L.A. Confidential (1997)

City of Angels? More Like City of Demons!

Curtis Hanson directs and co-adapts the screenplay with Brian Helgeland from legendary pulp novelist James Ellroy's novel. It stars Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, James Cromwell, Kim Basinger, Danny DeVito and David Strathairn. Music is by Jerry Goldsmith and cinematography by Dante Spinotti.

It's 1950s Los Angeles and three cops of very different morals and stature are about to be entwined in crime and corruption...

I admire you as a policeman, particularly your adherence to violence as a necessary adjunct to the job.

Tremendous film making. Hanson takes Ellroy's labyrinthine story and pumps it with period authenticity and seamless direction, the latter of which sees him garner superlative performances from the cast. This is the side of Los Angeles nobody wants to talk about, it's awash with corpses, hookers, seedy set-ups, violence, drugs, racism and corruption a go-go. And that's just involving the politicians, the press and the coppers!

Rollo Tomasi.

The absence of genuine heroes on show still further keeps "The City of Angels" covered in dark clouds, where even as the plot twists and turns, as the mysteries unravel and brutality unfurls, the final destination of the principal characters is never clear, thus there's a continuing edge of seat pulse beat within the pic. It's also sexy and dangerous, the dialogue sharper than a serpent's tooth, and while the ending is a little too cosy as opposed to original noir wave conventions, this is pure noir in all but black and white photography.

It won only two Academy Awards, Basinger for Best Actress in a Supporting Role and for Hanson and Hegeland for Best Writing - Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published. Frankly it should have won a dozen or so for it's not just one of the best films of the 1990s, but also one of the best Neo-Noirs ever produced. 10/10

After the seemingly indiscriminate slaughter of the folks at a diner, it's the ambitious "Exley" (Guy Pearce) who suggests to his bosses that it's time for the LAPD to get it's act together and root out the corruption endemic within the force. To that end, he is promoted by "Capt. Smith" (James Cornwall) and sets about trying to assert a bit more of the rule of law rather than the rule of vengeance - that'd be the "White" (Russell Crowe) method, or the more venal and sleazy fashion of "Vincennes" (Kevin Spacey). Needless to say, nobody takes kindly to this new pure as the driven snow approach, but gradually "Exley" starts to make a bit of headway into the world of organised crime, and to realise just how involved the police are in covering up crimes from fraud to murder. He's also aware that someone is pulling his strings, so some sort of rapport with one of his suspicions colleagues is going to have to be forged if he is to stay alive! Each of these characters get their moment in the sun and that allows us to meet the unscrupulous red-top publisher "Hudgens" (an energetic Danny DeVito) and the sophisticated call-girl "Lynn" (Kim Basinger) who is quite often pretending to be Veronica Lake! I think my only problem with this film was that I reckoned on who was doing what really early on, so the jeopardy was a little bit compromised. That said, though, it's one of Crowe's more natural performances and Pearce shows us he can deliver gritty and bruising parts well too. I could have been doing with a little more of Basinger's quite intriguing character, just to break up the relentlessness of the story a bit more, but it's a solid adaptation of James Ellroy's uncompromising book that Curtis Hanson presents and it doesn't hang about.