George Roy Hill’s The Sting, starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, was written by David S. Ward (Sleepless in Seattle). The movie was nominated for ten Academy Awards and won seven of them, including Best Director and Best Picture. The Sting is a complex caper story in which two confidence men, Henry Gondorff (Newman as the good-looking but grizzled, veteran grifter) and Johnny Hooker (Redford as the also good-looking, naive upstart) are on a mission to con a mob boss, Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw), for every penny they can get.
Buy The Sting Blu-rayLonnegan has been accidentally ripped off by Hooker, and Lonnegan’s gang will not stop coming after Hooker until all Hooker’s crew members are dead. Hooker is brought to Gondorff to plan and execute the con to end all cons against Lonnegan. The web is set early and there are many twists and turns to blindside the conscientious viewer.
It doesn’t take long to decide the con will be a formerly famous one known as “The Wire.” Gondorff will pretend to run a sportsbook. This leads to the need to hire countless men to pretend to run the office, keep up with box scores, run back and forth with pay slips, etc. The scale of a confidence game is presented as being an incredibly complex way of going about “earning” money, and the grifters must be one-hundred percent trustworthy to each other.
At one point, we learn that this complex grift may need two- or three-hundred men to run it. Each of them getting enough of a share to make it all worth it. This leads the viewer to imagine the countless ways in which everything can go south. Hooker pretends to work for Gondorff, pretends to be sick of working for him, and pretends to want to run his own gang. He needs cash, though, and gets Lonnegan in on an apparent scheme in which they appear to know the results of horse races a few minutes early, giving a person in the know the ability to make guaranteed-to-win post-bets.
The music of Scott Joplin (1868 – 1917) with adaptations by Marvin Hamlisch, is all that is heard during the musical interludes in The Sting. Ragtime (1890’s to the 1910’s) was popular earlier in the century than when the film takes place in September of 1936. Ragtime, and only ragtime music is heard throughout, helping the narrative in several ways. It is incongruous in time and its heyday has come to an end in the same way the age of the grifters and confidence men is about to come to an end due to major changes in jurisprudence helping cut down on grifting police.
Ragtime also has a playful / jaunty air, a springy step, and while the plot of The Sting leads to matters of life and death, Ragtime keeps the plot more bent toward the lighthearted. Last, Ragtime is never played under sound effects or dialogue during The Sting; in effect keeping the music and the plot separate in a way that allows the viewer to concentrate. Ragtime is too fun to use it to ruin a serious movie, but it is absolutely perfect here as the juxtaposition between darkness and whimsy.
Paul Newman and Robert Redford get the most accolades for The Sting. Having just made Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) a few years earlier, also with George Roy Hill at the helm, had audiences clamoring for more of their undeniable chemistry. And they got it. But let’s not forget the seriously deep casting helping to surround and bolster the leads. Robert Shaw is terrifying as Doyle Lonnegan, and he needs to be. To believe that Gondorff and Hooker are genuinely in a life-or-death situation, we must be absolutely convinced that Lonnegan will kill anyone who gets in his way. But the sinister Lonnegan also needs a comedic element to give relief to the tension. Ray Walston as J. J. Singleton and Harold Gould as Kid Twist bring the laughs as they run into obstacle after obstacle in their attempts to one-up Lonnegan.
If you haven’t had the chance to watch The Sting, now is the time to sit down with one of the greatest buddy/caper movies ever produced.
