The Screengrab : the grifters

The Best & Worst Get Rich Quick Schemes In Cinema History! (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 21:00:00 GMT

FARGO (1996)

Any number of Coen Brothers movies revolve around bumbling get-rich-quick schemes, many of them involving kidnapping, but few characters in film history have gotten in as far over their heads as car salesman Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy). Jerry’s not looking to make a big score just for the sake of accumulating wealth; as the movie begins, he’s already in deep financial doodoo, although we never find out the exact nature of his troubles. To his credit, one of his schemes is not so boneheaded: a property investment proposal he brings to his wealthy father-in-law Wade Gustafson. In fact, the plan is so good Wade decides to take on the investment himself rather than lending the necessary money to Jerry – though he does offer a nominal finder’s fee. In Jerry’s mind, this betrayal may make his alternate plan more palatable – arranging for the kidnapping of his wife and bilking Wade out of the ransom money. This plan goes much, much worse, however, and before it’s over Wade and his daughter are dead, Jerry is led away in handcuffs and Steve Buscemi is fed into a wood chipper. All that for a little bit of money. (SVD)

THE GRIFTERS (1990)

Stephen Frears’ tight little modern noir is immeasurably aided by strong efforts at every level: the source novel is one of legendary noir novelist Jim Thompson’s best, the screenplay is provided by Donald Westlake, another crime novel pro, and of course, the cast is dynamite, from the leads to bit parts to Pat Hingle’s chilling mob boss, Bobo Justus. But one of the least-noticed thematic bits of brilliance is how it treats the different layers of confidence games, and how getting rich quick through the art of the con means very different things to different people. John Cusack’s Roy Dillon is strictly a short-con operator: pulling little hustles, tricks and sleight-of-hand jobs that keep him in nice suits and decent hotels as long as he keeps moving. His mother, the determined Lilly, is much more the get-rich-quick type, handling her mobster employer’s money as he manipulates the outcome of horse races through cleverly spread-out bets. And the seductive Myra Langtry is a long con type – although she’s reduced to hustling, her specialty is big-money cons that take months or years to pay off, but when they do, they pay off in the millions. It’s a fascinating look at the economics and expectations of the day-to-day life of the habitual criminal. (LP)

HOUSE OF GAMES (1987)

There’s no heist in David Mamet’s House of Games, but there are more cons than one film should be able to support. That Mamet’s debut delivers its endless barrage of tricks and ruses with exhilarating proficiency is a tribute to the writer/director, whose interest in hard men living hard lives and pulling off very hard endeavors is encapsulated by this tale of a psychologist (Lindsay Crouse) lured by a master crook (Joe Mantegna) into a web of lies. As with most of Mamet’s work, women – in this case, Crouse’s protagonist, the lone female in a story full of men – don’t fare very well. Yet there’s something fascinating about the way the writer/director stages Crouse and Mantegna’s duel as a sort of primal battle of the sexes, the latter’s attempts to swindle the former coming off as a conflict of both gender and education (she the intellectual, he the graduate of the school of hard knocks). House of Game’s psychological warfare may not always be pleasant, but the head-games played by Mamet remain magnetic, so skillfully constructed and executed that one relishes the opportunity to be duped. (NS)

X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES (1963)

This Roger Corman sci-fi flick stars Ray Milland as Dr. Xavier, whose experiments give him the special X-ray vision that he first uses to turn a suburban dance party into his own personal stag show, only to find himself reduced to plying his trade at a carny operated by Don Rickles. Finally, though, Xavier makes the trek to Vegas to use his creepy peepers to clean up at the tables, using perhaps the best method of outsmarting Sin City that the movies have ever come up with, since it doesn't require knowledge of advanced math or buying a suit for Dustin Hoffman. We eagerly await the day when some gifted film student has the brainstorm of doing, as his thesis project, a mash-up of this movie and Scorsese's Casino, so that the haunted Xavier can flee from Don Rickles only to find himself running into Don Rickles. How could Hell be any worse? (PN)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Four, Five & Six

Contributors: Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce, Nick Schager, Phil Nugent

