Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988)

Frank Oz's 1988 caper concerns two con men working the French Riviera, one refined and British, one American and loud, and their escalating competition over a single mark. The film has no interest in instructing anyone about anything. It is a farce built on vanity, greed, and the pleasure of watching skilled performers lie to each other with mounting commitment. The cast is uniformly white, the Riviera is a playground for wealthy idlers, and the movie reflects that milieu without commenting on it. There is no racial dimension, no environmental concern, no historical argument, and no moral to carry home. It is, by the standards of any decade, a remarkably agenda-free piece of work.

The one subversive gesture arrives late, when Janet Colgate, played with cheerful resilience by Glenne Headly, turns out to be the Jackal, a con artist of greater talent than either of her suitors. It is a pleasant reversal, delivered as a punchline. No thesis is built upon it. Elsewhere the comedy leans on Freddy impersonating a paraplegic and, in an earlier scheme, a man with an intellectual disability, both played for laughs. Any inclusive reading we might wish to extract collapses against that. The humor here is amoral and unbothered, and it knows it.

Lawrence's personal code, that he never fleeces the poor or the virtuous, hints at a class awareness that never develops into an argument. The film admires the grift and the grifter in equal measure, and it ends with the trio cheerfully preparing to fleece a fresh room of tourists. What we are left with is a clean, well-built entertainment with no message beyond the next laugh. We have sat through worse sermons. We have rarely sat through one so thoroughly absent. The classification file, for this entry, is mercifully thin.