THE USUAL SUSPECTS

THE USUAL SUSPECTS

It involves the wildly mysterious Keyser Soze, the fierce, off-camera
Hungarian who is referred to as "the devil himself" and whose very
name seems to give the film makers a thrill.

The film's secrets are held together by dialogue of quiet ferocity:
"Keyser always said, 'I believe in God and I'm afraid of Him.'
Well, I believe in God and the only thing that scares me is Keyser Soze."


Gabriel Byrne - Dean Keaton
Stephen Baldwin - McManus
Chazz Palminteri - Dave Kujan
Kevin Pollak - Todd Hockney
Pete Postlethwaite - Kobayashi
Kevin Spacey - Roger "Verbal" Kint
Benicio del Toro - Fred Fenster
Dan Hedaya - Jeff Rabin













He'll flip ya. He'll flip ya for real
Dave Kujan: Do you know a dealer named Ruby Deamer, Verbal?
Verbal: Do you know a religious guy named John Paul

Keaton: I'm a businessman now.
Cop: Yeah? What's that, the restaurant business? No. From now on, you're in the gettin'-fucked-by-us business.







The tough guys of "The Usual Suspects" radiate confidence in their own movie-mythic possibilities,
secure in the knowledge that they are this year's Reservoir Dogs. And it's not even a stretch, since
Bryan Singer's immensely stylish film noir incorporates so many good masculine roles and such terse,
literate conversational sparring. With these advantages, "The Usual Suspects" goes straight to cult status
without quite touching one important base: the audience's emotions. This movie finally isn't anything more
than an intricate feat of gamesmanship, but it's still quite something to see.

And it has been made to be seen twice, with a plot guaranteed to create minor bewilderment the first time around.
Mr. Singer and the screenwriter, Christopher McQuarrie, whose collaboration on "Public Access" won the Grand Jury
Prize at the Sundance Film Festival two years ago, include a great many hints and nuances that won't be noticeable until
you know which Suspect bears the most watching. Suffice it to say that this film's trickiest role is handled with supreme
slyness. And that acting of that caliber, plus a whopper of an ending, compensates for some inevitable head-scratching on the way home.

It's no surprise that this film's poster art, featuring five intriguing miscreants in a police lineup, was an important early aspect
of its creation. Beyond following the demands of an unusually dense mystery plot, Mr. Singer and Mr. McQuarrie have
also worked overtime at generating visual interest in their story. Even the jail cell looks eye-catchingly sleek when Keaton
(Gabriel Byrne), McManus (Stephen Baldwin), Hockney (Kevin Pollak), Fenster (Benicio Del Toro) and Roger (Verbal)
Kint (Kevin Spacey) are locked up together one fateful evening. "It was all the cops' fault," Verbal later remembers.
"You don't put guys like that in a room together." Not unless you want the endless set of high-testosterone
-offs that help keep "The Usual Suspects" perpetually on its toes.

The five New York cellmates, who seem to have been rounded up at random, are soon embroiled in a crime scheme
that we know will lead, since the film is structured in flashback, to an explosion on a pier in California. In the aftermath
of those fireworks, the story is being unraveled by three separate investigators (Chazz Palminteri, Dan Hedaya and
Giancarlo Esposito), with the help of Verbal, who has survived to explicate the tale.

It involves figures as wildly mysterious as Keyser Soze, the fierce, off-camera Hungarian who is referred to as
"the devil himself" and whose very name seems to give the film makers a noirish thrill. Keyser Soze is as fabulously
improbable as Pete Postlethwaite's Kobayashi, whose dark makeup and Pakistani accent just dare the viewer to call his bluff.
It ultimately isn't best to do so, since "The Usual Suspects" has become so exhaustingly convoluted by the time it ends that
some of its unraveled threads lead nowhere. But the film's secrets are also held together by dialogue of quiet ferocity:
"Keyser always said, 'I believe in God and I'm afraid of Him.' Well, I believe in God and the only thing that scares me is Keyser Soze."