Pat Hingle, 1924 - 2008

Phil Nugent — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Pat Hingle, who died this past weekend at the age of 84, was one of the most familiar and dependable of all American character actors, over the course of a career in film, TV, and the stage that spanned some fifty years. Born in Denver, Colorado, he served in the navy during World War II and studied acting at the University of Texas. In the first several years of his career, Hingle appeared in the Broadway productions of Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (as Gooper, father to the no-neck monsters), Archibald Macleish's J.B. (in the title role), and William Inge's The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (for which he received a Tony nomination). He also made his movie debut (not counting an uncredited small role in On the Waterfront) in the 1957 Method melodrama End as a Man (A.K.A. The Strange One, based on a play that he had also appeared in. Hingle was offered the title role in the 1960 Elmer Gantry, but before the film started shooting, he suffered a horrendous accident, falling more than fifty feet down an elevator shaft. He was laid up for more than a year recovering from his injuries, which included a fractured skull, his left leg broken in three places, and the loss of a finger. Elmer went ahead with Burt Lancaster , who won an Academy Award for it. Hingle maintained a good-natured attitude towards the whole thing: ""I know that if I had played Elmer Gantry, I would have been more of a movie name. But I'm sure I would not have done as many plays as I've done. I had exactly the kind of career I had hoped for. And I never, never forget that I'm the recipient of the blessing that is life. It was given to me to try again."

Hingle returned to work looking older, gruffer, squatter, and craggier: an easy casting call for authority figures at a time when those roles often meant dads who don't understand their kids (as in Splendor in the Grass, where he played the father of Warren Beatty, who was all of fourteen years his junior) or cops who were either crooked or self-righteously brutal or both. He appeared with Clint Eastwood in Hang 'Em High, The Gauntlet, and Sudden Impact, played Sally Field's father in Norma Rae, starred in the original Broadway production of Arthur Miller's The Price, and did an unholy shitload TV, notably playing Colonel Tom Parker to Kurt Russell's Elvis Presley in John Carpenter's 1979 Elvis and Sam Rayburn to Randy Quaid's Lyndon Johnson in the 1987 LBJ: The Early Years.

Unlike a lot of actors who work that much, Hingle has the distinction of having continued to get better, tapping into deeper veins of regret and exposing a streak of wry humor as he started to get almost as old as his characters. Reviewing the 1985 The Falcon and the Snowman, in which he played the hardass FBI-agent father of Timothy Hutton, Pauline Kael wrote, "It's a role Hingle has played dozens of times --he's a pop-culture joke in this role--but I doubt if he has ever done it as well." Five years later, he went to town in perhaps his best movie role, the terrifying cracker crime lord Bobo Justus in Stephen Frears's Jim Thompson adaptation The Grifters, giving Anjelica Huston the shivers and making it seem as if all the secrets to the universe might be contained in the line, "You'll never shit right again." He also played Commissioner Gordon in the 1989 Batman, a role that he would reprise in three other movies, playing it alongside a total of three different different--Batmans? Batmen? Whatever. More recently, he played Ben Franklin in a late-'90s revival of the Broadway musical 1776 and turned up in the movies A Thousand Acres, Muppets from Space, Shaft, and Talladega Nights. He died at his home in Carolina Beach, North Carolina, where he decided to settle after working there shooting the 1986 Maximum Overdrive, Stephen King's directing debut. ""I really do believe there was a divine hand that headed me here," he had told a local reporter.. "I am happy that I think it's going to end here."

Donald Westlake, 1933-2008

Phil Nugent — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Donald Westlake, who died New Year's Eve, at the age 0f 75, while vacationing in Mexico, was best known as a "crime writer", and in that capacity he won three Edgar Awards (including one for Best Screenplay for his adaptation of Jim Thompson's The Grifters, directed by Stephen Frears in 1990) and was honored by the Mystery Writers of America with the title of Grand Master. But such tributes barely hint at Westlake's stature as a supreme, all-around entertainer with a wide range within his chosen specialty. After publishing his first novel, The Mercenaries, in 1960, Westlake established such a steady rate of production that, in addition to the many books he published under his own name, he also adopted more than ten pseudonyms, partly to deflect criticism of him for overtaxing the marketplace. (He may have also had other, personal reasons, for sticking the name "John B. Allan" on the 1961 book Elizabeth Taylor: A Fascinating Story of America's Most Talented Actress and the World's Most Beautiful Woman and other pseudonyms on the pulp porn novels he wrote in the 1950s and 1960s, some of them in collaboration with Lawrence Block, which have titles such as Sin Sucker and Campus Tramp.) Westlake also matched certain pseuds up with recurring characters, for instance writing a string of mysteries about a character named Mitch Tobin under the name "Tucker Coe".

