Hard-Luck Guy: THE GRIFTERS

By RICHARD CORLISS

THE GRIFTERS

Directed by Stephen Frears

Screenplay by Donald E. Westlake

When Jim Thompson died in 1977, he was broken and damn near broke. Not one of his 29 novels -- tough stuff with titles like Savage Night and A Swell- Looking Babe -- was in print. He had fiddled on the fringes of Hollywood, helping to write Stanley Kubrick's The Killing and Paths of Glory, but found no steady work. His one solace was booze, in punishing quantities. No wonder the typical Thompson antihero was a smart guy who got outsmarted by fate, fast company or himself.

In his final days Thompson promised his wife that he would be "famous after I'm dead about 10 years." Now he is. His reputation as a hard-boiled novelist is within spitting distance of Hammett's and Chandler's. And finally, Hollywood has discovered the man who wanted desperately to be in the movies. Three Thompson novels have recently become films: James Foley's broody After Dark, My Sweet, Maggie Greenwald's incompetent The Kill-Off and Stephen Frears' The Grifters.

The Grifters is the gem -- small, cold, bright, brilliantly crafted. The movie traces the slug tracks of three con artists who play their deadliest tricks on one another. Roy Dillon (John Cusack) works the "short con," using loaded dice and legerdemain to skin cashiers and sailors. Roy's girlfriend Myra (Annette Bening) is cheaper, perkier, ever ready to try the "long con" -- the elaborate scheme that takes suckers for big stakes. Roy's mother Lilly (Anjelica Huston) is the con woman supreme. Abused and abusing since girlhood, she can stand up to her sadistic boss or pull off a motel-room kill, and do it all with a hard smirk. Roy hardly stands a chance with Lilly. He can rebuff her seductions, but he can't duck her wrath.

The book was minor Thompson, lacking the snaky obsession of The Killer Inside Me or A Hell of a Woman. And Frears has turned it into a minor movie. Its characters are too small and twisted for sympathy; its pace is too studied, a little too in awe of its artfulness, to pack a wallop. It needs to move, but doesn't, at the pace a bus-station reader would devour a paperback thriller.

Best to savor The Grifters for its handsome design -- the picture looks as clean as a Hockney landscape -- and its juicy performances. Huston and Bening, sure shots for Oscar nominations, make for two splendid carnivores; they both have scintillating street wit and legs that go on for days. Cusack, as the would-be lion tamer, naturally gets devoured. And a swell sight it is too, a mother consuming her young, for the same reason a mama scorpion does: she's hungry. That's Jim Thompson's world, and now Hollywood is welcome to it. R.C.