PG | 2h 9m | Caper, Heist, Comedy | Dec. 25, 1973
Fifty years ago, “The Sting” won seven Academy Awards. Re-watching it fires up an appreciation of its timelessness.
“The Sting” became a cultural phenomenon and sparked a ragtime music revival—ice-cream trucks blared Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer” ad infinitum all across suburban America, and Mr. Softee trucks play it to this day. The film renewed an appreciation for Americana-painter Norman Rockwell’s art, made composer Marvin Hamlisch a household name, and burnished the already gleaming stars of its two iconic leads, Paul Newman and Robert Redford, by cashing in on their long-established, easy camaraderie.
Story
It’s the 1930s and America’s Great Depression is in full swing. Honest work is hard to come by. We meet street-level flim-flam man Johnny Hooker (Redford, looking almost too pretty for the proceedings) cheerfully pulling a simple bait-and-switch on a victim. One that yields a jaw-droppingly larger-than-expected score.
Unfortunately, the mark turns out to be an off-track betting cash-runner for New York Irish crime boss Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw, a year away from “Jaws”). Lonnegan’s an extremely dangerous great white shark of a mobster, who, upon finding he’s been robbed, promptly has Hooker’s partner-in-crime Luther (Jones) thrown off a high balcony.
This outrage lights a fire under Hooker. He sets out for Chicago to join forces with an old pal of Luther’s, the legendary Gondorff. Gondorff and everybody else in the tight-knit grifter community loved Luther; they’re all up for some payback. Hooker: “Can you get a mob together?” Gondorff: “After what happened to Luther, I don’t think I can get more than two, three hundred guys.”
The brilliance of Gondorff’s elaborate scam to exact revenge on gangster Lonnegan (referred to as a “Long Con” due to the multitude of moving parts and the time needed for such an elaborate ruse to come together), works, well, like gangbusters.
The Kid gets a dapper makeover with a rakish cap and pinstripe suit, and Gondorff, rudely awakened by Hooker from the blacked-out unconsciousness of a big bender, exits the cold-water bathtub the Kid put him in, and dunks his head in an even colder sink of ice chips to quell the hangover, pulls himself together, and—Kid in tow—sets sail on the ensuing Big-Con Caper Comedy.
Half Way Through
The film’s middle acts, devoted to setting up the long-con, are delicious, like the auditioning and role-casting of a big Broadway show. Someone’s got a “sheet” of “who’s in town”—it’s like a veritable union of Chicago con artists auditioning. “Me specialty is an Englishmun,” says one hopeful, twirling his moustache.Meanwhile, Lonnegan’s goons are out looking for the Kid. Also hot on his trail is a brutal, corrupt Illinois cop Lt. Wm. Snyder (Charles Durning) who’s determined to snatch and shake him down for previously paying him off with counterfeit cash.
Setting the Hook
How to get Lonnegan’s attention? Shaw’s Lonnegan, by the way, is a masterful study in menace, who anchors and grounds the movie’s overall giddy hijinks with his glinting but dead eyes. When Doyle tells his minions—or anyone, for that matter—how he expects things to proceed, his finishing phrase lets everyone know that failure equals death: “Ya follow?”
Newman’s Gondorff, play-acting a rich bookie named Shaw, repeatedly and hilariously pokes this lethal bear of a man. In perhaps the movie’s most delightful scene, set on a train, Gondorff, after showing off to the Kid with an eye-popping virtuoso display of card-deck cheat-trickery and manual dexterity, rinses his mouth with gin, affects a drunken stumble, and, with a twinkle in his eye, knocks on the door of Lonnegan’s train compartment.
Barging in, he loudly announces his presence: “Sorry I’m late gentleman—I had to take a crap!” Surrounded and wedged in by Lonnegan’s goons, he keeps brilliantly besting the big man at poker, and cheerfully mispronouncing Lonnegan’s last name (“Lonnerman!” “Lindeman!”) along with taunts and insults, until the gangster can take it no more and grabs Gondorff’s omnipresent gin bottle: “It’s Lonnegan!! Ya follow?!!!”
Gondorff then smoothly passes the baton to the Kid in a great follow-up scene, where Hooker bamboozles and salves Lonnegan’s wounded pride with a tale of wanting to usurp his boss. He’s got insider info on Gondorff’s underground gambling establishment, don’tcha know. Just needs a backer. Everyone could get rich quick! Doyle Lonnegan: “Your boss is quite a card player, Mr. Kelly; how does he do it?” Johnny Hooker: “He cheats.”
Performances and Such
Walston and Durning, along with Harold Gould as Kid Twist—dapper and genius of last-minute improvisor-of-hoaxes, and Dana Elcar as a sham FBI agent brought in to put Snyder off the Kid’s trail—sparkle.Brennan, fresh off “The Last Picture Show,” applies her trademark working-class gravitas as a world-weary madam running a house of ill repute upstairs from a carousel. She disinterestedly deflects Lt. Snyder’s sneering threat to ransack her establishment looking for the Kid. Snyder: “What are you gonna do, report me to the cops?” Billie: “I won’t have to—you’ll be running into the chief of police just up the hall.”
Both megastars—silver fox Newman and golden boy Redford—ooze movie star charisma. The 1970s were a time in America when being a movie star was truly otherworldly. They take their tried-and-true, jokey alpha-male, mentor-protégé formula to the bank.
But the sheer magnitude of charisma was really icing on the cake: The screenplay reflected what people had seen on TV in recent years: “The Sting” was more or less a Depression-era episode of TV’s “Mission: Impossible!” long before Tom Cruise obliterated all memory of the original TV version.