His best-known alter ego was Richard Stark, who, starting with 1962's The Hunter, wrote more than twenty taut, mean thrillers about Parker, a cooled-out, super-efficient sociopath of a professional thief. Under his own name, Westlake wrote, among other titles, the John Dortmunder series, detailing the often hilarious adventures of an intelligent, hard-working, frequently put-upon crook with a knack for gaudily designed heists that tended to run into equally gaudy complications. (The series began with 1972's The Hit Rock, which he said began as a Parker novel; he realized that he needed to concoct a new hero for it when the plot started turning funny on him.) Stark and Westlake both kept 'em coming until 1974, when Parker abruptly disappeared after Westlake, as he would later say, lost internal contact with the hateful bastard. But in the late '90s, Westlake seemed to get back in touch with his Parker side, and Richard Stark began producing again, even as Westlake continued to publish under his own name such entertainments as The Ax, The Hook, and the further activities of John Dortmunder in such novels as Watch Your Back!

In addition to adapting Thompson for the Grifters screenplay (and, more recently, Patricia Highsmith for the 2005 Ripley Under Ground), Westlake wrote one terrific original screenplay, for the chilling yet witty serial-killer movie The Stepfather (1987), directed by Joseph Ruben and starring a then-unknown Terry O'Quinn. The list of Westlake novels made into movies include the 1973 caper comedy Cops and Robbers, which he adapted himself; The Hot Rock, with Robert Redford as Dortmunder; the calamitous 1974 Bank Shot starring George C, Scott; the 1982 Jimmy the Kid, in which a Dortmunder novel somehow got turned into a vehicle for Gary Coleman; the 2001 What's the Worse That Could Happen?, in which a Dortmunder novel somehow got turned into a vehicle for Martin Lawrence; and the 2005 French film Le Couperet, directed by Costa-Gavras and based on the novel The Ax. There have also been a slew of movies base on the Parker novels, though for some reason the character's name has yet to survive the screenplay adaptation process. The grandaddy of Richard Stark movies is John Boorman's 1967 Point Blank, based on The Hunter and starring Lee Marvin as the monolithically homicidal "Walker." (It was remade, in 1999, as Payback, with Mel Gibson as "Porter.") Jean-Luc Godard also used the Parker novel The Jugger as the (loose) basis for his 1966 film Made in U.S.A., without paying for the honor, which would ultimately cause his movie distribution problems in the States. Westlake's last novel, a Dortmunder number called Get Real, is scheduled to be published in the spring.

Reviews By Request: The Hot Rock (1972, Peter Yates)

Paul Clark — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Thanks to reader “Uncle Crizzle” (a.k.a. Craig Lindsey) for requesting this week’s review. As always, for instructions on how to request the next review for this feature (to run in two weeks), see the bottom of this post.

The more heist movies I see, the more I realize that the secret to a good one lies in three factors. First, the characters have to be engaging. There are only a limited number of heists one can pull onscreen, but if we enjoy the people onscreen it scarcely matters. Second, the script shouldn’t run out of ideas before the ending, so that the audience won’t be too sure where everything stands until all the pieces finally fall into place. Third- and perhaps most importantly- the movie has to be light on its feet. If the style or the storytelling becomes overbearing, the movie will turn into a slog, which is pretty much the last thing you want from a heist movie.

Peter Yates’ The Hot Rock succeeds on all three counts, with the added bonus of getting better as it goes along. In the opening scenes, I was expecting a fairly standard issue heist movie, albeit one with an impressive, quintessential seventies-era cast. But The Hot Rock has plenty of surprises up its sleeve, not least that the story’s central heist scene happens even before the midpoint of the film. Best of all, it takes itself just seriously enough that it doesn’t feel like a lark, but never too seriously. It’s a lot of fun.

But back to that central heist, which involves the titular rock, a massive diamond that’s long been a point of contention between the ruling factions of an obscure (and apocryphal) African nation. The country’s ambassador to the U.N., played by Moses Gunn, hires the recently-released-from-prison John Dortmunder (Robert Redford) to mastermind a plan to steal the stone for him. Dortmunder’s team- comprised of safecracker George Segal, driver Ron Liebman, and explosives expert Paul Sand- exhaustively plan the job which, while quaint by modern-day standards, is a pretty good one. Of course, it doesn’t quite go according to plan, and it’s the aftermath of the heist that makes the movie so enjoyable.

