For the Love of the Con

These opening scenes of Trouble in Paradise deftly reveal a key truth about confidence games: they’re basically seductions. When they’re mutual, as Gaston’s and Lily’s are, you might even call them courtships or mating dances. As ideally matched as this movie’s partners in crime are, though, it soon becomes apparent that in the long term their relationship presents a unique kind of difficulty: these lovers understand one another too well. In the usual course of romance, the parties to the affair begin with sweet illusions about each other, which over time give way to more realistic assessments. With Gaston and Lily, experts both in creating illusory versions of themselves and in playing on the illusions of others, that process is hilariously abbreviated; it takes maybe an hour, tops. So when they embark together on an intricate con game whose object is the fleecing of a wealthy Parisian widow, Madame Colet (Kay Francis), the very length of the operation—it takes weeks of diligent role-playing to get the victim to give Gaston full access to her considerable fortune—puts a strain on the lovers’ relationship. Mme. Colet falls hard for Gaston, who naturally exploits her affection and then, to his surprise, starts to reciprocate it; Lily, just as naturally, sees what’s happening and doesn’t like it a bit; and Gaston, no fool himself, knows full well that Lily’s on to him. Can they trust one another long enough to pull off the scam? Paris, we have a problem.

Because Trouble in Paradise was made a couple of years before Hollywood began enforcing its rigid Production Code, which required that no deviations from the straight and narrow path of either criminal law or conventional sexual morality be rewarded in the end, the larcenous lovers are permitted to ride off blithely into the glittering night of the City of Lights, and the audience is allowed to hang on to the lovely illusions it paid for. The Code inevitably made the fantasy of the charming deceiver a lot harder to put across. Wily Lubitsch managed it again in 1942, though, in To Be or Not to Be, by the simple expedient of placing his con artists in the service of a good cause. This time, the tricksters are a company of Polish actors who use their thespian skills in order to sabotage the plans of their country’s Nazi occupiers. Even the Code watchdogs couldn’t object to that.

And somehow Preston Sturges got away with a new take on the con game as happily-ever-after romance, in his incandescently funny The Lady Eve (1941). Here, only one of the lovers, a comely card sharp named Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck), is a crook; the other, Charles “Hopsie” Pike (Henry Fonda), is the purest mark imaginable—the Platonic ideal of a sap. They meet on an ocean liner, where Hopsie is on his way back from a year studying snakes in a South American jungle, and Jean, in the company of her father, Colonel Harrington (Charles Coburn), is hard at work trawling for suckers. Hopsie, as everyone on board seems to know, is from a family that manufactures an extremely popular ale; he’s the biggest fish in this stretch of ocean, and Jean doesn’t have much trouble reeling him in. After a year up the Amazon, he’s practically begging to be hooked.

The funny thing is, Jean gets hooked on him—at first, just enough to try to minimize his gambling losses to her distinctly unsentimental father, and, later, enough to accept his sudden, ardent proposal of marriage. She’s attracted to his innocence; he’s the something different she hadn’t known she wanted. But he finds out who she is and breaks their brief engagement, and Jean, feeling like a prize chump herself, vows revenge. So she descends on the Pikes’ Connecticut estate posing as one Lady Eve Sidwich, an English noblewoman on a visit to the States, and proceeds to seduce him all over again—this time with the object of wedding him, divorcing him, and taking him for every penny she can in settlement. Except for a serviceable British accent and a few tweaks to her hairdo and wardrobe, she barely bothers to disguise herself at all; she hides in plain sight, like the purloined letter. Muggsy (William Demarest), Hopsie’s gruff valet/bodyguard, keeps insisting “it’s the same dame,” to no avail. Poor starry-eyed Hopsie falls for her again. (He seems to have a certain propensity for falling; he suffers a fair number of slapstick face-plants in the picture too.) And the con artist, in her moment of apparent triumph, realizes for a second time that she doesn’t really want what she thought she wanted.

The best romantic comedies have always created tension by dramatizing the mistrust, or at least the wariness, lovers can feel before at last they find the faith to take the plunge. The relatively benign confidence games of Trouble in Paradise and The Lady Eve were effective vehicles for love stories, but while cons and scams and grifts have remained staples of movie entertainment they have rarely since then been used in quite that way.

There’s not a lot of romance, for example, in film noir, with its dead-eyed femmes fatales and its weak-willed men, always plotting murders and always, in the end, turning against one another. And there’s even less in the many, many films about complicated heists, in which grim-faced thieves plot and doggedly execute elaborate robberies—and then, of course, turn against one another. Great as a lot of these movies are, they’re often joyless, and faithless too: orgies of betrayal in which the crooks almost always come to bad ends. In some peculiar way, they’re more in line with the values of the hated Production Code than they are with the subversive playfulness of Lubitsch and Sturges.

And these days, cons are nearly impossible to romanticize. The scamming calls and texts that flood our phones and tablets and laptops, the phishing emails in our inboxes, the social-media hacks, the malware and the ransomware—nothing very sexy about any of that, is there? Fraud just isn’t what it used to be, and the celebrity fraudsters of our time—Bernie Madoff, Sam Bankman-Fried, Elizabeth Holmes, certain prominent political figures—are conspicuously lacking in charm. The image of the grifter is at its lowest point ever, at the bottom of a gold-plated escalator.

To my mind, the most interesting of more recent movies about the confidence game are the ones that focus on the psychology of the con artist rather than on the mechanics of the game. Chameleon Street is, like Mellville’s The Confidence Man, an episodic and essentially satiric portrait of a man whose identity is no more than the sum of his masquerades, and although both works find a good deal of humor in their heroes’ various guises, there’s a strong undercurrent of melancholy too: a sense that these protean tricksters have, in their persistent and compulsive evasions of the truth, become their own marks, stripped willingly of anything like an authentic self. They’re terribly lonely men. Matchstick Men is less bleak, because its frenetic, OCD-afflicted hero becomes aware in the course of the story that his duplicitous way of life might be cheating him out of something important, like, say, a bit of self-knowledge.

Probably the most—maybe the only—tragic hero in the genre is the young short-con artist Roy Dillon (John Cusack) in Stephen Frears’s brisk, blistering 1990 noir The Grifters. Roy is, by choice, strictly a small-timer, content to run quick little sleight-of-hand grifts on bartenders and convenience-store clerks and gullible strangers, and content, too, to live perfectly anonymously, in featureless hotel rooms and impersonal, no-strings love affairs. But after a bungled con ends in a gut punch that lands him in the hospital with a life-threatening internal hemorrhage, he finds himself uncomfortably dependent on other people. And pretty dangerous people, at that: his voluptuous girlfriend, Myra Langtry (Annette Bening), who turns out to be a con artist herself, and—deadlier yet—his long-estranged mother, Lilly (Anjelica Huston), a hard number with whom his relationship is, it’s fair to say, a little complicated. Trapped by the conflicting desires of a couple of strong-willed women, Roy’s as helpless as the victims of his innumerable small cons, and by the time he understands the danger he’s in, it’s too late.

In the 1963 pulp novel on which the movie is based, Jim Thompson wrote of his protagonist: “He had made personality a profession, created a career out of selling himself. And he could not stray far, or for long, from his self-made self.” Paradoxically, the film’s own self-awareness and its determination not to give its viewers the fantasy they might want—the sweet romance of getting away with something, as the bygone grifters of Trouble in Paradise and The Lady Eve did—are what compel our belief in its icy-hearted worldview. We may be appalled, but in the end, we’re willing. We buy it.