True Confessions **** (1981, Robert Duvall, Robert De Niro, Charles Durning) – Classic Movie Review 5811

Director Ulu Grosbard’s fully-fleshed-out, stimulating and intelligent 1981 thriller is adapted from John Gregory Dunne’s novel about a Forties detective bent on solving the brutal murder case of a young prostitute, in a trail that leads to a businessman who is a staunch supporter of his brother’s parish.

Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall give typically complex, distinguished performances as brothers, one a worldly, power-mad Catholic monsignor, Father Des Spellacy, the other a tough homicide cop, Detective Tom Spellacy.

There is also extremely powerful star support from Charles Durning, Kenneth McMillan, Burgess Meredith, Cyril Cusack, Ed Flanders, Dan Hedaya and Jeanette Nolan. Only Grosbard’s slightly plodding and uninspired direction fails fully to satisfy, with its bland personality and lack of distinctive character. But Owen Roizman’s photography, Georges Delerue’s score and Stephen S Grimes’s production designs do add the required flavour and atmopshere.

John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion’s screenplay is based on Dunne’s novel, which used facts from the notorious unsolved California real-life Black Dahlia murder case, earlier the basis of a TV movie, Who Is the Black Dahlia? (1975) and later the cinema feature The Black Dahlia (2006).

Also in the cast are Rose Gregorio, Gwen Van Dam, Tom Hill, Jorge Cervera Jr and Susan Myers.

Duvall got into the spirit of things by going on the night beat with real-life Los Angeles homicide detectives, attending a stake-out, witnessing a lie-detector test and visiting a murder crime scene.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 5811

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