Mr. Singer has assembled a fine ensemble cast of actors who can parry such lines, and whose performances mesh
effortlessly despite their exaggerated differences in demeanor. (Mr. Baldwin's mad-dog jokester, for instance, matches
Mr. Byrne's elegant businessman without missing a beat.) Without the violence or obvious bravado of "Reservoir Dogs,"
these performers still create strong and fascinatingly ambiguous characters. Mr. Spacey, so good in "Swimming With Sharks" this
year, joins Mr. Palminteri to give the interrogation scenes a particular charge.



The tough guys of "The Usual Suspects" radiate confidence in their own movie-mythic possibilities,
secure in the knowledge that they are this year's Reservoir Dogs. And it's not even a stretch, since Bryan
Singer's immensely stylish film noir incorporates so many good masculine roles and such terse, literate conversational sparring.
With these advantages, "The Usual Suspects" goes straight to cult status without quite touching one important base:
the audience's emotions. This movie finally isn't anything more than an intricate feat of gamesmanship, but it's still quite something to see.




1: The Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer, US, 1995)
WHO IS KAISER SOZE? (SO-ZAY)
Kujan realises that he has been conned...
"It was one of those rare occasions when you could lie to an audience and because there were so many aspects to the film the audience would accept lies - it made the ending all the more exciting and powerful."



That is how director Bryan Singer remembers the scene that tops the Observer poll. "The film won two Academy Awards but in a way this is more significant because then we were up against the best films of 1995, while this survey is comparing a moment in The Usual Suspects to all the great moments in film history." The nature of the list also appeals to Singer: "Films to me are great lines and great moments - it is amazing to me that we should come out top. It is a testament to how much people like to be tricked: if you trick them the right way, they will love you forever; if you get it wrong, you will never work again."



The whole film is built on lies. Five criminals meet at a police line-up, plan and execute a successful robbery. And they are then approached by the arch criminal Keyser Soze via his henchman, the lawyer Kobayashi, played by Pete Postlethwaite. He makes them an offer - work for the devil or die. The tale is told in flashback by Kevin Spacey's character, the crippled Verbal Kint - already granted immunity from prosecution - as he is interrogated by customs officer Dave Kujan, played by Chazz Palminteri.



But this revelation scene is not the original. Singer screened the first version for two friends - his agent and his lawyer - before realising that it was, "too flat?it was confusing and just kind of died". It had the crashing coffee cup falling out of Kujan's hand, the bulletin board and the fax with the face of Keyser Soze, which seems to take forever to come off the machine. But after that first screening, Singer introduced the visual flashbacks as Kujan scans the board and finally realises that he has been conned by Spacey's Kint - aka Keyser Soze - who is shuffling out of police headquarters after being released by Kujan.

Singer added audio flashbacks. So in hindsight we hear from disembodied voices, with Spacey's saying: "It's all there, I'm telling it straight, I swear," as Kujan scans the board and finds references to some of the places and characters from Spacey's elaborate lie staring down from the board.



"It works because of the way Kevin carries the moment, the choice of music - how it shifts gear and takes a completely different rhythm from the rest of the film," says Singer. "There are all kinds of scenes and pieces of the film being played out before your eyes - the images are flooding down from the bulletin board. The coffee cup goes crashing in slow motion and all the time you are seeing images from the film that you thought meant one thing but you now realise mean something completely different. We pulled together every bit of sound which hinted that Kevin was Keyser Soze. The flashbacks and audio were all keenly placed to sit with certain images and then we stuck all the magnetic tape together and waited to see the result."



The scene was the idea of screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie. He and Singer had made a low-budget film, Public Access, in 1993 that won an award at the Sundance film festival. The duo was seeking a new project and McQuarrie came up with the idea of five criminals meeting at a police line-up. The bulletin board scene was the second he wrote and the film was then effectively written in reverse.



"It is one of the few times I can watch something that I have done. Obviously I am biased, but I think it was a successful surprise, and it had been a long time since a surprise ending had actually caught people by surprise."