You Can't Cheat An Honest Man -- or can you?

Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill's characters discuss their legal options.

There are a certain amount of feathers ruffled among traditional business circles about the rampant amorality to be found in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) a black-comedy romp directed by Martin Scorsese that could be described as "Goodfellas without the murders."  Personally, I believe you should be suspicious of anyone who is offended by the fact that the characters in the story receive only minimal incarceration and fines for their extensive misdeeds and appear to learn nothing from the whole debacle.  At the end they are just as greedy and stupid as they were at the start.

Being offended by such things is just silly.  First, the punishments administered adhere to the facts of the true-life case, which acknowledge the extensive assistance the defendants gave in making cases against other malefactors.  Second, if incarceration and fines comprises your concept of punishment, you need to check your moral compass.  Third, people rarely learn and scarcely ever change.  Certainly, legal sanctions rarely have the power to instill a genuine sense of right and wrong in a sociopath -- only a surface understanding of what the social expectations are.  (To this day, the person on whom DiCaprio's character is based has not made complete payment of the restitution due from his plea deal of 10 years ago.)

One of the things Scorsese does best is make films about closed social groups.  Mean Streets, Goodfellas, After Hours, The Age of Innocence, Casino, Gangs of New York, The Departed, Shutter Island all deal with tight-knit communities and the way they can close ranks against outsiders.  (Not surprising considering Scorsese's own background.  Incidentally, his other great mode is the story of the Loner, also unsurprising when you know how much time he spent alone, sick in bed, as a child. Many spectators have complained that Wolf does not show the damage caused to decent citizens and their financial security by its characters' depredations.  The answer is simple -- the film is told from the characters' point-of-view (DiCaprio frequently addresses the audience directly).  They had no idea of, nor any concern for, the effect of their actions on anyone else -- that's the nature of a sociopathic personality.  It is true, there is no one in the film that expresses moral disdain for what is happening.  Even the FBI man played by Kyle Chandler is mostly anxious for the kill, for the success of the hunt, for bringing down the big target, than for rendering justice in any cosmic sense.  He's also a career builder, albeit one who is content with his modest means.

Judgment, says Mr. Scorsese, is for you, the audience.  If you're not up to that, you may not be up to a Scorsese film.

Incidentally, I had never known Mr. S to be a maestro of slapstick comedy, but the sequence illustrated above, exhibits some of the best physical comedy seen since Peter Sellers's stuntmen retired.  Mr. DiCaprio's character has taken an inordinate number of Quaaludes which suddenly take delayed effect, rendering him incapable of walking or talking.  The way he slithers into his Lamborghini, opening the gull-wing door with an exquisite scissor-leg move, and then tries to prevent Jonah Hill's character from talking on the bugged telephone, in a slow-motion, rubber-muscled tussle on the floor, can only be compared with this masterpiece:

The 1980s con games in Wolf of Wall Street are relatively crude, especially when compared with CDOs and the other entertaining manipulations of the 2002-2008 period.  American Hustle (2013), on the other hand, manages to con even the audience, including your obedient servant, a lifelong Jerseyite, convincing me that the 1970s-era story was shot on my native soil, whereas it was made entirely in Massachusetts (those rapscallions!).  Whereas DiCaprio invites you along on the ride, though he lies right to your face, Christian Bale's character would like to keep you and everyone else at arm's length so you can't see how the faux-hair is pasted on under the combover and exactly what is hidden up his sleeve.

Bradley Cooper adjusts Christian Bale's accoutrements.

Thusly, the film pulls some remarkable surprises and a full-out concluding con comparable to the finale of The Sting, yet it doesn't seem to be about that.  And what's more, unlike Wolf, Hustle toys with your notions of who is the good guy and who is the bad guy and everything in between.

Two slam-dunk predictions, and a few chancier ones.  Hustle will be nominated for Costumes (they make a huge contribution to both the atmosphere and in establishing the characters) and for Jennifer Lawrence as Best Supporting Actress.  She is truly the new Meryl Streep, in that she disappears into variegated roles, and, I would argue, disappears much more completely into them.  Her Rosalyn is rife with telling detail.  (No disrespect to Amy Adams, although one wonders why David O. Russell gets work out of her that no other director does.  Is that they don't think to ask?)  Presuming there will be 10 Best Picture Nominees, Hustle will make the cut (and Wolf probably will, too).  Russell will be nominated as director, and the screenplay will be as well.

