Screen Hustles, Grifts and Stings

Stings, Grifts, Hustles and the Long Con

A. Sargeant

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137466891
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de medios

Screen Hustles, Grifts and Stings identifies recurrent themes and techniques of the con film, suggests precedents in literature and discusses the perennial appeal of the con man for readers and viewers alike. Core studies span from film (Catch Me If You Can, Paper Moon, House of Games) to television (Hustle), from Noir (The Grifters) to Romantic Comedy (Gambit). Frequently, the execution of the con is only finely distinguishable from the conduct of a legitimate profession and, challengingly, a mark is often shown to be culpable in his or her undoing. The best con films, it is suggested, invite re-watching and reward the viewer accordingly: who is complicit and when? How and where is the con achieved? When is the viewer party to the con? And what, if any, moral is to be drawn?

1

Lone Operators

Abstract: The first chapter deals with lone operators: Shape Shifters (such as Frank W. Abegnale in Catch Me If You Can), Knaves of Hearts and Nietzschean Self-Inventors (such as Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley). In the case of Alain Resnais’ Stavisky, the narrative is drawn from actual historical events. There is analysis of the psychology and temperament of the con man and discussion of his victims’ predisposition to conning.

Sargeant, Amy. Screen Hustles, Grifts and Stings. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. DOI: 10.1057/9781137466891.0004.

In his survey of literary con men, Gary Lindberg identifies historic reasons for the appeal of the species to American audiences: ‘the confidence man not only revealed and acted upon the opportunities created by migration in the emergent American society; he also played its prevailing promissory tone.’¹ ‘He is at once the celebrant of shared faith and the agent most capable of exploiting it.’² To what can one invest trust in a land of strangers? The coinage ‘Confidence Man’, notes Lindberg, had entered common usage by the 1850s. Already, writers would comment wryly on the Stock Market as ‘The Confidence Man on a Large Scale’.³

This, then, is the actual background to Hermann Melville’s 1857 ‘unreadable novel’ The Confidence Man: His Masquerade. The action takes place on a Mississippi river boat on All Fools’ Day, with a passenger list drawn from all manner of men, migrants and misfits, ‘a piebald parliament’.⁴ Between staging posts, the eponymous protagonist (or a series of protagonists, suggests Lindberg) multiply appears and disappears, swiftly and surreally shifting shape and aliases.⁵ These guises include a mute, a black cripple, a Black Rapids Coal Agent, a peddler of patent medicines, and a Cosmopolitan representing a Widows and Orphans Asylum. One of the Confidence Man’s interlocutors is a grudging old miser, another a charitable (yet prudent) plump widow. The ship’s captain (to whom ‘the charmer’ makes an appeal as a fellow mason) cannot recall any previous meeting; the ship’s barber (by whom the charmer is not shaved – his promissory note being refused) considers him ‘quite an original’.⁶ Through these encounters Melville proposes that everyday American business and social affairs are tested and transacted on the basis of confidence. Melville suitably concluded his narrative: ‘Something further may follow of this Masquerade’.⁷

Shape Shifters

‘God, it would be good to be a fake somebody, rather than a real nobody’, observed the boxer, Mike Tyson.⁸ In the shadowed autobiography, Catch Me If You Can: The Most Extraordinary Liar in the History of Fun and Profit, Frank W. Abegnale lists a number of aliases under which he once operated: Frank Williams, Robert Conrad, Frank Adams, Robert Monjo. He variously posed in the professions of pilot (the knowledge of which role enabled an audacious escape), lawyer, doctor and university lecturer. Throughout, he is a ‘paperhanger’, an easy and adept forger of documents deployed to authenticate his personae (the toy planes from which Frank lifts Pan Am logos to attach to expense cheques pile up in his bath). The quiz show introduction to Spielberg’s 2006 film version of the story suggests, perhaps, both that there are other claimants to Abegnale’s boast and that Abegnale’s masquerade was simultaneously undistinguishable from the real thing: three contenders align themselves to camera in identical, ordinary, pilots’ uniforms, vying for selection as ‘extraordinary’. Whereas Melville’s Confidence Man (like Grant Allen’s Colonel Clay – known in France as le Colonel Caoutchouc) demonstrates an ability to shift his very physiognomy, Abegnale enlists confidence by swapping costumes.⁹ In the film version, Leonardo di Caprio (starring as Abegnale) is, throughout, recognisable as di Caprio.

The autobiography stresses the honesty of Abegnale senior, his blind trust marking him as his own son’s first ‘perfect pigeon’.¹⁰ Significantly, Spielberg attempts to provide an explanation for Frank’s fraudulent exploits, casting the father (Christopher Walken) as a mentor initiating an apprentice (Leonardo di Caprio) in the skills of his trade and repeating the con man’s frequent apologia, ‘an honest man has nothing to fear’ while also attempting to restrain the son’s ambition, to prevent his seizure. Abegnale is conveyed as a fantasist, in the film, by way of film: Frank imagines himself as Bond and announces an intention to go to Hollywood (suckers, says his father – see Chapter 5).

