Roy Dillon (John Cusack) is a small time con man, pulling little grifts in bars to get by. While the occasional blown con may get him a savage beating from an irate bartender now and then, his life grows increasingly more complicated when his new girlfriend Myra (Anette Benning) tries to pull him into a long con like she and her old partner used to devise. To make matters worse, Roy’s estranged mother Lily (Anjelica Huston), a woman with her own shady dealings helping bookies hedge bets, comes back into his life with cloudy motivations, leading to a twisting of fates as the con artists try to out-con one another and nothing is as it seems. What is the truth here, and is anyone being honest about their intentions?

The summary on the back of this Criterion release of The Grifters refers to Jim Thompson as the dime-store bard. While I’m sure the term is intended to reference Thompson’s penchant for Shakespearean tragedy amidst the rain soaked gutters, it also doesn’t quite encompass everything that makes Thompson such a compelling author. Thompson’s writing can be at times both incredibly insular and wildly explosive. It can also be extremely bleak, making Thompson a bit of a touchy subject for film adaptations. Having said that, he’s gotten several solid productions over the years although few, if any, have truly captured that churning internal chaos that imbues the best of Thompson’s work (although the wildly underappreciated This World, Then the Fireworks may come the closest). But what works so well in novel form doesn’t always translate ideally to the big screen. What I’m getting at is this. Stephen Frears’ The Grifters, with a script penned by another great crime writer Donald E. Westlake, isn’t what I would call a word perfect adaptation of Thompson’s novel. But that’s ok. In the hands of a director with a darker touch, like Jacques Tourneur if it had been adapted on its initial release or someone like David Fincher today, the film might have come across almost unbearably grim and miserable. Thompson is a lot of things, but an optimist is rarely one of them. But what Frears and Westlake have done here is apply a slightly lighter touch without intrinsically changing the extremely dark narrative which gives the film of The Grifters an innate watchability that allows the viewer to focus on the excellent performances, an area that Frears does better than most. The trio of Huston, Cusack and Benning is one of the best ensemble performances of the ’90s in my humble opinion. The comparatively clean narrative lets us watch the subtle dance the three main characters find themselves in. While the film goes to dark places, they act more as quick gut punches (quite literally on at least one occasion) than extended visits to the dark side. The Grifters manages a deft high-wire balancing act of ‘light and breezy’ with a dose of pitch black classic Thompson fatalism.

The scan delivered by Criterion for this release was scanned from the original 35mm camera negative which was supervised and approved by DP Oliver Stapleton. Interestingly, Criterion includes additional notes on the mastering describing how the original theatrical prints struck from this negative used a “bleach bypass” process, and it is this process which was used as a baseline reference during the mastering phase of the project. What this results in is an image with a higher contrast and a more desaturated look, giving the film a very naturalistic feel. The image quality is stellar here with nice grain levels and no visible distortion or debris in the image. On the audio front we have a nicely balanced stereo 2.0 audio track that captures the sound of the film well also. The Grifters has had several blu-ray releases over the years, and Criterion has essentially gathered together extras from all of those various releases as well as adding a new interview with Annette Benning (whose comments on the film are missing from all the previous extras). The pre-existing extras including a nice, informative audio commentary including director Frears, actors John Cusack and Angelica Huston and screenwriter Donald E. Westlake. We also get an older short ‘making of’ featurette as well as a very good feature-length documentary on the film Seduction, Betrayal, Murder: The Making of “The Grifters”. Plus we also get a short featurette on Thompson himself (at only 8 minutes, I would’ve preferred this be longer but it’s still nice that it is included). The release also includes an excellent essay on Thompson and the movie by film author Geoffrey O’Brien.

With a newly remastered restoration and a bounty of all pre-existing extras as well as a new one to fill in some gaps, the Criterion edition of The Grifters is easily the most definitive release of the film to-date. If you are a lover of the tumultuous, bleak, and ever-shifting world of Jim Thompson, you will be delighted in what this film and this release offers.