the subplot is Oedipal and spicily played in parts. I'm sure Huston and Cusack had a few laughs off camera, but we are left not really knowing whether Lilly really is his mother or not. (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. In short, the cast is interesting and they do a great job. See this for Anjelica Huston who makes a complex character real.
Rating: 
Summary: Dissappointing
Review: With John Cusack, Annette Bening and Anjelica Huston's help, this movie is a 3, without them it would be a 1. John Cusack's character Roy Dillon is a small time con man following in the footsteps of his mother Lily, played by Anjelica Huston. His girl friend the sleazy Myra Langtry is played by Annette Bening. Everything about these three is the con. Roy's relationship with his mother has been jaded by it since he was a child. The importance of the "work" has overshadowed their relationship since day one and continues to do so. When Roy's mother's visit after a long separation coincides with a "big" con his sleazy girlfriend has cooked up, everything falls apart. Con men rarely thrive in packs and this crowd shows you why. This movie has little substance on why these shallow people stayed in the lives they had and offered little depth into what moved them other than the "con". You just get a glimse of their shady ploys and sleight of hand and wind up caring about them as much as they do their victims. When you are done watching this movie you will feel like you've been conned. I know I did. Little substance and no redeeming features, I hate to see these wonderful actors wasted on it.
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