Hold up your
badge, so they’ll know you’re a policeman.”
There are so many great gangster pictures. Some center on the the crew like “Reservoir
Dogs”, “Goodfellas”, “Miller’s Crossing”, and “Pulp Fiction”. Others follow a central figure in the gang, “The
Godfather”, “Carlito’s Way”, and “Scarface”…man, Pacino did a lot of those didn’t
he? And in the past decade or so it’s
been ‘gangsta’ to love the gagster.
However, some of my favorite crime films involve the lives of the cops
who chase the crooks, like “The Untouchables”, “Donnie Brasco” “Dirty Harry”, “Colors”,
“Serpico” (Pacino again) “Seven”, “Lethal Weapon”. And as much as I love those films, the one I
go back to again and again is 1997’s “L.A. Confidential”.
Based on the
1990 novel by James Ellroy, the film follows three cops who have chosen very
different paths that intersect in 1953 during a time of corruption, scandal,
and Hollywood. The trio is Bud White
(Russell Crowe) a gruff, tough, only slightly dirty cop. Edmond Exley (Guy Pearce) as the
straight-laced do-gooder cop working his way up the ranks like his father
did. And Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey)
as the smooth talking, flashy Narco cop who’s gone Hollywood as a TV consultant.
When a gruesome
murder takes place, all three men get involved for their own personal reasons
and find that they have to work together to solve the case that will take them
off of their path and lead them to be the cops and men that they truly are.
This is a
fantastic film with so many levels and characters that all flow together seamlessly
as it tells a great story that deserved its Oscar for “Best Adapted Screenplay”
for Director/Co-writer Curtis Hanson, and Brian Helgeland. With not so many twists, but definitely turns
that develop the characters and give a glimpse, albeit fictional version into
the time of 50’s cops and robbers. It’s a
hard-hitting crime yarn with outstanding performances by all the key players,
though mostly Crowe and Kim Basinger as the beautiful Veronica Lake look-alike/hooker. And it also has one of the best interrogation
scenes that is so intense that I get goose-bumps right now as I simply write
about it.
I can still
remember going to Suncoast the day this movie was released on video, and I had
to have it in widescreen which at the time the movie was almost fifty
bucks. Even the guy ringing me up thought
it was too high. I like to think I
watched it enough to make up the price I paid.
Fifty bucks? Maybe not, but to
this day, this is one of my favorite films of all time and has yet to be topped
even with modern classics like “Heat” and “The Departed”. And while everyone remembers 1997 as the
record breaking run of the gajillion dollars earning “Titanic”, the best film
of that year was “L.A. Confidential”.
--Robert L.
Castillo
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