50 Years Ago Today: The Sting

The Sting was released this day in 1973 — 50 years ago.

I had just turned 8 when this movie came out. The Sting was definitely one of the keystones in that heavy period of Hollywood nostalgia of the early ’70s which I wrote about here. Its ultimate source was David Maurer’s 1940 book The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man. Maurer had interviewed scores of real-life grifters for his book, getting the skinny of the tricks of the trade. The idea of turning into a film came from screenwriter David S. Ward, who at the time was employed at a company that made educational films. It was one of two screenplays Ward sold at the same time, both produced by Tony Bill with Michael and Julia Phillips (author of the bestselling You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again). The other one Steelyard Blues, with Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland and Peter Boyle, was directed by Alan Myerson.

This is a LOT of hungry, new blood and they went at the project with a will, adding all sorts of elements that paid off in a manner tellingly consonant with the elaborate bamboozle at the film’s heart. To direct and star they got the winning team from the 1969 hit Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, director George Roy Hill and stars Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Both of these films follow the “stylishly depicted outlaw” theme of Arthur Penn’s 1967 Bonnie and Clyde. The Sting also has much in common with Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon, released that same year, including a con man theme, and an almost aching nostalgia for the Depression Era.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen The Sting: eight? Ten? I just watched it again yesterday after a gulf of many decades and half expected to hate it after all these years, but no, goddamn it, it proves to be too clever and charming for that. Why did I expect (maybe even want) to dislike a movie I once loved? Um, because I am no longer a child? And I remembered it as a movie that was all about style, and which glorifies a gang of criminals, and we now live in a nation that is now on the precipice of having conned itself to death? If you haven’t developed a loathing of con men after the past seven years or so, the mark at the table is most definitely YOU. Also, this movie marks New Hollywood’s move away from substantive realism of the sort I just praised to the skies in my post on Serpico. Going forward, style, like the shark in Jaws, would devour everything in its path, and substance would once again struggle at the margins. In spite of that, however, the movie still won me, just barely, which is pretty miraculous.

It managed to do so because the movie itself is forthrightly a con. Not just because it tricks us several times with plot elements that turn out to have been subterfuges, but also because the creators were smart enough to load the dice. To be blunt, I despise almost all heist movies. Why? Because they put the audience in the position of rooting for and identifying with, CROOKS. It seems pretty basic, but that took a surprisingly long time to dawn on me, and it seems never to have occurred to most people. It’s probably the thing that I am most Puritanical about, in that old, bluestocking sense of the word. I can have a certain amount of sympathy for people who are driven by circumstances to crime, but those who are simply born to prey on their fellow men, no, I don’t have much sympathy for or interest in that. But like I say, The Sting, in its broad shameless fantasy, short-circuits that. All of the marks in this film are hoisted on the petard of their own larceny. And the titular Big Con amounts to revenge on a gangster (Robert Shaw) who has rubbed out one of their number (Robert Earl Jones, father of James Earl Jones). We leave aside the question of what alternate universe contains a gang of white criminals so racially enlightened that they risk the wrath of both the law and Irish mobsters to express their displeasure over the killing of a black man in 1936. It makes us feel warm and fuzzy. This is Hollywood and it’s 1973. Of course the history is revisionist.

But we love the ride on this merry-go-round. The film keeps hitting us with hits of heroine that inject the pleasure-centers of our brain with bursts of happiness springing from past associations, from the original black and white Universal Pictures logo to the last iris out. Like Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, Redford is forever running away from cops and crooks in funny foot chases. The titles look just like Saturday Evening Post illustrations. In perhaps the film’s biggest swindle (so big that almost no one ever seems hip to it) is Marvin Hamlisch’s use of Scott Joplin’s soundtrack on the score. It’s one of the most effective, cherished, and remembered elements in the film, so savored that most people have never figured out or noticed that it’s actually wrong. Joplin’s rags are from the 1890s and the oughts. The sound of the 1930s, when the film is set, was crooners and early big bands like Paul Whiteman’s. In most movies set in that era, it’s what you hear piped in over the radio, or being played on phonographs. But this music sweeps you up. I freaking love it, and you won’t be shocked, I ween, to learn that I have Scott Joplin rags on my phone. It’s why I chose the soundtrack album cover for the image at the top of this post rather than, say, a movie poster.

You can’t make a good machine without good parts, and the impeccable supporting cast is a who’s who of memorable character actors. In addition to Robert Shaw (with the exception of Brando the most memorable screen gangster since Bogart, Cagney, and Edward G. Robinson), we get Charles Durning, Eileen Brennan, Ray Walston, Harold Gould, Dana Eclar, Jack Kehoe, Dmitra Arliss, Larry D. Mann, Arch Johnson, Ken Sansom, and whole bunch of others.

Above all, the movie understands the deep truth that confidence trickery is all about theatre and vice-versa. At bottom it’s a celebration of Hollywood make-believe itself. It’s that self-referential, existential element that elevates it above the simple, flashy revenge story it might have been and makes it something worth remembering.