The Great Movies III by Roger Ebert

Author:Roger Ebert [Ebert, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: General, History & Criticism, Performing Arts, Motion Pictures, Film & Video, Guides & Reviews
ISBN: 9780226182087
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2010-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

White has compromised himself by sleeping with a potential witness. He is also in deep with Captain Smith, who uses him as a strong-arm man to beat up “suspects,” including out-of-town mobsters (the message: go home). Vincennes compromises himself by ratting on fel ow cops, something he says he would never do—until his job on the TV show is threatened. And the straight-arrow Exley believes he could never bend the official rules of conduct, until he discovers that sometimes they need bending.

It would be unfair for me to even hint at some of the directions the story takes. Let me instead describe superb moments. One of the most famous comes when Vincennes and Exley enter the Formosa Cafe, a Chi-nese restaurant close the Paramount lot, to question the mobster Johnny Stompanato. He’s with a date, who gives them some lip. Exley tells her to shut up: “A hooker cut to look like Lana Turner is still a hooker.” Notice how the camera frames Exley in foreground and holds Vincennes in background, as he confides, “She is Lana Turner.” This line, one of the movie’s most famous, works so well, I think, because of the particular way Spacey delivers it, and the little smile he allows himself, and because Hanson does it in the same shot; a cutaway to Vincennes would have been all wrong.

Vincennes has another emotionally wrenching experience involving a beefcake “actor” named Matt, who he first met during a bust set up by Hush-Hush. Now Hudgens has a scheme to lure the D.A. into a “sissy”

L . A . C o n f i d e n t i a l

scenario with Matt, and uses Vincennes to help convince the gullible kid this favor could open the door for him on the TV (“Like Badge of Honor is gonna want him after he’s been cover boy for Hush-Hush twice in a year,”

Hudgens gloats). How this assignation ends, and how Spacey as Vincennes reacts, amounts to a self-contained scenario on shame.

Consider, too, the choreography after two of the characters burst into the district attorney’s office. The D.A. tries to put them off with a clever line about “good cop, bad cop,” until he finds out in a horrifying way what “bad cop” can really mean. I’ve seen endless hours of violence in movies over the years, but hardly anything to equal what happens to the D.A.

in a minute or two.

L.A. Confidential is described as film noir, and so it is, but it is more: unusually for a crime film, it deals with the psychology of the characters, for example in the interplay between the two men who are both in love with Basinger’s hooker. It contains all the elements of police action, but in a sharply clipped, more economical style; the action exists not for itself but to provide an arena for the personalities. The dialogue is lovely; not the semi-parody of a lot of film noir, but the words of serious people trying to reveal or conceal themselves.

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