Although “The Grifters” has been quietly updated, its soul is pure ‘40s and ‘50s and its visuals, in Oliver Stapleton’s cinematography, bend the noir conventions wonderfully to the present.
Now director Stephen Frears and novelist/screenwriter Donald Westlake have tackled Thompson’s icy consideration of mother love in the rackets and turned it diamond-hard and mesmerizing. Then this year James Foley’s “After Dark, My Sweet” caught the mood, the desert light, the doomed gallantry of Thompson’s characters exactly and, in the shifting levels of Jason’s Patric’s performance, carried a hauntingly tragic sense. Jim Thompson’s “existential pulp” novels, most of them set among emotional badlands, have been fueling movies for years the very best of the early crop was Bertrand Tavernier’s “Coup de Torchon,” which transposed Thompson’s “Pop. In that moment, the sense of why they grift is nailed. There’s a lovely bit at the beginning of “The Grifters” (at the AMC Century 14) when each one of its three unflappable con artists-Anjelica Huston, John Cusack and Annette Bening-pauses on the way to the day’s new “grift.” They are at three different locations and as the screen splits into thirds, all three look around for just an instant and not even sunglasses can obscure the alertness on each one’s face they’re about to fleece that dumb chump, their fellow man, and they can hardly wait to get at it.
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