Everybody Loves A Con Man (Or Woman)-With Richard Gere’s “The Hoax” In Mind  

DVD Review

By Book Critic Zack James

The Hoax, starring Richard Gere

Everybody loves a con man (or at the headline states con woman as well although there tend to be fewer of them in the deep rich history of this art form). Everybody that is except the guy (or gal) being conned. That egg on the face person most definitely does not love a con although he or she gets what they deserve in my book. I have seen some beautiful work in my time. The time when Eddie Murray took some hungry greedy stockbroker for a cool million when a million was something on non-existent stock, nada. Or that time when Conrad Vedt a seemingly mild mannered non-entity took the local syndicate for five mil and got away with it (although he did spent some serious time looking over his shoulder before the coast was clear). The big one though at least the one I was close to, knew some of the players, was when Jack Kiley took down a couple of high-end Las Vegas gamblers for something like ten million all by himself. The stuff of legends. And that brings us to the film under review the rough film adaptation of writer Clifford Irving’s book about his big time literary scam of the so-called billionaire when a billion was serious money Howard Hughes “autobiography” The Hoax. (Although the thought occurs to me why would you believe what a con artist has written about himself-oh well.)  

Clifford Irving, played by Richard Gere, understood the first rule of the con-go big or don’t go at all. It is not worth the time or energy to do the con for chicken feed although I have known back in the old Acre section of my growing up town North Adamsville guys to do cons for chicken feed. A serious con like the one Irving tried to pull for a million bucks and maybe more if things had worked out on a well-known if reclusive public figure working the literary scam which meant bucking a high-end publishing company also meant possible jail time if the thing went south on him. Which in the end as everybody now knows it did dragging his wife and his closest collaborator down with him in the gutter-into jail time.       

       

Still you have to like the brass of the guy taking a shot at immortality in the con artist pantheon-a place not for the faint-hearted. First he had to get a big enough target for his appetites which seemed to narrow down to Howard Hughes for no better reason than he saw his name on a magazine cover and figured he could use that notorious reclusiveness of Hughes’ to work his magic. Of course the second rule of the con is to talk fast on your feet and be plausible which Irving did with relish starting with his agent and working up the food chain to the big-time publishing company executives. The dicey part or one of the dicey parts was that the potential publishers advised by their platoon of lawyers were going to be looking for some proof and a lot of the film dealt with working around that problem. But see the third rule of the con or maybe it really is the first rule once you get a bead on human nature as it has evolved over the last few millennia is to understand how to play to a  little greed or some vanity advantage over your competitors. Bingo here. 

The other dicey part which in the end did Irving and his compadres in was the blow-back from the super security conscious Hughes empire.  Irving almost had it made but just couldn’t work out that last kink about how to grab the dough-the fatal check-which needed to be cashed with Hughes’ name on it. Tough break. Yeah, everybody loves a con. Conrad Vedt, Jack Riley and Eddie Murray would have been proud.