Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS is a comedy about the joys of conning, and you feel a secret release in the flagrant amorality and greed of its characters. They’re predators, these two, sharks feasting on the gullible rich women who come to wiggle their toes in the azure waters of Beaumont-sur-Mer in the South of France. When decent human sentiments are mentioned they cock their heads in puzzlement. Their corruption has a glorious purity. They’re rats, clean through. Caine plays a snakily elegant playboy named Jamison, who has raised the art of seduction to a lucrative business. Jamison isn’t a champion between the sheets, and the good life has left the body well-padded and shmushable. What he appeals to in the women he approaches isn’t their thirst for casbah sex but their desire for exotic adventure. He presents himself as a character in a romance novel – an exiled prince trying desperately to raise the cash to finance the brave resistance fighters back home – then offers his victims a role alongside him as the beautiful lady bountiful, savior of freedom. (...) until the end, the rats keep topping themselves, swishing their tails with vermin panache. (Hal Hinson)