Beside the dodgy relationships with money, Wolf and Hustle have much in common stylistically.  Rapid dolly-in shots and fast cuts, bright colors in the design (especially the retro clothes in both films), nostalgic soundtracks (American Hustle offers some real boomer-bait).  But thematically, they part company over the old con-man ethic expressed in the title of this post.  Irving Rosenthal, the role played by Christian Bale (who will not be nominated because toward the end of the film he appears to be channeling DeNiro), is a true classic con, who can live with himself morally because he only cheats those who want something for nothing, or an unfair advantage over another person.  You Can't Cheat An Honest Man, they say.  You take money from those who deserve to be taken.  And Rosenthal refuses to hurt the people that matter to him.  That puts him 180-degrees diametrically opposed to Jordan Belfont, DiCaprio's character, who has no idea and no concern who he hurts and how.  These films live comfortably side by side, yet inhabit totally different moral universes.

But don't take it from me when you can get it from the horse's mouth.

Knowing when to hold 'em

A Big Hand For The Little Lady (1966) presents itself as a comedy Western about gambling, specifically poker. But in fact ***SPOILER ALERT*** the film is in fact a con movie, one of the earliest I am aware of to deal with a long, or at least semi-long con with a sympathetic point of view for the cons. (Until then, most films about con artists were police procedurals.) The trickiest thing about a really fine con film is that there must be at least one con reserved for the audience. This gets harder as the years go by.

Back in 1966, the mere fact that you were witnessing a con without your prior knowledge was a pretty satisfying twist. Today I would guess most movie fans would guess that at about the halfway mark. (There's a large and improbable turning point which is a tip-off.) One still doesn't know the extent and the shape of the con, so there is still fun to be had. And back then, having sweet old Henry-Abraham-Lincoln-Mister-Roberts-Eagle-Scout-Fonda as one of the cons was fun in and of itself. (This was three years before Sergio Leone cast Fonda as a psychopathic mass killer in Once Upon A Time In The West.)

Today in the post-Sting age, when everyone has plumbed the depths of The Sting's source work, David Maurer's 1940 book, The Big Con, it takes a lot more to completely sandbag the audience. (I confess, Matchstick Men did that for me, and I've gotten pretty good at these things.) The key, usually, is in character. Think about who would want to con who--and remember, there's probably someone you've forgotten or overlooked.

In this case, the marks (as in the best con films) really deserve it. Jason Robards blew his charm wad in A Thousand Clowns, and for the rest of this film career specialized in scowling. Charles Bickford contributes his own 50 years of experience in scowling, John Qualen is having a rare turn as a non-Swede and Kevin McCarthy uses that beautiful voice to contribute some super smoothness that might deceive you. You could overlook Burgess Meredith and I completely missed Chester Conklin (was he wearing his moustache?), but the film is most remarkably a fine vehicle for Paul Ford, who gets to play an actual human being rather than the human foghorn he plays in The Music Man and The Russians Are Coming! If you recognize at least a few of those names, this is a film you appreciate.

Finally, the strangest credit, director-producer Fielder Cook, not known for Westerns--in fact, he was a specialist in live television drama and later in making films based on plays. This seems strange during the opening 10 minutes of the film, until the picture arrives in the single room in which it will spend at least 75% of the balance of the movie. One of these days I might try to compile a list of Westerns set in a single room. (And wouldn't you like to see Clerks remade as a Western? I would.)

What about Joanne Woodward. She's just fine, as would be a few dozen competent professional actresses. Good thing she didn't co-star with husband Paul Newman in this film, or it would have given away the trick right away!

Faux noir

Film noir, once an interesting mode of film analysis, has become such a potent marketing tool that desperate home video distributors are willing to slap the name onto any black-and-white film that has any character or activity which is slightly more hard-hitting than a Shirley Temple film. In the case of Bad For Each Other (1953), not only is there no sense of doom, no guilt, no sense of the world overcoming the protagonist, there is not even a crime of any kind. Don't let the title fool you: there is really nothing to recommend this film for any purposes, especially entertainment, except for the presence of the borderline sinister Lizabeth Scott, who managed to project the aura of a girl who was born to a good family but promptly got into bad--maybe even kinky--stuff. That's all kept pretty well offstage in this attempt at a Warners-style soap opera, directed by Warners journeyman Irving Rapper.

Two Of A Kind (1951) comes a bit closer to noir, given that there's a half-hearted attempt at a con, and that the head con is the weak-chinned and sort-of greasy Alexander Knox. (Yes, I know he's famous for playing Woodrow Wilson, but he was sort of a greasy prig himself, disguised as an upright college professor.) The con itself, like most long cons, has disappeared into the mists of time. Long cons require a fundamental lack of knowledge on the part of the mark, and it is hard to keep the marks in this state of extreme ignorance nowadays. Specifically, the cons try to pass off seedy, sweaty and burly Edmond O'Brien as the son they lost when he was a three-year old boy. (It's hard to imagine Edmond O'Brien was ever three years old. Could he have been that sweaty then?) The point is, one simple DNA test would end this con quick. As it is, they can't pull it off, even then sweaty Edmond has allowed the tip of his pinky to be hacked off to further the plot.

