All it takes is a little confidence.

The Sting, evoking a bygone era of gangsters and con men, was the deserved winner of Best Picture Oscar in 1973. It also won Oscars for Best Director, Best Original Screenplay plus a host of technical awards as well.

Robert Redford plays Johnny Hooker a small time grifter who, whilst working a bait and switch street con, fleeces a numbers runner carrying the weekly take. The orders come down from the head gangster himself, Doyle Lonnegan an Irish-American hoodlum, played by Robert Shaw, to kill those who did this to set an example.

Hookers mentor is killed, mainly because Hooker starts spending a lot of that newly acquired loot that tips them off. He wants revenge so he looks up former big time con man Henry Gondorff, played by Paul Newman, who himself is dodging law enforcement as well as Hooker.

They work the big con on Lonnegan and it’s a beauty. The scheme they have is something to behold. They also have to do a couple of improvisations on the fly that lend a few twists to the scheme.

Newman and Redford, along with director George Roy Hill, had a lot riding on this movie, given it was a follow-up to their earlier critical and box-office hit Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid. To measure up, they had to produce nothing short of another classic. And so they did.

Comparing The Sting to Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid is kind of an overdone sport, but you can see why The Sting worked as well as it did by looking at how the director and the stars played it differently within the same basic framework with both Newman and Redford again playing outlaws and underdogs.

What’s different about The Sting, and what makes it such a classic in its own right, is the way the stars service the plot. In Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, Newman and Redford’s comradeship was the story. Here, the chemistry between the two actors is minimised in favour of spinning a yarn with enough red herrings to feed the Swedish navy. The plot here is smarter than Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, which is a more elegiac film with grander cinematography and funnier set pieces. The Sting is an edge-of-your-seat caper flick from beginning to end. The climax neatly wraps it all up.

You can’t really call The Sting a comedy. Though there are many laughs, but director George Roy Hill won’t let the audience relax enough for that. This is a con game, played on the audience, designed not to cheat but entertain by means of clever hoodwinking and constant misdirection plays.

The dialogue is great and feels real in its Runyonesque way, while the cons are elaborate and logically played out. Watching this on multiple repeat viewings is especially fun because once you know how the plot goes down, you find yourself catching clues you missed the first time, and enjoying the film even more for them.

Special mention should also go to Robert Shaw. He’s got a difficult part, maybe the most difficult in the film. He’s not stupid, he would not have gotten to the top of the rackets if he was. But he also has to show that hint of human weakness that can be exploited by Gondorff, Hooker and the whole gang they assemble which makes him vulnerable to the con.

During the 1960s and 1970s Robert Shaw was really coming into his own as an actor, getting more and more acclaim for his work. His early death, he was only 51, from a heart attack in 1978 was a real tragedy.

On a technical level, we have to surrender to the impeccable cinematography achieved by the meticulous eye of director George Roy Hill, in cooperation with a team of excellent professionals. This perfectly emulates the old films from the 1930s with the advantage of colour, in tones deliberately brownish, golden and yellowish. The sets, props and costumes are simply superb: the cars can make classic admirers salivate and the costumes deserve a place in the closet of any gentleman with a taste for the old-style elegance they exude. The period is well recreated and the situations balance dramatic tension and humour well, and the titles are magnificently well-designed and have art in themselves. It’s a long film, two hours long, but it’s so delightful to watch and so well edited that time flies by.

We also can’t also forget another co-star in this film, the ragtime music of Scott Joplin that was used to score The Sting. It probably is what a number of people still remember about the movie. Music from the Theodore Roosevelt era, scoring a film set in the Franklin Roosevelt era made while Richard Nixon was president. Strange, but it actually really works – the adaption by Marvin Hamlisch won him an Oscar.

The Sting still works wonders today.

and the tease for my next post . . . Puttin’ on the Ritz.