Edward Burns in James Foley's Confidence: Straight Man

James Foley's Confidence is a movie about a group of grifters led by Edward Burns who unintentionally steal money from an underworld kingpin and then, in order to work off the debt, pull another grift in collaboration with him. (Burns's character is named Jake Vig. In street parlance (in Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets, for instance) "vig" is short for "vigorish," meaning usurious interest on a loan, say from a loanshark, i.e., the plot of Confidence in three letters.) It boils down to the same game as in the Robert Redford-Paul Newman movie The Sting (1973) but without the superstar radiance and the moral justification provided by the fact that the target of their sting had murdered a Negro friend of Redford's. I say "Negro" to underline the archaic melodramatic function of the friend who was introduced only so that he could be murdered. I don't take that moral justification seriously, and I'm not wild about the Redford-Newman pairing, either. Newman works at his comedy routines, especially the poker game, but what does Redford do? All the same, Redford's waxy remoteness as a performer, his refusal to get ruffled, by action or emotion, is clearly integral to his star image, which is as inarguable as a geological formation.

Confidence isn't "cute" like The Sting (with the stars way too palsy-confident of their appeal, and Scott Joplin's stately-stepping ragtime music whipped to froth), but I'm not sure that its lack of star power and its relative amorality (the murder of the friend is integrated into the characters' criminal activities, so Burns's revenge is just gangland payback) are in themselves big plusses. Edward Burns is in the tradition of the handsome rough, Clark Gable being the most famous example. Gable poured his masculine charm on the role, often to the point of smirking, but even when he overdid it he put a lot of energy into it, and softened the boundary between melodrama and comedy, between rascal and hero. He wasn't a complex actor but he was no deadbeat. With a perfectly even face and a tall, muscular frame, Burns is a catalogue stud beyond question, and never false. He doesn't coast on his looks, as Brad Pitt has, but he's not really a sparkplug. He's like broad-shouldered, long-jawed Chester Morris, a tight, efficient disreputable urban hero from the very early talkies, except Morris's vehicles were themselves so tight they didn't call for a more developed star personality. In that context Morris was a hot ingot. (Gable and Morris both did escort duty opposite Norma Shearer in her "daring" modern-woman pictures.) Burns comes across more like Dennis Morgan, an undercharged, second-string studio star of the '40s, really more of a co-star than a star.

It doesn't help that Burns's character is pitched right at the young men in the audience. The script compensates too hard by making the kingpin, played by Dustin Hoffman, into a whackjob: he runs a nightclub with porno-go-go dancers whom he instructs to go down on each other "tastefully"; is eerily intuitive and openly, inappropriately sexual, with men and women; and has attention deficit disorder, so he talks talks talks, everything spilling out; and all of it with a hovering sense of retributive violence. It's a funky creampuff of a role for Hoffman, who chews and chews and chews it. He shows an amazing command of gesture--he can shape scenes just by changing the volume of his voice. Whatever is cheesy in the attempt to make him creepy is more than made up for by Hoffman's late-career vitality. Actually, Hoffman's vitality is so nearly comic that the menace is impaired, but I didn't care, he was too entertaining to watch.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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