The Hot Rock was based on a novel by Donald E. Westlake, who I was familiar with primarily for his hard-hitting crime novels written as Richard Stark and his nihilistic screenplay for The Grifters. However, this film is based on one of Westlake’s lighter Dortmunder books, which gave me some pause since my only previous exposure to a Dortmunder story was the godawful 2001 Martin Lawrence vehicle What’s the Worst That Can Happen? That film took Westlake’s story and buried it in shticky storytelling and hammy performances until it became all but unwatchable, and I feared the worst from The Hot Rock as well.

However, the difference between the two movies is telling. Whereas the broadly comic style of What’s the Worst That Can Happen? didn’t suite Westlake’s terse prose one bit, Yates wisely plays the story straight. Primarily known up to that time as an action director (his biggest hit had been 1968’s Bullitt), Yates never leans too hard on the film’s comedy. Instead, he directs the story like a straight thriller, matter-of-factly following his band of crooks from one complication to the next. This only makes the movie that much funnier. Due to unforeseen difficulties, the original heist ends up leading to another job, then another, then yet another, each more unlikely than the last. And the team, which seemed so well-chosen at the beginning, becomes less so with each successive job. Consider that Liebman is perfect behind the wheel of damn near any car, but fairly out of sort when he finds himself in an entirely different sort of vehicle.

As I said before, the cast is a lot of fun. I’ve never been a big Robert Redford fan, but he’s a natural here as the master thief who has to keep his cool in order to think himself out of the messes in which he keeps finding himself. Segal is his usual reliable self as Dortmunder’s trusty lieutenant, all business to the outside world but always kvetching to the boss. Liebman and Sand have some good moments as the other team members. Gunn gets lots of laughs as the seemingly imperturbable diplomat, at first amused by his involvement in the crime (observe his wry smile when he states, “I am a criminal”), only to become increasingly frustrated with every new development in the case. And there’s a choice supporting role for the one and only Zero Mostel, as Sand’s shifty father. Given his over-the-top signature performance in The Producers, I sort of expected Mostel to clash with the others, but instead his outsize personality is in service of an outsize character, which allows him to fit in perfectly with the ensemble. It’s an indelible character turn, with the unfortunate side effect of making me wonder how many priceless Mostel performances we lost to the blacklist.

The Hot Rock is yet another reminder of the kind of action movies Hollywood was great at making during the seventies, but not nearly as good at today. The cast is enjoyable, the storytelling efficient, and most of all, the direction never calls attention to itself. As fun as Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s films sometimes are, there’s always a layer of self-consciousness to them, as though Soderbergh deliberately means to evoke a bygone filmmaking style. By contrast, Yates trusts in his story enough to stay out of the way, and the result is a highly enjoyable example of its genre, and a darn good entertainment in general.

So, what movie would you like me to review for the next installment of Reviews by Request? Let me know in the comments section below. To refresh your memory, here are the rules for requesting a movie to be reviewed: (1) it has to be a movie I haven’t seen, (2) it has to be available through Netflix, and (3) please only request one film. Other than that, anything is fair game. First to suggest a movie that qualifies gets their requested review. See you in two weeks!

Forgotten Films: "This World, Then the Fireworks" (1997)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 23:00:00 GMT

This past week marked the thirty-first anniversary of the death of Jim Thompson, the cult-object writer who worked on the scripts of Stanley Kubrick's The Killing and Paths of Glory, but whose real gift to film history was a shelf's worth of pulp novels (The Killer Inside Me, The Getaway, The Grifters) so intense and obsessive in their seaminess that they amount to a double-dog-dare to the movies: You think you're the repository of forbidden daydreams? Put this on the big screen! Two versions of The Getaway, including one with Sam Peckinpah's name in the credits, softened the relationship between the husband and wife bank robbers on the lam (the star of the Peckipah version, Steve McQueen, having objected to the less cheerful elements of a screenplay treatment turned in by Thompson himself); Coup de Torchon, directed by Bertrand Tavernier and based on Pop. 1280, is in motherfucking French! Even the best of all Thompson adaptations, Stephen Frears's The Grifters, is handsomely mounted and has a good vicious streak but keeps it distance from the vortex of Thompson's deeply felt hatefulness; it maps the dragon's lair down to the last molted scale but resists the urge to fling you in there by your feet and nail the door shut behind you.

