Ed Exley: "Rollo Tamasi."
Jack Vincennes: "Is there more to that, or am I supposed to guess?"
Ed Exley: "Rollo was a purse snatcher. My father ran into him off duty, and he shot my father six times and got away clean. No one even knew who he was. I just made the name up to give him some personality."
Jack Vincennes: "What's your point?"
Ed Exley: "Rollo Tamasi is the reason I became a cop. I wanted to catch the guys who thought they could get away with it. It's supposed to be about justice. Then somewhere along the way, I lost sight of that."
L.A. Confidential is a story about many things, but it is more than anything else a story about police corruption. A wide cast of cast of characters play out a complex and complicated drama (which is even more complex and complicated in the novel, believe it or not) that is set against the very authentic background of the LAPD as a notorious hotbed of truly vicious corrupt cops. Not just bad apples; the whole system was rotten to the core.
But if corruption was the rule of the day, that does not mean that exceptions did not exist. Vincennes is corrupt, but in his own peculiarly unique way. Ed Exley is the shining knight, however; Mr. Clean who has come to save the day. This little story that Exley shares with Vincennes—with whom he is not even on particularly friendly terms, much close with—is important for two reasons. Only one of which is obvious at the time Exley shared it.
“Remember, dear readers, you heard it here first, off the record, on the Q.T. and very Hush-Hush.”
Another thing that the film is about is the intricate connection between the Hollywood film industry, the publicity industry and law enforcement. A single phone call was all it could take to make sure that a very popular star’s peccadilloes never become public knowledge. Likewise, another phone call could make sure that that very same behavior was captured on film and recorded on text with a typewriter either to be published as a sleazy article in a tabloid magazine…or be used as leverage for something much less sleazy that the studios cared more about and was willing to collaborate with the tabloid on.
The 1950’s were especially robust for the tabloids because the power of the studio system was beginning to experience its first cracks and a new generation of stars were coming along that were less willing to have every aspect of their private lives controlled by the studios. And the police? Somebody needed to tip the tabloids off and collect a finder’s fee, right? Sid Hudgens is the main man representing the tabloids here, the brains behind the sleazy operation with the telling name “Hush-Hush” which is the film’s stand-in for the leading real tabloid of its day, title simply Confidential.
“Sergeant Vincennes was killed by a .32 slug to the heart. Time of death, approximately 1 a.m. Although he was found in Echo Park, preliminary forensics indicates his body was most likely moved. I want two-man teams to scour that entire neighborhood. Our justice must be swift and merciless.”
Dudley Smith is a Captain with the LAPD. He’s been on the force for years and is himself a force within the force. Remember, now, that the LAPD is systemically corrupt. From the top down and Dudley is very much near the top despite his limited rank. He runs a show without allowing the audience to peek behind the scenes. The audience is the public and the show is an effective force that protects, serves and puts the bad guys away.
It is interesting that he puts “our” in front of justice because, well, there’s justice according to those who mete it out and then there’s actual justice. The two may not necessarily meet anywhere in the middle of a Venn Diagram. Dudley Smith need not put so much energy into finding the killer of one of their own, Officer Vincennes, since he is already quite familiar with the events leading to the cold-blooded murder of Sergeant.
“Rollo Tamasi.”
Jack Vincennes had never heard the name Rollo Tamasi before Ed Exley shared his story. No one had; Exley admits he made the name up and he is not lying. That made-up name is the very last thing that Jack Vincennes says before perishing as the result of that .32 slug to the heart, shot at point-blank range. With his death, of course, there are now still only two people in the world who have ever heard the name, except now Ed Exley shares that information not with Jack Vincennes, but with the man who killed Jack Vincennes.
If whoever shot Vincennes makes the mistake of mentioning Rollo Tomasi to Ed Exley, well, the jig is up. There’s no flies on Exley; he may not be a clean cop anymore, but he’s still a smart cop. So the question is, of course, who killed Jack Vincennes and does he, in fact, make the fatal mistake of asking Exley about Mr. Tomasi? Yes, he does. And even being the most corrupt Captain in the LAPD can’t save him now.
