Before “Parasite,” before “Shoplifters,” and even before “The Grifters,” there was the darkly comic Japanese morality play “Elegant Beast,” which makes the old W.C. Fields saying, “You can’t cheat an honest man” universal.

Yûzô Kawashima’s 1962 film, titled “Shitoyakana kedamono,” which is sometimes translated as “The Graceful Brute,” is a minor masterpiece in amoral, entangled thieving at its most personal. Confined to basically a single set — a modest but well-stocked Tokyo apartment — Kawashima’s film of a Kaneto Shindô screenplay is paranoid, callously amusing and cruelly cautionary.

There’s no such thing as a “victimless crime,” after all.

The apartment belongs to the Maedas. Or so we think. Their rush in hiding their TV, their Polaroid camera, the Renoir that sometimes hangs on the living room wall, their liquor collection and even members of the family tell us something’s up when three people come to their door.

Mr. Katori (Hideo Takamatsu), a talent agent hoping to book an “Evelyn Presley” tour of Japan, is furious. He’s brought along his accountant, Yuki (Ayako Wakao) and the ridiculous-looking but possibly tough jazz singer (Shôichi Ozawa) for backup.

There’s money missing from the office, and the Maeda’s son Minoru has taken it!

“There must be some mistake,” Mr. (Yûnosuke Itô) and Mrs. (Hisano Yamaoka) protest, in Japanese with English subtitles, the first of MANY such protests. “Our son would never do such a thing!”

A tirade of bellowing accusations filled with facts, details and precise amounts confronts a lot of very Japanese apologizing and bowing.

But it’s only afterward that Katori’s “I’ll go to the POLICE” threat is dissected. That’s when Minoru, played by Manamitsu Kawabata with an Alain Delon edge and swagger, comes out of hiding.

“He cheats on his taxes,” Minoru cackles as changes out of his sharkskin suit. No, Katori won’t be ratting them out to the cops.

When tarted-up daughter Tomoko (Yûko Hamada) sashays in, we start to get a picture of the scope of the crimes of this family that preys together. The novelist she’s been cleaning out has kicked her out. Something about Dad’s “pimping her out” to him as his mistress rubbed him the wrong way.

When novelist Yoshizawa (Kyû Sazanka) barges in to “break things off,” he makes himself at home and asks about his Renoir. That’s when we figure out he pays for this apartment. He apparently recommended Minoru for the booking agency job. Minoru didn’t just loot them, he apparently stole book residuals by passing off Yoshizawa’s business card to his publishing house.

“It might be rude of me to talk this way, but are you all in this together?”

Every knock at the door of this apartment further complicates this delicious plo and the relationships, and adds money to the tally and layers to all the grifting that’s going on.

“Elegant Beast” was one of the last films of Kawashima (“The Temple of Wild Geese”) and an early jewel on screenwriter (“The Naked Island,” “Hachi: A Dog’s Tale,” “Postcard”) and sometime director Shindô’s resume.

The early scenes set it up as a con artist family farce, with the “Evelyn Presley” references and jazz singer with the silliest spitcurls this side of “Alice in Wonderland.” But as sketchy women talk of using and letting themselves be used, sexually, for money and as corrupt men rage at being used in simular fashion, we start to taste the “cost” of all this conning, however one and all rationalize it.

Kawashima shows characters ascending or descending a shadowy symbolic white staircase, up towards their dream life, or down into debt, jail or hell.

Conversations are overheard as characters are glimpsed listening via a fan vent, a doorway, through an air duct or down a stairwell. The compositions by cinematographer Nobuo Munekawa are pristine and striking, and the editing (by Tatsuji Nakashizu) crisply underscores the combative — without fisticuffs — nature of the many harangues and bowing apologies that constitue the story’s conflicts.

The acting is blunt and brisk — sinister coming in all shapes and sizes here.

But best of all is the clockwork screenplay that complicates the characters and their interrelationships, allows them to miss seeing others just out of the frame and allows us to wonder not simply where the grifting ends, but who, in all this corruption, will come out clean and who will pay a price.

That makes “Elegant Beast” the mother of every dark grifter tale to follow. Because not every scam ends with a twinkle, a smirk and “The Sting.”

Rating: TV-14, but racy — nudity, profanity, innuendo

Cast: Ayako Wakao, Manamitsu Kawabata, Yûnosuke Itô,
Kyû Sazanka, Yûko Hamada, Hideo Takamatsu,
Hisano Yamaoka and Shôichi Ozawa

Credits: Directed byYûzô Kawashima, scripted by
Kaneto Shindô. A Daiei Release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:35