Anniversary of The Usual Suspects

According to the IMDB website, for the first time Bryan Singer’s film The Usual Suspects was shown on January 25, 1995, at the Sundance Independent Film Festival. This is also confirmed by the review of Roger Ebert for this film. However ... However, in the 1995 Sundance Film Festival programme I did not find any mention of this film. Perhaps it was some kind of completely closed show. Moreover, IMDB simultaneously reports that the official premiere of The Usual Suspects took place in May 1995 at the Cannes International Film Festival. True, at the Cannes Film Festival, the film The Usual Suspects participated only in an out-of-competition screening.

Continuing the theme of the festival participation of this picture, it can be noted that the film was nominated for the British BAFTA Prize, withal, as an American film. Although two British, two American and one German film companies took part in the creation of the film. And it is the British PolyGram Filmed Entertainment that is indicated as the main participant in this consortium.

The film obtained totally 37 film awards and 16 nominations. The most significant of all these indicators of festival success, in our opinion, is the nomination for the French César Awards as a Best Foreign film. The significance of this is due to the fact that the The Usual Suspects as the nominee for César Awards was accompanied, in particular, with Bridges of Madison County by Clint Eastwood and Underground by Emir Kusturica. But these masterpieces also remained only nominees as well. The prize was awarded by the decision of the French Film Academy to Ken Loach's film "Land and Freedom".

This is not to say that all the film awards received by the film were very insignificant. The film obtained two Academy Awards. One of them - for the Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen - had gone to Christopher McQuarrie, which is absolutely not surprising, because, before starting to work in the cinema, he worked in a private detective agency and in a law office and was familiar with the criminal world and the work of policemen, as they say, not by hearsay. The second Oscar - for the Best Actor in a Supporting Role - was won by Kevin Spacey. If Kevin Spacey's role in this film was Supporting Role, then whose role was the Leading one? Can someone explain? Or maybe it's just that Sean Penn, Anthony Hopkins, Nicolas Cage were competing for the Oscar in the Best Actor in a Leading Role nomination that year, and Spacey just didn't dare to compete with them?

Well, continuing the theme of Kevin Spacey in this film, we can note that, as many people know, in December 2017, allegations of sexual harassment were made against Kevin Spacey. Gabriel Byrne then reported that the shooting of the film The Usual Suspects at some moment was even suspended for two days, precisely because Spacey was caught in obscene sexual propositions in relation to one young actor engaged in the film. But later, in June 2018, Kevin Pollack stated that the reason for the shooting stops was that this actor was actually the then-boyfriend of director Bryan Singer himself.

Perhaps due to the fact that the premiere of the film The Usual Suspects was not held in New York, The New York Times did not honor this work of Bryan Singer with a separate review. Film reviewer Janet Maslin only at the end of the year, making a review of the film production that was released for the year, listed about 40 films that are worthy of attention, in her opinion, noting that "Each of them fought the creeping dullness of mainstream Hollywood. And each helped make 1995 a better year". In this list, at one of the last places was mentioned also the film The Usual Suspects.

But, if The New York Times film reviewer found at least a couple of flattering words for the film The Usual Suspects, even in the company of almost 4 dozen other films, then Roger Ebert did not find any. Moreover, one of the most devastating reviews of the guru of American film criticism is dedicated to this film by Bryan Singer. In this review, Ebert, who rated the film only one and a half stars out of 4 possible, wrote: "The first time I saw "The Usual Suspects" was in January, at the Sundance Film Festival, and when I began to lose track of the plot, I thought it was maybe because I'd seen too many movies that day. Some of the other members of the audience liked it, and so when I went to see it again in July, I came armed with a notepad and a determination not to let crucial plot points slip by me. Once again, my comprehension began to slip, and finally I wrote down: "To the degree that I do understand, I don't care." It was, however, somewhat reassuring at the end of the movie to discover that I had, after all, understood everything I was intended to understand. It was just that there was less to understand than the movie at first suggests."

Anyway, Roger Ebert was not the only one who did not understand the film. At least the first time. Kevin Spacey admitted that, having read the script, he also did not understand anything in it. And only after the second reading of the script the idea of the plot of the future film became clear to him. But to the other actors involved in the film, the meaning of the plot reached immediately. Moreover, as soon as they read the script, they were so impressed with it that they agreed to play in the film for fees that were substantially lower than their usual fees at that time. And all these were real stars of American cinema already at that moment: Stephen Baldwin, Kevin Spacey, Benicio Del Toro, Gabriel Byrne, Chazz Palminteri, Pete Postlethwaite, Dan Hedaya and others.

Mostly due to the agreement of the above movie stars with lower fees, the budget of the film was a relatively low value - about $ 6 million. This amount is equivalent to today's 10.5 million dollars. By today's standards of the film business, it is just a low budget movie. And, meanwhile, the box office of this film, according to the most authoritative Russian film critic Sergei Kudryavtsev, exceeded $ 51 million.

However, it would be incorrect to assume that film critics evaluated Singer's film exclusively negatively. Most of the reviews are just very positive. For example, the authoritative American film critic James Berardinelli commented on the film in his review: "Singer does an excellent job of blending humor into his noir thriller. There's enough to avoid a sense of ponderousness, but not so much that The Usual Suspects becomes campy....The Usual Suspects is an accomplished synthesis of noir elements and, as such, is an entertaining entry to the genre."

Yes, and from ordinary moviegoers Bryan Singer's film The Usual Suspects received a very high assessment: 82% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users around the world gave the film ratings from 8 to 10. Taking into account all the above indicators of the success of the film The Usual Suspects, its rating according to the version of FilmGourmand is 8.807, which allowed it to take 214th Rank in the Golden Thousand.