This has been a DVD cover staring back at me from inside $2-bins for over a decade. But I couldn't tell what this movie was, didn't recognise the actors and thus there was usually something else I would gamble on with Don "The Dragon" Wilson or Lorenzo Lamas instead ... It is these places that we search for a different flavour and texture ... Not just in the filmmaking itself, but the strange journey the movies take to find us ...
So I was in a secondhand furniture store recently and picked up a stack of these bargain-basement DVDs and in my haste, chose this one too, because "why not?" .. At this point, having seen it's cover so many times, it felt like the law of averages had finally clicked in this film's favour. It had some imagery on the back-cover from the inside of nightclubs and I enjoy that coloured light, noir-atmosphere in a film.
So, to my surprise, this ended up being an intelligently-written zen-piece on the art of small and medium size grifts, but with a strange sense of honour, as if it were being done by a samurai. The master of these curious payphone tricks is played by Tommy Redmond Hicks, who somehow comes across as being a moralist in his criminal acts ... A sort of fake-cheque Morphius. The cop on his tail is played by Jack Conley, a classical film-noir character, indecisive and back on the beat after some legal troubles of his own.
Slightly dated by its verbose Tarantino-esque conversations, Confidence Man is a high-point in direct-to-video cinema while the genre was otherwise taking a nose-dive in the early 2000s. At the moment I write this, it has zero IMDB reviews and scant info whatsoever online.. Like a thief in the night.. This does not help its rediscovery. Yet it's an intriguing hidden-gem, very much worth digging-up after all these years of obscurity. In its minimalist, rough around the edges way, Confidence Man compares favourably to bigger-budget films in the crime and neo-noir genres.. But as a kind of bonus, you get the satisfaction and aforementioned texture and feeling only an obscure film can provide.
The company that made the film is credited as "Be Brave Pictures" and they even thank people in the credits for often working for free ... It was indeed brave to make something more like an A-picture in terms of writing, but go against the formula of the time by not having a star-name on the cover to move units. But rather than all their money going on David Hasselhoff, it seemed to have been a very limited pool spent on a personal dream. Sure, it ticks genre boxes, but it's also very unconventional, opening with a First-Testament quote on the screen followed by a monologue about Dante's Inferno. It didn't look like it made a commercial splash ... That's a bummer ... But artistically, nobody can take the work away from them.
