L.A. Confidential
Old school film noir about corrupt cops in Los Angeles (as the name implies). A bit too clean for my taste. Nearly as good as Chinatown.
A nice little setup: Bud is the loving bruiser, some low class lout that does the right thing using percussive methods. Jack is the sleazebag, seducing actresses and joining forces with the tabloids to get kickbacks a nice picture in the paper. Ed is the goody two-shoes, a nepo baby idealist who wants to save the world.
Then the hook. After the drunkard dude beats up some Mexicans guys for nothing and it gets in the papers, their personalities are further set in stone: Ed testifies willingly, seeing that as rebellion and immorality. Bud follows the “Ape don’t kill Ape” motto. Jack is just caught with his pants down and he’s got too many pressure points, he rolls over..
And with this, Ed is promoted, but absolutely despised by other cops, Bud gets back in the force murdering the remnants of the big Capone wannabe, and Jack get demoted to the Vice Squad, tracking pornos.
Only then the Nite Owl Massacre happens. No, it’s not Watchmen, it’s six brutal murders execution style using shotguns in a men’s room. One of them is the drunk dude, recently thrown off the force as a scapegoat. The girl is the one Bud saw outside the liquor store, with the nose bandage. Our femme fatale was with her, too.
Ed jumps to this occasion but gets snuffed by the captain, Bud is touched by the death of a friend, and Jack smells his big break.
The big manhunt is on. “Negros” are the usual suspects, and for some reason Jack “knows a guy who knows what’s going on south of Jefferson”, and Ed follows, for some reason.
Bud goes put the screws on liquor store to absolutely violate the constitution and reaches the Fleur de Lis emporium run by Pierce Pratchett, the other guy in the car. His grift is being a high class pimp where all the girls are movie star dead ringers. He goes as far as paying for plastic surgery, that’s why she had her nose hurt. Suck on that, other cops, the dumb muscle out-detectived you. What idiots!
Bud then goes straight to Lynn’s house, the femme fatale entertaining a city hall councillor. She’s supposed to look like Veronica Lake, I take that’s like Sydney Sweeney of its time? She almost blushes when Bud tells her she’s prettier that the actress. After confirming the pimping connection is all on the up-and-up, she mentions the dead girl was not her friend, just an acquaintance.
For some magical reason, everyone actual got the three “negro boys”, the shotguns, the red car. Ed and Jack bust them, and leave them locked up for a day, and Ed interrogates them like a motherfucker, strategically turning the PA system to feed information between them. But what transpires is not the Nite Owl murder, it’s a completely different crime: the three boys conspire with another one to bound and rape some poor girl, to make the young one would “pop his cherry”. Yikes, what was the fourth’s relationship with the victim, brother? Father?
They corroborate the story by raiding the material evidence. The girl was still bound, and the fourth guy entertained watching TV and eating cereal. The captain takes charge and lets Bud violate the fourth amendment some more by covertly entering the house, locale the laughing man and kill him from the shadows. He then plants a gun on his body, before more cops arrive. The girl is saved, but with a dead suspect that could have shone light on what happened. Bud on the other hand did “justice”, Ed does not approve and this he’s a manchild loose cannon. They almost punch it out in the street.
As the victim is taken away, they hear the suspects fled through a window. The fucking morons left the precinct in a hurry, and left all the idiots in charge. What kind of buffoons let prisoners escape, what the hell. Ed is on the case though, they mentioned another name in the interrogation.
They storm the place, and find them holed up in there with their dope dealer. The cops have shotguns, but Ed really wanted them alive. He took some random idiot cop along, so he starts shooting when a beer bottle falls, and it’s a blood bath. The cop is dead, but Ed shoots him way out of there, even without seeing straight on account of not wearing the glasses that make him look like a dork. His most stylish kill is sticking the shotgun in the closing elevator door and pulling the trigger. What a mess of blood and guts we don’t even see, making it even more gruesome.
This makes him the hero, he regains the respect of his peers. “Shotgun Ed”, they say. Jack gets back into the TV set, as technical consultant. The pimp blackmails the councillor to make sure they build that freeway, he invested in freeway construction. So far, so Chinatown, without the incest.
