Actors - The Grifters

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	Actors - The Grifters

The Grifters is a 1990 neo-noir film directed by Stephen Frears. It is based upon The Grifters, a novel by Jim Thompson.

The film

The plot

The Grifters tells the story of Lilly Dillon, a long-time female con artist who begins to rethink her life when her son Roy, also a grifter, suffers an almost-fatal injury due to a failed scam. Lilly works for a bookmaker, Bobo, handling playback at the tracks, that is, betting money to lower the odds of longshots. While driving to the La Jolla races, she stops at Los Angeles to visit Roy, whom she hasn't seen in eight years. She finds him in a miserable state: he has been hit with a baseball bat trying to con a bartender, and has an internal bleeding. Initially, a bookie refuses to find help for Roy when Lilly pleads with him for it. But when medical assistance finally comes, Lilly confronts the bookie and in stone cold fashion, threatens to have the man killed. This only indicates the amoral personality that Lilly has possessed her entire life.

At the hospital, Lilly meets and despises Myra, Roy's girlfriend, who also lives on scams and is a few years older than her son. She urges her son to quit the grift and leaves late for La Jolla, missing a race where the winner was paying 70-1. For this mistake, Bobo burns her hand with a cigar.

Upon leaving the hospital, Roy takes Myra to La Jolla for the weekend. On the train, she notices him conning a group of sailors, and later reveals that she is also on the grift and looking for a partner for a long-con operation.

Roy hesitates at first, but finally refuses her proposition, fearing she may try to dupe him herself. Myra sees his mother behind Roy's decision and moves for revenge. She hints to Bobo that Lilly keeps a large sum of money stashed in her Cadillac, money she had stolen from him over the years. Lilly is warned by a friend and flees. Myra follows with the intention of killing her.

Roy is called by an FBI agent to identify his mother's body, found in a motel room with the face completely destroyed. While sustaining it was Lilly's, he silently notes a cigar burn is missing from her right hand. Coming back home, he finds Lilly trying to steal all his money so that she may keep running away from Bobo. She had shot Myra while being attacked at the motel and arranged things so that it looked like she was the one who got killed.

Roy refuses to let her go with his money. In a desperate attempt to get away, she hits him with a suitcase and unintentionally breaks a glass onto his neck, slashing his artery, causing him to bleed to death. This in turn, causes Lilly to break down in tears as her son's lifeless body remains on the floor. Silently packing up the money, Lilly exits the room and descends off into the night but with the knowledge of how she extracted the money, by taking the life of her own son in the process.

Influences

The Grifters was modeled after B-grade films noir. Critical reviews pointed out similarities between this movie and genre classics such as Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street
, Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place
, Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly
and Fritz Lang's The Big Heat
. According to Frears, Bening had based her character on similar roles played by Gloria Grahame.

It is also worth mentioning that Westlake's screenplay develops the psychological background laid out in Thompson's novel way beyond the usual cynicism that constitutes the distinctive mark of film noir heroes. The three leading characters are crooks, but it's ultimately their obsessive and often disturbing passions that push the plot towards its inevitable tragic ending. For instance, the film explores the problematic relationship between Roy and his mother, hinting at a level of sexual tension and incest that may also partially account for Myra's aggressive behaviour towards Lilly.

In this sense, The Grifters may be seen as following a subgenre of film noir that enhances the dramatic aspects of character interaction. Movies in this tradition include Stanley Kubrick's The Killing
, which had Thompson himself as a screenplay co-writer, and a few pictures by John Huston, most notably The Asphalt Jungle
and The Maltese Falcon.

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