The film, Catch Me If You Can thus becomes, in part, a two-hander (see Chapter 2). Furthermore, both memoir and film recount the divorce of Abegnale’s parents and an identity split between America and France. ‘Did he have an unhappy childhood?’, enquires Hustle’s crew of an adversary (see Chapter 3). For Frank Jr., marriage for financial gain warrants another pose – as the romantic suitor of a wealthy Lutheran’s daughter, the film presenting the father’s concern for the prospective bride as overly attached and possessive – and, hence, a greater prize to be secured. Abegnale, by his own self-aggrandising account a rampant womaniser, thus explains his criminal gamesmanship: ‘the goal is not just loot, it’s the success of the venture that counts. Of course, if the booty is bountiful, that’s nice too’.¹¹

Catch Me If You Can plays its audience predictably. It offers the vicarious pleasure of a charismatic figure defying and trumping various forms of authority and the illusion of various forms of self-invention. Meanwhile, it comfortingly reassures the viewer that authority and certain presumed, shared, unimpeachable values will prevail and guarantee safety from con men: a banker sniffs a rat; Abegnale serves time in a foreign prison; Inspector Henratty (Tom Hanks) doggedly pursues Abegnale from scam to scam and continent to continent. To the father’s explanation that his son is in Vietnam, Henratty replies ‘he’s in trouble’. The audience is equally rewarded for its admiration of Henratty’s tenacity. Abegnale, a poacher turning gamekeeper, enlists as an informer and adviser to the FBI.¹² The audience is allowed, as Lindberg suggests is key to the appeal of the con man, to denounce his conduct in public while privately laughing up its sleeve.¹³

Knaves of Hearts

Jay Robert Nash reports the advice proffered by an actual ‘Knave’ to would-be successors:

1Always look for the widows. Less complications.

2Establish your own background as one of wealth and culture.

3Make friends with the entire family.

4Send a woman frequent bouquets. Roses, never orchids.

5Don’t ask for money. Make her suggest lending it to you.

6Be attentive at all times.

7Be gentle and ardent.

8Always be a perfect gentleman. Subordinate sex.¹⁴

Despite American celebration of the con man, as a species, in fact and fiction, America does not hold a prerogative over the particular genus, the ‘Knave of Hearts’. Thomas Mann’s supremely self-confident Felix Krull and Patrick Hamilton’s Ernest Ralph Gorse are enthusiastically delineated as European examples.¹⁵ The unsavory Gorse, ‘savage and bitter’, selects as his first conquest a starry-eyed young girl (on England’s Riviera – the hotels, piers, beaches and esplanades of Brighton) swiftly divesting her of her meagre savings.¹⁶ A subsequent mark conforms more closely to the model presented by Nash. Gorse ‘pumps and flatters’ the aptly-named Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce, who is readily seduced by his false claims to a precocious and glittering war record and purported expertise as a financial adviser.¹⁷ She volunteers to fund his supposed investments on her behalf. Sex is mutually obnoxious but, for Gorse, may be a price worth paying for his fleecing of the vain, greedy and snobby suburban widow. Significantly, Hamilton informs his reader that Gorse’s mother died shortly after the birth of her child and that Gorse’s father re-married.

The ‘Zille’ films, Michael Kertesz’s 1926 Fiaker Nr. 13 [The Road to Happiness] – in which the daughter of a cabdriver is discovered as the lost heiress of a millionaire – and Gerhard Lamprecht’s 1926 Menschen untereinander [The Folk Upstairs] feature con men operating in the wake of years of inflation in Germany.¹⁸ Menschen untereinander is literally a Kammerspiel, cutting between the lives of residents of a Berlin tenement building, overseen by the landlady, widow Büttner (Erika Glässner).¹⁹ The ground floor is given over to the shop and apartment of a jeweller, Herr Rudolf, whose daughter has been imprisoned for running someone down in her car. Having given birth in prison, the daughter is due to have her baby taken away from her for adoption. Herr Rudolf’s son-in-law, a senior councillor, who occupies the floor above, fears that the scandal attendant on his wife’s arrest will damage his career and is advised by the building’s notary to seek a divorce. Meanwhile, the top floor is shared by a balloon-seller and his family, and a kindly old piano teacher, Herr Ritter, who, since losing his money in the years of inflation, and finding difficulty in demanding pupils’ fees for lessons, is unable to pay his rent to widow Büttner. Furthermore, his eyesight is failing. Elsewhere in the building, the once wealthy Frau Wolgast and her son have likewise fallen on hard times. Frau Wolgast is now famished and her clothes are threadbare. Frau Büttner is unsympathetic to the balloon-seller’s complaints of a leaking roof and presumes to preach a moral to Herr Ritter: ‘Save in times of plenty to have enough in times of need’.

Thus, the widow is positioned for her comeuppance. The dapper Alfons Mellentin (Aribert Wäscher) introduces himself as a representative of the Jones Diamond Co...