MovieChat Forums > The Grifters (1991) Discussion > Why did she get 10.000? Why did she leav...

Why did she get 10.000? Why did she leave all the money behind?

posted 17 years ago by unclebob-7
14 replies | jump to latest

Fantastic movie! One for the collection!
Three questions:

1- Why did Anjelica /Lilly get 10.000 from Bobo in the enveloppe after the oranges scene? Just before she left.

2- Were did she get the money from to place the bets at the racetrack?
These were big amounts and she got her orders to place bets via telephone so no money handed over at that point.
Is this explained in the book?
( i mean: why call per teleph if you have to meet anyway to get the betting money?)

3- After killing Myra / Anette Bening, why did Lilly leave all the money in the trunk stash?
I understand why she had to leave a lot of it (otherwise Bobo would know she had gotten away) but i think she could have taken... lets say .. half of it. Nobody knew how much there originally was in the trunk anyway.
This point is not trivial because the whole ending is based on its consequeces.
If she would have taken a large amount she could have disappeared immedeately, now she had to do a very risky re-apperance on ''known territory'' to get some money from her son.

Thanks!!

[–] rickmeister95 17 years ago

Good questions.

1. The 10 grand was her pay for the very bet that got her into trouble with Bobo. This is made clear in the book.

2. Lilly's job requires her to keep a rotating - and accounted for - supply of big cash.

3. In the book, it's as simple as this: Lilly is now Moira (Myra), and therefore the money doesn't belong to her - it, and the car it's in, belongs to the dead Lilly.

[–] unclebob-7 17 years ago

Thanks for yr annswers!

@1
Apparently Bobo still made money on the bet?

Or Lilly simply got payed because it was her job also if some bets did not go as desired? Bobo must be a very nice boss.

@3
I see from many discussions here that the book is followed in such a way that the movie is forced into several little illogical twists. They did not allow themselves complete freedom when they wrote the script.
Now i understand why many movies dont follow the book but are only loosely based on a book. Now it makes sense to me. Books are much better for explaining many mny twists, in a book you have oceans of time (pages) to explain. A movie is very short compared to a book.

Interesting for me.

The movie still stands out as a very strong one, i will defenitely keep it (i download old movies as a hobby, 1 or 2 every week, and i only rarely keep them after vieuwing, maybe 95% is deleted).

[–] mccannisdown 17 years ago

Hi, I first saw this movie as a kid, and didn't fully understand Lily's job until I watched it recently.

At a racetrack the "odds" for a payout are determined not just by the horse's handicapping, but by the "action" of the bettors.

So when a horse is an underdog, and lots of people bet on it, the odds would go down.

Lily is paid to place huge bets on long shots, reducing the odds. Because if a long shot wins, people like Bobo have to pay out huge sums of money.

The example in the opening of the film explains it well. Lily places 2 bets, to move the odds from 70:1 to 22:1.

This acts as "insurance" in the event that this long shot won. While most of the time the long shots don't win, it's much much cheaper to have Lily fixing the "price" than Bobo paying them out.

Lily is distracted with Roy in LA, and as she is stuck in traffic a long shot comes in. That's why Bobo beats her up.

[–] zanmorrow 17 years ago

1. She sent Boba the 10 grand to pretend she had put the bet on because the horse won.

2. The second poster is correct.

3. She just wanted to get the hell out of there after killing Myra and didn't want to risk fingerprints etc. She had to have 'the frame holding' in order to get away. Also she knew Roy must have money somewhere.

O that blue, blue shirt of yours

[–] lgforce 17 years ago

Hmmm

[–] amytaylor 17 years ago

@3 - This still doesn't make sense to me, and as the OP said it's a fairly fundamental plot point as it sets up the tragic ending.

If she were Myra she would have taken the money, that's why she followed Lilly and went to her room in the first place. In fact I'd say it was MORE suspicious that she left the money, since it makes 'Lilly's' murder motiveless. As for fingerprints - it was her car so why would her fingerprints on it have been a problem?

Come to think of it, that brings up another plot hole - the police officer who takes Roy to identify 'Lilly' says they can't use dental records and don't have her fingerprints on record, but they could've easily checked to see if her fingerprints matched those found in her car.

I did enjoy this film by the way, but found this troubling.

[–] rickmeister95 17 years ago

There is some suspension of belief required here; Lilly's morals are such that, in the real world, she probably would have taken at least part of the money.
In fiction, that would be too easy. Lilly chooses the best out for herself in a desperate situation; become someone else.
Moira has just inadvertantly offered her identity to Lilly, but it has to be as clean a switch as possible - the money has to be sacrificed.

Bobo Justice is the catalyst in her decision. By leaving the money, Lilly has thrown him off. If only in the desperate hope that he will believe that Moira's dead body is that of a suicidal Lilly, and therefore leave the matter closed. The money is required for the frame; if there was no large stash of cash found, Bobo would be on to Lilly and eventually track her down. Of course this may well happen anyway; Bobo marked Lilly with a very tracable scar.

