" … a cross between a 'B' movie and Shakespeare"

The Grifters completed Frears' Hollywood doubly whammy. Although set in ostensibly different time and location to Dangerous Liaisons, it shares with Liaisons a keen sense of passionate, determined individuals gradually, spectacularly coming unravelled.

When con artist Roy Dillon (Cusack) is visited by his mother, Lilly (Huston), also a con artist, she sends Roy off to the hospital for a blow to the gut he suffered while 'working the grift'.

Roy's girlfriend, Myra (Bening), con artist #3, visits Roy, to Lily's evident displeasure. After he is released from the hospital, Roy and Myra go on a little trip, where he is propositioned to be partners in crime with Myra.

Surprisingly - even more than Liaisons - characters in The Grifters display almost mythical passions, and it's surely no real shock that overtones of Elektra lurk in the mix, even if they are at the racecourses of fixed-betting and the shadowy bars of the short-con.

Bloody and unsettling, The Grifters also betrays that streak of mordant humour and (again like Liaisons) is finely served by its leads.
John Cusack effortlessly drifts from always-interesting into the closed paddock of stardom, his weary-yet-adolescent looks a perfect foil for Angelica Huston, magnificently resurrecting a dormant career.

Annette Bening proves (for the first and quite possibly last time) how good an actress she can be : both women received Oscar® nominations.

The Grifters is a film for grown-ups, where the playfulness which occasionally surfaces in Gumshoe or The Hit fries under a Godless hardboiled sun.

Nowhere is its link to that golden age of film-making plainer than in Elmer Bernstein's punchy and muscular score.

It's also one of the best-looking movies of the last 20 years, combining the deep chiaroscuro of hotel rooms, dodgy offices and gin-soaks with dazzling blue skies and Huston's striking wardrobe of white, a wardrobe you just know will end up bloodstained……

1990 USA 119 mins