But honestly, the men are of no real interest in this movie, at least not in comparison with the good girl-bad girl dichotomy set up, as seen in the illustration above. The good girl is Terry Moore, who evidently learned from bad girl Lizabeth Scott, and switched over to being a bad girl later in the decade, especially in a sweater (very bad!).

But Lizabeth Scott is the whole show here. At first she seemed like a road company Lauren Bacall, all husky voice and sassy attitude. But where Bacall is insolent, Scott has the inherent superiority of just being better and smarter than her men, which makes her free to exhibit a sparkle and enthusiasm not available to the sullen sultry Bacall persona. Bacall had Howard Hawks to guide and shape her, but Scott had no such mentor. She had been discovered by producer Hal Wallis and followed him through Warners and Paramount, both home to heavy-breathing melodrama before she fetched up at Columbia, which really lacked a house style, taking what it could from the occasional A-list talent that went slumming in Gower Gulch. But Wallis was not a star-maker, but a star-finder and exploiter. Among his contractees were Kirk Douglas, Shirley MacLaine, Elvis Presley and Martin and Lewis. The filmographies of the latter stars should indicate that Hal Wallis mostly gave up on quality when he left Warners.

Oddly, though Bacall was a cool and a noir dame, she was never a femme fatale. She might think you were kind of a jerk, but she would never destroy you. Scott, on the other hand, might be completely head-over-heels about you, but she'd sell you out in a second. That splendid balance of enthusiasm about men and about money made a lot of her films and roles seem more interesting than they really were.

And you gotta like a gal whose big break in show business was understudying and appearing as Sabina in The Skin Of Our Teeth. It is said that at 81 she could still recite her first speech in the play from memory. I believe it. It's a really good speech.*
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* Oh, oh, oh! Six o’clock and the master not home yet. Pray God nothing serious has happened to him crossing the Hudson River. If anything happened to him, we would certainly be inconsolable and have to move into a less desirable district.

The fact is I don’t know what’ll become of us. Here it is the middle of August and the coldest day of the year. It’s simply freezing; the dogs are sticking to the sidewalks. Can anybody explain that?

But I’m not surprised. The whole world’s at sixes and sevens, and why the house hasn’t fallen down about our ears long ago is a miracle to me. Every night this same anxiety as to whether the master will get home safely: whether he’ll bring home anything to eat. In the midst of life we are in the midst of death, a truer word was never said. ...

My advice to you is not to inquire into why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it’s on your plate; that’s my philosophy. Don’t forget that we got through the Depression by the skin of our teeth! One more tight squeeze like this and where will we be?

Pardon me, your seams are showing

I was really looking forward to The Brothers Bloom (2008), as it was written and directed by Rian Johnson, creator of Brick, one of my students' best-liked films in my Film Studies course. And I love con man movies, going back past even Hustle and The Sting to The Flim-Flam Man, Hot Millions and perhaps any of W.C. Fields's movies where he plays a crooked carney. (I confess I have never warmed to David Mamet's films such as House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner because the cons were so simple and obvious, and the manner of speech and action so deliberately stilted, sacrificing the quality of glibness which is one of the pleasures of the genre.)

But there is a built-in problem with con movies, especially since Matchstick Men. An inherent element of the genre is deceiving the audience. The result is that we audience members have been trained to trust nothing we see. We never can relax and enjoy the characters, so focused must we be on who is lying and how we are being misled. I was glad to see they had steered clear of the Bedtime Story/Dirty Rotten Scoundrels trope, in which the mark is actually the con. But the final con in Bloom rests on something which is impossible--love and trust between two cons. True, these two are brothers, but one thing becomes clear as you delve into con literature--the real professional con lives in a world devoid of other people. So I saw the wrap-up of this one coming (a first for me) and didn't buy it a bit.

It didn't help that the film has a choppy, disjointed quality. I was not surprised to learn that the rough cut of this film was quite long and that a lot was discarded--that appeared visible in the final result. Brick, although it existed in a make-believe time and place, rooted that time and place in a plausible, continuous reality. Brothers Bloom is so steeped in deception that when the title says "New Jersey" we KNOW it's a lie. (Especially if you've seen real mansions in New Jersey, like I have.) Never was I invested, never carried along.

Notwithstanding, the film is fun to watch, and there are much worse ways of spending two hours. It has a theatrical quality (Maximillian Schell appears to think he is performing in an opera) which is emphasized in the way it uses the 2:35 widescreen, often as a proscenium, especially when framing the two brothers together. Mark Ruffalo is always an asset to any movie. And this movie has two completely infalliable assets:

1. Rinko Kiyuchi -- Awesome. I would say that every movie needs one but then she would not be so special. Imagine if Harpo Marx was Asian and had dynamite.

2. Hats -- Best hats of any film since Bob Fosse died.