Bud is restless though, he knows his partner’s killers are still at large. He keeps stalking the femme fatale, and doesn’t have the stomach to brutalise suspects anymore. Fucking the femme fatale does help.
While Jack is back on his beat of hobnobbing with the stars, he meets the tabloid dude again. His latest grift is paying a dumb actor 100 bucks to fuck the DA at a specific hotel room, where prime cover story photos will happen. The actor is so dumb, he meets Jack, the cop that busted him fondling some girl while high on reefer, and doesn’t recognise him, just feed him exposition on the hookers that look like movie stars.
Jack keeps hearing about Fleur de Lis, “whatever you desire”. Bud is watching Roman Holiday with the femme fatale, telling her his life’s story (up there with Chinatown, I’ll give him that), and she encourages him do dig into it, that he is smart enough. Ed picks up the raped girl from the hospital, and she confesses her statement was bogus. The pimp is back on the spotlight.
Ed is not happy his big break came from what he knows is a lie, but he’s not man enough to out the kibosh on it either. That stolen valour stench is always there. Bud sniffs around and finds the ex-cop he busted in the liquor store rotting in the home of the dead girl, with her half-senile mother there. His partner is mixed up in that, so he keep it on the down low for now.
But Ed is smarter than Bud, he fishes out the dead guy from under the house, keeping it on the down low as well. Tells a sob story to Jack to make him help him, he was already soft after getting cold feet from his life of pointless hedonistic pursuit of money. Jack’s turn was talking with the actor he busted the first time, then seeing him dead a couple hours later, murdered by the DA apparently. They join forces.
Bud keeps doing sub-rosa police work, but Jack and Ed are onto him, they find him with his squeeze, the femme fatale. Fleur de Lis comes up again, and again. As one of future Hollywood’s finest says, “it’s like poetry, it rhymes”.
Ed keeps following on Bud’s footsteps, but he’s not street smart. He tries to make some brute dude who knows about heroin shipments and verbally assaults the great Lana Turner, calling her a hooker and everything, but she IS Lana Turner, slumming it apparently. That old Katharine Hepburn accent, so sexy. They then go put the squeeze on the millionaire (how dated is this, the good old times), but he remains cool, and with access to good lawyers and the tabloid dude.
And that’s how Ed goes down, from hubris. He thinks so little of Bud, he can’t see why a bombshell like Lynn from the Arizona borderlands would like to hangout with a lout like Officer White. But her sophistication works like catnip and he forces himself into her, not before her big speech telling him he’s human trash. The tabloid dude is right by the window to get 100% pure LA kompromat, ladies and gentleman, disco shit.
Jack digs around further and finds some ancient records, showing the drunk cop, the rotting cop and the current police captain were all in on some attempted bust of the millionaire a while back, which went nowhere. As Jack talks to the captain for more answers, but he gets a .22 bullet to the heart. The captain shot him, dumped his body, and them requires the cops to patrol around the park for leads. But Jack warns Ed from beyond the grave of treason that goes all the way to the police captain and city councillors
Bud gets the kompromat pictures and tries to kill Ed, but they talk their way out of it, and join up to take down the police captain. He’s trying up loose ends, so more bodies come up again. The millionaire was becoming a nuisance, so they suicided him. The tabloid dude is just garroted. The femme fatale also gets roughed up, her call girl days are over.
It’s basically all in the open by now, so it’s a free for all. Bud and Ed are lured to the same place the captain was muscling out the competition and waves of cops try to kill them. They almost damn near succeed, Bud seems to have bitten the bullet even, but Ed comes through and shoots the captain in the back, for his final character growth moment.
Ed is the second-to-last man standing, so his version is the official one. He gets another medal, and Bud takes the femme fatale to her native Arizona.
I’m not sure they changed the ending, not that this is upbeat. The downer ending is having Bud die and the femme fatale stay with Ed, after that big speech. That would be depression incarnate.
The leads are really great. James Cromwell being an evil corrupt dude is playing against type, and with an extremely stupid Irish accent, boyo, it’s Basher-level. David Strathaim is just a suave dude with an undignified death. Having Kevin Spacey talk with The Mentalist about gay-for-pay, press scandals, ooof. That part hasn’t aged well.
How come this is also produced by Arnon Milchan? He is everywhere!
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.