The Grifters (film)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
The Grifters is a 1990 neo-noir film directed by Stephen Frears and produced by Martin Scorsese. It is based upon The Grifters, a pulp novel by Jim Thompson.
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 when he is beaten after 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 is bleeding internally. When medical assistance finally comes, Lilly confronts the doctor involved, and threatens to have the man killed if her son dies.
At the hospital, Lilly meets and instantly 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.
Myra describes her long association with another grifter, Cole, and how they took advantage of wealthy investors in business con-job, including a greedy oil investor, Gloucester Hebbing. The anecdote is recounted in a serio-comic flashback sequence. The flashback scene takes place in plush office building and culminates in a fake FBI raid with a fake shooting of Myra to discourage Hebbing from going to the police.
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 identifying it as 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.