As for the finger prints, you have found as much a plot hole as a generation gap.
Jim Thompson's novel took place in it's own time period - the early sixties. So we have a story device that would have been much more believable to the book's original generation. Next of kin identification was common public knowledge, forensics not so much.
When the movie updated the story to the early nineties - the identification of Lilly/Moira's body should have been better updated as well.
This twist in the story would be nearly impossible to pull-off today.

[–] mobocracy 16 years ago

"Lily" was a suicide, not a murder, so there's no motive and the cash stash remaining helps reinforce the fact that it was a suicide, and not a murder or a robbery.

Lily should have taken SOME of the money, though, since nobody knew how much she had on hand. As long as the amount left was "substantial" and was in the ballpark for the amount Bobo might have expected, she would have been fine, and presuming that she could have taken 10 or 20 thousand (2 bundles of $100s), it would have made her getaway much easier.

The forensic hole is that even by 1940s standards, it would have been OBVIOUS that it wasn't a suicide -- no powder residue on Myra's hands, and the ceiling/wall would have a huge exit splash from the gunshot, which any detective would have concluded wasn't a suicide.

What wasn't explained, though, was how she got money for buying down the odds. Since she's presumably buying down the odds of longshots that seldom win, she wouldn't really be able to make up her losses, even if she kept 100% of the longshots that actually won.

Strangely, how she skimmed WAS fairly well explained, if obliquely -- she gathered losing betting slips and used them as basically fake receipts to show she was buying down the odds, when she instead kept the money.

[–] Byzantine15 16 years ago

"Lily should have taken SOME of the money, though, since nobody knew how much she had on hand."

I agree. It seemed illogical that she would leave it all. Unless, of course, her panic was such that she could only think of getting out of there. But that doesn't seem like her.

Yes, we have noble llamas.

[–] Sulaimone 11 years ago

Once she got the call that Bobo was onto her, she knew she had to hightail it quick. Bobo had let her know earlier that he had people everywhere. She knew the deal, she was a dead woman if she didn't leave now. Now? No...RIGHT NOW!

[–] roell29 16 years ago

I was wondering the same thing and then I remembered her scooping up discarded tickets. I think the way she could have made money is, whenever she would find a used ticket for the longshot, she could put it in her file as her own bet and then deduct the amount of the bet from the money she owed Bobo and keep it. Bobo wouldn't have known or cared from day to day how much money she needed to bet to bring the odds down. He just wanted them down. Bobo seemed to figure out what she was doing when he confronted her about skimming, after seeing that she had a spare 10k to pretend she had bet on Troubador. He basically approved of it and gave her back the 10k. But I guess she thought he wouldn't have appreciated the fact that she had a whole trunk full of money. Make sense?

[–] mobocracy 16 years ago

My guess is that Bobo probably knew she was skimming (its not like he hired her with references from a convent), but wanted it kept to an undetectable minimum.

Being a grifter, she was probably just playing the odds that the the odds were more or less reasonable predictors of the race's outcome, and that longshots were just that and as long as they lost, little attention would be paid to what their final running odds were. This allowed her to keep money she would have used to buy down the bets and the discarded slips were her receipts to balance against what she skimmed.

What I wonder, though, is if anyone actually buys down odds to protect bookmakers (legit or otherwise). The side effect is perhaps making races seem closer than they really are, possibly luring people to bet on horses with longer odds than are actually posted.

[–] BigJohnPilgrim 12 years ago

Of course Bobo knew Lilly was skimming, they actually discussed it in a roundabout way during the confrontation, he hinted that he knew she was doing it and she acknowledged by saying she wouldn't be any good if she didn't. They both tiptoed around it with some brief back-and-forth.

On the 'suicide' - this was the biggest glaring hole in an otherwise well-thought-out and well-written script - the results suggested by the splatter of blood on Lilly and the supposedly totally destroyed face that couldn't be dental-matched only happens with a shotgun, not a handgun. And the bullet would have put a splatter on the ceiling, so that plus the splatter around Lilly's face on the bed sheets and pillows would have been detectable no matter how much she cleaned up. Not to mention the issues others have mentioned such as gunpwder residue.

And anyone who's seen the movie Charley Varrick (with Walter Matthau) knows that when a suspect gets a dead body to replace him so he can disappear, and a large amount of loot is involved, that only enough loot is left to be convincing and the rest goes with the escapee. Of course, then there wouldn't be any motivation for the last scene, so...

I won't even get into how in the wide world of sports does a thick drink glass get broken by a leather briefcase and a face. Nothing there hard enough to break a drink glass and cut a jugular. Oh well, once again, the plot intervenes. Sigh.

Come see a fat old man sometime!

[–] n-izzo 11 years ago

There is a scene where Lily is shown picking up the losing tickets left behind by other racers. Presumably she submits these as part of her receipts to Bibo, as if she placed the bets and that is what she skims. Plus, when one of her ling shots does win, she can lie to Bobo about how much she wagered and keep part of the winnings to herself.