Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		2.5
Overall		3.5

The Grifters Blu-ray Movie Review

Who's grifting whom?

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman February 8, 2013

The Grifters really should have been one of those “knock it out of the ballpark” hits, and yet quite strangely, it wasn’t. Released late in 1990, the film was director Stephen Frears’ follow up to his immensely successful Dangerous Liaisons, and it had been a personal pet project of sorts for co-producer Martin Scorsese (one of the film’s other co-producers was noted preservationist and restorer Robert A. Harris). Toplining the cast was Anjelica Huston, whose cachet may frankly have not been quite what it was directly after her 1985 Oscar win for Prizzi’s Honor, but who had just gotten another Academy Award nomination the year prior to The Grifters for Enemies, A Love Story (she would go on to get a Best Actress nod for The Grifters). Also on hand were John Cusack, who had just enjoyed one of his biggest breakout roles in Say Anything... and Annette Bening, not quite yet the major star she would soon become, but who, in the small world department, was just coming off of Milos Forman’s Valmont, another adaptation of the same source material that inspired Dangerous Liaisons. The Grifters was based on a novel by noted pulp fiction writer Jim Thompson (Thompson worked largely uncredited on a couple of Stanley Kubrick films, including The Killing and Paths of Glory, but he wrote the source novels that inspired both versions of The Killer Inside Me and The Getaway). Adapting Thompson’s novel for the screen was another noted author, Donald E. Westlake, a writer who had seen several of his own novels adapted (for better or worse) into films. Finally, The Grifters featured yet another memorable score by the inimitable Elmer Bernstein, working a kind of proto-jazz territory that he had helped to introduce to the film medium back in the 1950s. And yet despite largely favorable reviews and an ultimate four Oscar nominations (Frears, Bening and Westlake were nominated along with Huston), The Grifters never became a bona fide hit, and instead had to develop a lot of its long term appeal in the intervening years of cable broadcasts and home video.

Perhaps part of the perceived issue with The Grifters is its overall unusually sunny ambience, something that is distinctly at odds with its proto-noir subject matter. A lot of down and dirty films have been set in the amber hued climes of Los Angeles (L.A. Confidential ), but few have so deliberately dabbled in the irony of such a sundrenched environment surrounding the absolutely shady shenanigans of a trio of con artists. (It might be useful to pause for a moment and discuss the word grifter. It really had fallen out of general parlance before this film reinvigorated public awareness of it, and according to several sources, it’s a relatively new formulation in any case, evidently appearing in the early years of the twentieth century as a slang term, probably etymologically related to graft. As the film itself exploits in its opening segment, the term was a favorite among the literati, including lyricist Lorenz Hart, who incorporated it into his iconic collaboration with Richard Rodgers in the song The Lady is a Tramp. Basically, a grifter is a swindler, a con artist, a person out to make a quick buck by cheating people.)

It might be tempting to call The Grifters a morality tale, except that there’s a rather shocking lack of morals on display throughout the film. In a split screen gambit early in the film that even director Stephen Frears admits was rather old fashioned we meet our three main characters: Roy Dillon (John Cusack), a two bit conman whose favorite scam is showing bartenders a $20 bill then quickly switching to a $10 to pay; his girlfriend, Myra Langtry (Annette Bening), a supposedly empty headed sex kitten who uses her feminine wiles to get anything and everything she wants from a series of unsuspecting (usually older) males; and Roy’s mother Lilly (Anjelica Huston), the most “professional” of the bunch, an employee of a gangster who uses Lilly in a complicated scheme which lowers the odds on racehorses (a system which has since become impossible with newer technologies).

The film perhaps is structurally too convoluted for its own good, with one quick flashback giving us some of Roy’s story, and another, much longer one providing some background on Myra, two elements which perhaps could have been handled more artfully in quicker dialogue setups. The main thrust of the story turns into a kind of bizarre family drama where Lilly attempts to get Roy out of the con game, while at the same time Myra decides she needs to arrange a “divorce” for Lilly and Roy (there is more than a hint of incest sprinkled throughout the film). That leads to a series of devastating consequences, as each of these characters spirals into further depths of moral turpitude (and in two cases, even more than that).

Another thing which might be at least potentially off putting to some prospective audience members is the fact that the film is about conmen (and women), and thus is perhaps expected to feature some convoluted Sting-esque plot mechanics, when The Grifters is at its heart (black though that heart may be) more of a character study. (The closest thing this film comes to The Sting is in the long flashback sequence giving us some insight into Myra’s past.) In this regard, the film is in its own nasty little way a rather splendid follow up to Frears’ Dangerous Liaisons. In both films we find a trio of characters attempting (at times not all that seriously) to find a moral center and discovering nothing but the gaping maw of a vacuum.

The Grifters Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Grifters is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Echo Bridge Entertainment and Miramax Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. While this isn't the sharpest looking high definition presentation imaginable, it's still a considerable upgrade over the DVD, with decently saturated (if sometimes admittedly pallid) color, good fine detail and an obvious layer of natural looking grain (some of the opticals have a good deal more than a mere layer, as should be expected). The elements still reveal some weaknesses, with occasional density and emulsion issues that were also clearly visible on the previous DVD. In one regard, that should put those who fear overly aggressive digital tweaking at ease, since it's obvious no restoration work has been done on the title. But some might have wished for at least a minimal clean up here, as my hunch is this film could look at last marginally better than it does in this presentation. As it stands, The Grifters is well above average, but certainly far short of reference quality.

The Grifters Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Grifters features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mix that ably supports the relatively modestly structured soundtrack of this film. Some of the more crowded scenes, like Lilly's jaunts at the racetrack and a couple of bar scenes with Roy, have decent enough depth, even if things are obviously fairly narrowly focused across a standard soundfield. Elmer Bernstein's music sounds great and well supported by this lossless track. Dialogue is also very cleanly presented. There's not a lot to write home about with regard to this mix, but there's also next to nothing to complain about, either.

The Grifters Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Feature Commentary offers several people involved in the production, including Stephen Frears, Donald E. Westlake, Anjelica Huston and John Cusack. From the sounds of things, these participants were all recorded separately and then rather artfully edited together to provide a rather interesting and broadly based commentary.


• The Making of The Grifters (480i; 16:24) is a really good retrospective looking at the genesis of the project and its ultimate production. The film clips included look like they've been anamorphically squeezed to fit the 4:3 frame.


• The Jim Thompson Story (480i; 7:59) is a brief but interesting biographical sketch of the author, including interviews with Robert Polito, who wrote a book about Thompson. Both Polito and Donald E. Westlake comment about how dark, even nihilistic, Thompson's writing was.

The Grifters Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Grifters, much like its three main characters, isn't quite what it seems to be on its surface. If you're expecting an overly convoluted caper film, you'll probably be at least a little disappointed by this kind of smarmy at times character study. But as a portrait of three destitute characters trying to remain balanced in their own self-imposed vertiginous worlds, the film could hardly be better. The three leads are all exceptional, and Frears directs with his usual flair and economy. Bolstered by some superb supporting performances by the likes of fantastic character actors like Henry Jones and Pat Hingle, The Grifters hopefully will get another chance to hit it out of the ballpark with this new Blu-ray release. While the video and audio here aren't top notch, they're also not half bad. With caveats noted, The Grifters comes Recommended.