“Same as everybody’s,” says Lilly, deadpan. “What’s your objection to Myra?” asks Roy. “If not, I’ll have you killed.”Īt Roy’s bedside, Lilly meets her son’s girlfriend, Myra (Annette Bening), a scamming sex kitten who’s kissed too many frogs in her search for a prince. “My son is going to be all right,” she tells the doctor. Lilly rushes him to the hospital, where she proves remarkably persuasive. While trying to pass off ten spots as twenties, Roy got bashed in the stomach with a bat now he’s hemorrhaging. Roy isn’t pleased by her visit his platinum-haired, spike-heeled, tight-skirted mom makes him nervous. On a job in Los Angeles – which she pronounces “Los Angle-ees” – Lilly drops in on Roy (John Cusack), the son she had at fourteen and hasn’t seen in eight years. Huston’s Lilly Dillon is a grifter (con artist) who has misspent most of her life working racetracks for the Mob she bets on long shots to lower the odds.
It’s the perfect backdrop for characters whose morals are rotting in the sun along with the palm trees. Even the opening credits, featuring stark cityscapes, have a toxic allure. Westlake, British director Stephen Frears (My Beautiful Laundrette, Dangerous Liaisons) has brewed the strongest cup of Thompson yet – it’s served black, scalding and definitely no sugar.Ībounding in suspense, eroticism and dark comic twists, the film updates the story to present-day Los Angeles, but cinematographer Oliver Stapleton (Prick Up Your Ears) and production designer Dennis Gassner ( Miller’s Crossing) give it the look and feel of a classic film noir. Working from a pungent script by mystery novelist Donald E. Thompson is enjoying a cinematic renaissance this year – After Dark, My Sweet and The Kill-Off have already been released – perhaps because the lowdown scam artists of the Forties and Fifties who were his subjects seem to fit in just fine in the Nineties. The source material is a 1963 book by Jim Thompson, the pulp master who turned out twenty-nine uncompromising and uncommercial crime novels before his death in 1977. Huston’s radically unsympathetic role in The Grifters is her biggest gamble yet. Every role was a challenge that she met triumphantly. She’s still proving it, most notably as the neurotic mistress in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors, the Polish concentration-camp survivor in Paul Mazursky’s Enemies, A Love Story (another Oscar nomination) and the high-camp sorceress in Nicolas Roeg’s Witches. Then, working for the last time for her ailing father in The Dead, she played Gretta Conroy – an Irish wife haunted by a lost love – and proved them wrong. Some wrote her off in Prizz’s as a one-shot oddity. Though the film starred Nicholson and was directed by Huston, she took the Oscar for playing the malevolent Mafia princess Maerose. But the public saw her only as John Huston’s daughter and Jack Nicholson’s love until Prizzi’s Honor, in 1985. Nearly a decade later she started inching her way back in small roles (The Last Tycoon, The Postman Always Rings Twice, This Is Spinal Tap, The Ice Pirates). The thirty-nine-year-old Huston was a teenager when she made her screen debut in her father’s film A Walk With Love and Death, a medieval clinker that prompted a prudent career switch into modeling. Meryl Streep gets the press, but it’s Huston – in film after film, in large roles and small – who keeps astonishing us. This tall, sharp-featured, soft-eyed daughter of the late director John Huston confirms her position as the most exciting actress now working in movies. Huston does more than her best acting to date in The Grifters. For whatever it’s worth in this postfeminist age, Huston plays the hard case.Īnd what a hard case. One role is passionate, tender, overwhelmingly romantic the other is cool, callous, savagely pragmatic. It’s doubtful that you’ll see two bolder screen performances this year than those given by Anjelica Huston in The Grifters and Gérard Depardieu in Cyrano de Bergerac.