Frears’s vision … is a sweeping look over a moral and human landscape in decay – one that is as English as it is American or western, endlessly replicating itself in automatic variations as it awaits the coup de grace. In fact, after the ‘detour’ of Dangerous Liaisons (1989) … Frears made a film in the United States whose material couldn’t be more American: The Grifters, adapted from a thriller by Jim Thompson, scripted by Donald E. Westlake, set in Los Angeles and other American cities that are copies of Los Angeles, and produced by Martin Scorsese with his new company. The Grifters is one of those four or five films that linger in the memory after a season of cinema – one of those films that, by taking a well-worn genre (in this case, the urban noir, where a cast of petty criminals burns through its last illusions in a mutual game of destruction) to its extreme consequences, either reinvents it or brings it to an end. The Grifters is cruel, sarcastic and so stereotypical that its three main characters become pure automatons – eerily similar, perhaps interchangeable, but capable of suddenly revealing dark wells of pain, dissatisfaction and unresolved issues. Frears reshuffles a stripped-down narrative, purged of anything not essential to the subterranean dynamic between the three leads (visualized once again with a split screen at the film’s opening), with a lean style in which sharp details – gestures, expressions and a flat, repetitive, almost sickly atmosphere – make up for the lack of interest in plot. In truth, there’s no real plot, at least not until the final minutes – only a survey of a cruel visual world transplanted into reality; and from that reality the icy “witch” Anjelica Huston, a mask of warped, furious passivity, ultimately flees “like someone,” Frears said, “who is on their way to hell”.

Emanuela Martini, Storia del cinema inglese 1930-1990, Marsilio, Venice 1991