The Grifters (Stephen Frears, 1990)

John Cusack and Anjelica Huston in The Grifters

Lilly Dillon: Anjelica Huston
Roy Dillon: John Cusack
Myra Langtry: Annette Bening
Bobo Justus: Pat Hingle
Mr. Simms: Henry Jones
Cole: J.T. Walsh
Joe: Gailard Sartain
Gloucester Hebbing: Charles Napier
Jeweler: Stephen Tobolowsky

Director: Stephen Frears
Screenplay: Donald E. Westlake
Based on a novel by Jim Thompson
Cinematography: Oliver Stapleton
Production design: Dennis Gassner
Film editing: Mick Audsley
Music: Elmer Bernstein

Stephen Frears's ice-cold neo-noir The Grifters works as well as it does because of the trio of top-notch leads, a tough-minded screenplay based on a tough-minded novel, unsentimental direction, and a magnificent score by Elmer Bernstein. In short, it's an easy film to admire, but a harder film to like. If it has a message to convey it's that crime may pay, but at the expense of all humanity, including love and family. The most brutal moment comes not with bloodshed, but with Lilly Dillon's attempt to seduce her own son, a moment that has been foreshadowed earlier when Myra Langtry voices her suspicion that Roy Dillon has been sleeping with his mother. Anything goes, it seems, when you're on the grift. This was the film that made Annette Bening a star -- after a well-reviewed but little-seen performance in Frears's Valmont a year earlier -- and earned her the first of her four Oscar nominations. Adopting a Marilyn Monroe-ish little girl voice as Myra, she makes the character a near-equal to Anjelica Huston's Lilly, both of them trying to manipulate Roy to succeed in their respective grifts. But as good as Bening, Huston, and John Cusack are in their roles, the film also rides smoothly on its supporting actors, especially Pat Hingle as the brutal Bobo, Henry Jones as a kind of Greek-chorus hotelier, and the always marvelous J.T. Walsh as the cunning but ultimately fragile Cole. (Walsh's early death -- he was only 54 when he succumbed to a heart attack in 1998 -- deprived us of one of our most watchable supporting actors. Like Bill Paxton, whose death at 61 earlier this year recalls the premature departure of Walsh, he was one of those actors who made any film he appeared in just a little bit better.)