To see what Thompson's special, sweaty brand of nihilistic dementia looks like uncensored, flashy but not polished, your best bet might be the 1997 This World, Then the Fireworks, based on a posthumously published Thompson fever dream. Directed by a music-video veteran named Michael Oblowitz, the movie lets you know right from its opening moments that it's not going to play coy and try to impress you with its subtle touch. The antihero and narrator, Marty, has a twin sister, Carol, and the movie opens with a little backstory interlude set on their fifth birthday. Entertainment at the party includes a shootout between their father and the wife of a woman dad's been screwing. "The man on the floor didn't have any head, hardly any head at all," Marty says, by way of explaining why he and sis got such a kick out of the festivities. Oblowitz shoots this bloody-trauma sequence in over-the-top funhouse mode, breaking out the fish-eye lenses and dousing the screen with surreally bright colors and contorted faces leaning into the camera. He doesn't pull back much when the action shifts to the "present"--which is supposed to be 1956 but looks more like some perpetual Noirville, U.S.A.--and Marty and his sister, who's become his fuck buddy, are played by Billy Zane and Gina Gershon, both looking as if they'd immigrated to our world from the covers of old paperback thrillers.

It might be a stretch to call This World a good movie, but it's true to its overheated vision in a way that's amazing to watch, partly because it makes you aware of how watered-down down pulp movies really are. Zane and Gershon thrive in this atmosphere. She's never been as eerily adorable as when she describes having suckered a couple of thugs who thought they could threaten her into staying out of their territory ("I do believe they'd never heard of chloral nitrate!"), and he looks unusually at home whether he's resigning from his job as a newspaper reporter by physically assaulting his editor (because the man has said nice things about his work, which bothers him because it makes him worry that the man might have the capacity to understand him) or romancing a masochistic woman cop (Sheryl Lee) by asking, "Are you blonde all over, or just where it shows?" If there's any real art mixed in with the cheap thrills and dazzling hype of This World, it comes from Sheryl Lee; as in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, she demonstrates a rare, brave talent for acting her character's sexual degradation that sensitizes you to the pain inside the pulp fantasy. She conveys the unhealthy attractions of Jim Thompson's cruel fantasy life even as she transcends the mindset that it grew out of.

The Ten Greatest Mentors in Movie History, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Back in 1989, in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg may have been making a point about what a bad-ass their archaeologist superhero when they cast the original James Bond as their hero's father and then showed that he felt no awe for this paragon: instead, he filched his personal style from some whip-wielding, ethically dubious mug in hobo-wear. In the forthcoming new Indy movie, Indy has acquired a son of his own, and it seems a safe bet that the movie will not end without li'l Indy looking up at his dad's craggy face and recognizing how lucky he is to have such an icon to admire and learn from. Thus does Indy come full circle as an instructional figure, an odd fate for a guy who used to sneak out of his campus office through the window so that he wouldn't have to face his students and risk earning his paycheck. If you're looking for a really impressive mentor, educator, guru, you could always do worse than get yourself into a movie.

Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), WALL STREET (1987)

Mentors don't always do well in Oliver Stone movies. The hero of the autobiographical Platoon had two of them, but one of them got killed and the hero wound up having to shoot the other. The fast-talking uber-capitalist Gekko is luckier; he has a smart wardrobe to construct around his power suspenders, an Academy Award, and a famous speech that will get replayed on the nightly news every time there's a market downturn or somebody who's worth more than the national revenue of Venezuela gets nabbed for insider trading. Actually, Gekko's weak link is agreeing to share his wisdom with the obnoxious little mouth-breather played by Charlie Sheen, the scowling kid from the wrong side of the tracks with the chip on his shoulder. Unable to work out his issues, Sheen screws his sensei over and then adds injury to, well, injury by setting him up and selling him out to the feds. Back when Wall Street was in theaters, it was possible to feel sorry for Gordon at the end, but since then it's become possible to get some perspective on these things. Today, after his stay at some Club Fed, he probably has his own reality TV show. Charlie Sheen can watch it when he gets home from his job scrubbing public toilets.

Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita), THE KARATE KID (1984)

I feel confident that Pat Morita's martial-arts-instructing janitor richly deserves his place here, even though I'm actually pretty sure that I never did see The Karate Kid. (Hell, I might be less sure if I had seen it.) Consider that this is a guy who, thanks to his Oscar-nominated performance here, managed to pull off a comeback almost a decade after he'd ill-advisedly abandoned the cast of Happy Days for a starring role in the sitcom Mr. T and Tina. (Can you tell me what ever became of Tina?) And he must be really good in this, because a lot of people lined up to see the movie, and they must have had their eyes glued to him, because I did see The Outsiders, and the one thing I remember from that is that looking at Ralph Macchio will make your eyeballs bleed. True, most of his biggest later roles would be in Karate Kid sequels, and while I'm not sure that I ever saw any of them either, I'm sure that they gave him the chance to really explore the possibilities of the character, plus he got to meet Hilary Swank. Clearly he was a fellow anyone would be well advised to seek out for advice, except on the subject of which Gus Van Sant movie to appear in. Wax on, wax off, motherfucker!

W.P. Mayhew (John Mahoney), BARTON FINK (1991)

Lured to Hollywood with the promise of easy money and big-screen glory, Barton Fink (John Turturro) quickly reaches an impasse in his writing. So with nowhere else to turn, his producer suggests that he find an established writer to mentor him. For his troubles, he gets W.P. Mayhew. Mayhew, played by a pre-Frasier John Mahoney, is a literary legend clearly modeled after William Faulkner, one who has toiled on countless screenplays for the studio in all possible genres. Tellingly, Barton first discovers Mayhew while puking out his liquid lunch in the men's room of the studio commissary. But Barton is so starstruck that he pursues him anyway, despite Mayhew's reputation as a washed-up souse. Unfortunately for the would-be student, the master whose guidance he seeks is too busy drinking and ranting at his secretary/live-in lover(Judy Davis) to give him much help with his writing, and indeed, it's Davis who's been doing most of the writing lately anyway. Yet while Mayhew isn't the mentor Fink bargained for, he's nonetheless valuable to Fink, providing him an objective lesson in what can happen to even truly great writers when they've been swallowed up by Hollywood. The lessons he teaches aren't pretty, but Barton isn't likely to forget them.

Patches O'Houlihan (Rip Torn), DODGEBALL: A TRUE UNDERDOG STORY (2004)

The schlubby regulars at Average Joe's gymnasium are facing difficult times. With their beloved gym struggling financially and facing takeover from a more sophisticated fitness center, they have to raise a boatload of money to keep from going under. So they do what any bunch of scrappy underdogs would do in a similar situation- they enter a nationwide dodgeball tournament, even though they're not especially athletic and can't compete with more experienced dodgeballers. What's a ragtag band of self-labeled Average Joes to do? Find a coach, that's what. Or more precisely, let a coach find them. But not just any coach, mind you. None other than Patches O'Houlihan (Rip Torn) a fifties-era dodgeball legend who's now confined to a wheelchair. With a mixture of abuse and tough love, Patches whips the Joes into shape using exercises such as one founded on the theory, "if you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball." Faster than you can say "Eye of the Tiger," the Average Joes are national contenders. Of course, their ascent has less to do with Patches' coaching style than it does to the demands of the plot- to say nothing of divine intervention from Lance Armstrong and Chuck Norris- but Torn is so irascibly funny in the role that it seems wrong not to include him. After all, how can you not love a guy who gets a line like, "is it necessary for me to drink my own urine? No, but I do it anyway, because it's sterile and I like the taste."

Cole (J. T. Walsh), THE GRIFTERS (1990)

Midway through its narrative, Stephen Frears's adaptation of Jim Thompson's seamiest pulp classic pulls the brakes on itself to fill in Myra's (Annette Bening) back story, to show that she learned the intricacies of the con-artist's game at the feet of the old pro Cole--played by J. T. Walsh, an actor with a blandly sturdy facade that, more often than not (Breakdown, Sling Blade, Nixon, The Last Seduction), served as the mask of a mean, sick puppy. Here, he's onscreen just long enough to show the highs of his profession (pulling off a sweet scam and celebrating after) and the lows (he goes nuts). Maybe the filmmakers wanted to get him on and off fast so that he didn't turn to the audience and make a bonus pitch for the United Way.

--Paul Clark; Phil Nugent

Click here for Part 2.