10 Best Con Man Movies

John Cusack sought about optioning the rights to The Grifters, Jim Thompson's noir novel of oedipal ruin, before he was 18. This was in part strategic on the actor's part - he saw the pitfalls of being stereotyped in 80s teen movies - and in part out of passion. The novel was one of Thompson's darker works, full of vigor and bile, but unlike The Killer Inside Me or Savage Night, the horror was internal.

It was only after Cusack and director Stephen Frears found one another that the latter best summed up the book: "pulp fiction meets Greek tragedy." Thompson's other works were violent, but The Grifters was about the scars you don't see - like the ones left on Angelica Huston's desperate mother character by a sack of oranges.

Huston is Lily Dillon, a veteran at the La Jolla track evening the odd for a mob bookmaker. When her son Roy (Cusack) is wounded after attempting to scam a bartender, she winds up thrust back in his life, distrustful of his floozy girlfriend (Annette Bening). Frears, though it was initially going to be Scorsese, has given us the unfailingly brutal look at the low rent life of con artists we deserve, all swimming around the bowl as it circles the drain to an inevitable end.