Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential opens on a city selling itself a story. It closes on three policemen who have stopped believing it. In between, the film builds one of the tightest crime pictures of the 1990s out of James Ellroy’s 1990 novel, the third book in his L.A. Quartet, and does it without a wasted scene.
L.A. Confidential premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 14, 1997, and Warner Bros. released it on September 19, 1997. It runs 138 minutes. It cost $35 million and grossed $126.2 million. It was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won two: Best Supporting Actress for Kim Basinger and Best Adapted Screenplay for Hanson and Brian Helgeland. Titanic took every other category where the two films met.
“Everything is suspect… Everyone is for sale… And nothing is what it seems.”
Trailer, via Warner Bros. Rewind.
Exley, White and Vincennes
The year is 1953. The Los Angeles Police Department wants a cleaner public face after decades of corruption, and the film hands us three officers who each represent a different way of surviving that machine.
Edmund Exley, played by Guy Pearce, is a careerist sergeant living under a legendary detective father whose killer was never found. Exley gives that unknown killer a name — “Rollo Tomasi” — a stand-in for any criminal who escapes justice. Jack Vincennes, played by Kevin Spacey, is a fame-hungry narcotics sergeant who works with tabloid journalist Sid Hudgens, played by Danny DeVito, to stage high-profile celebrity arrests. Wendell “Bud” White, played by Russell Crowe, is volatile and violent with suspects, especially men who abuse women, because his own father murdered his mother.
The three men collide over the Nite Owl coffee house massacre. Among the dead: White’s former partner Dick Stensland, played by Graham Beckel, and Susan Lefferts, played by Amber Smith. Three felons are arrested for the crime. The interrogation that follows does not close the case. It opens it.
Two Australians Nobody Knew
The casting is the part of this film that looks least like a studio decision and most like a director’s bet. Pearce and Crowe were relative unknowns in North America. One backer, Peter Dennett, worried about the lack of established stars in the lead roles, but supported Hanson’s choices anyway. A producer was against casting “two Australians” in an American period piece. Pearce later noted, dryly, that he was born in England to a New Zealand father, while Crowe is Māori and a New Zealander.
Hanson had seen Crowe in Romper Stomper and called him “repulsive and scary, but captivating”. Crowe had read Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia but not L.A. Confidential. The script drew him to Bud White’s “self-righteous moral crusade”. Hanson taped both actors and showed the footage to the producers, who agreed. Pearce did not like Ed Exley on first read. “I was pretty quick to judge him and dislike him for being so self-righteous … But I liked how honest he became about himself,” Pearce said.
That support gave Hanson the confidence to approach Basinger, DeVito and Spacey. He wanted to “replicate my experience of the book” — you dislike these characters at first, then sympathize as you learn them. The film does exactly that, and it is the reason it holds up.
Patchett, Smith and the Machinery of the City
The conspiracy runs through Pierce Patchett, played by David Strathairn, a businessman running a prostitution ring that supplies women surgically altered to look like film stars. White meets two of them on Christmas Eve, Lynn Bracken and Susan Lefferts, along with former officer Leland Meeks. Basinger’s Bracken becomes White’s relationship and, eventually, his test.
James Cromwell’s Dudley Smith is the film’s real engine. After gangster Mickey Cohen, played by Paul Guilfoyle, is imprisoned, Smith recruits White to scare off criminals trying to take Cohen’s place. A run of murders targeting Cohen’s underlings ends with 25 lb (11 kg) of his heroin missing. Smith is the man who benefits from every mess he asks White to clean.
The “Bloody Christmas” scandal — drunken officers beating inmates — gets Exley promoted to detective lieutenant, because he advised his superiors to protect the department by firing only officers with secure pensions. Exley then coerces Vincennes to testify. White refuses and is suspended. Stensland is fired. The other officers turn on Exley. Every promotion in this film is a debt, and every debt comes due.
What the Screenplay Gets Right
The screenplay is the achievement. Helgeland and Hanson took a dense, sprawling novel and cut it to 138 minutes without losing the corruption or the cost. Jerry Goldsmith’s score, the editing and the acting all earned the praise they got, and the film’s 1953 Los Angeles feels lived in rather than dressed up.
The three leads carry it. Crowe makes White’s violence sad instead of cool. Pearce plays Exley’s self-righteousness straight, so the character’s slow honesty lands. Spacey’s Vincennes is the film’s most interesting turn because he is the one who sold the job out first and knows it.
If there is a weakness, it is that the film’s women exist mostly as tests for the men. Bracken is the exception, and Basinger’s Oscar is deserved, but the story keeps her framed by what White needs from her. That is a real limit, and it does not sink the picture.
- Runtime: 138 minutes
- Budget: $35 million
- Gross: $126.2 million
- Academy Awards: 9 nominations, 2 wins
- Metacritic: 90/100
Why This One Still Holds
L.A. Confidential is the rare studio crime film that trusts its audience to keep three bad men straight and to understand that the conspiracy is not the point. The point is that the city sells itself a story, and the men who enforce that story pay for it. Hanson’s bet on two unknown Australians is the reason the film still feels dangerous instead of nostalgic. The Nite Owl case is the plot. The casting is what makes it land.
In 2015, the Library of Congress selected L.A. Confidential for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. That recognition is correct. This is a film that earns its reputation every time it is watched.
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