Why The Sting Is Still the Ultimate Grifter Movie

I’ve seen The Sting many times throughout the years, but the best time was when I saw it projected onto an enormous screen in the auditorium of the high school where I taught English for one year, when I was twenty-two. “Auditorium” isn’t grand enough a word to describe this space, really—it was a theater, as large and as august as an opera house, endowed by some prosperous alum or other, with lines of cushioned seats that rose for altitudes behind you, and a proscenium as tall and wide as an apartment building. The Big Con never looked so big.

It goes without saying that The Sting would look breathtaking played in a space like this, in part because any film made to be seen in giant dimensions would, and in particular because The Sting is beautifully designed, with its Saturday Evening Post-style intertitles and its palette of warm, rusty-colored reds, browns and yellows. But I think about this viewing experience when I think about The Sting because to me, The Sting is so much about performance that it befits the film to watch it played above an honest-to-goodness stage.

I’ll unpack this last part, but before I get ahead of myself—The Sting, which was directed by George Roy Hill and won the 1973 Academy Award for Best Picture, is the story of a young grifter, Johnny Hooker (Robert Redford), who winds up needing to seek revenge against a powerful crime boss named Doyle Lonnegan­ (Robert Shaw). Hooker leaves small-town Joliette, Illinois and travels to Chicago to seek out the once-great swindler-virtuoso Henry Gondorff (Paul Newman) to pull off a complicated scheme known simply as “the Big Con” that will ruin Lonnegan’s empire. And so Gondorff, with Hooker under his wing, assembles a team of trusted hucksters to pull off a racket that will bring Lonnegan’s operation to its knees.

It’s a perfect crystal of a premise—clean and neat despite the multitude of facets that it will turn over as it rolls along. In my opinion, The Sting’s particular kind of endless narrative-unfurling has never been topped by another movie—but The Sting is also fascinating for how many layers of performance it dons, as it progresses. The movie is often discussed in terms of its flawless headlining, a pairing between Newman and Redford that is even more fun and fulfilling than its counterpart in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (which, despite the joys of its big-time good-guy-burglaries, scenic chase scenes, and bicycle riding interludes, is bound to a historical accuracy that can’t provide the triumphant ending we crave for our heroes). Indeed, for us, the audience, much of the massive appeal of The Sting is specifically dependent on the performative togetherness of Newman and Redford—the presentation that they’re two halves of a friendly, repeatable routine. They are one of Hollywood’s greatest duos, greatest double-acts.

But the narrative within The Sting is also about performance. It’s about a large act with many moving parts: the show that the characters are putting on to dupe Doyle Lonnegan. So, The Sting is made up of people putting on a show, about people putting on a show. But, essentially, it’s not a movie about show-business (a scenario where such a meta-narrative would feel less noteworthy). The key difference between the two performances is that the show performed for Lonnegan needs to be mistaken for reality, while the show of the film cannot ultimately be mistaken for reality, however much it feels real, or however much we might want it to actually be real.

I’m compelled by the performance within the movie, especially because it sometimes resembles theater, in that its characters operate like they’re putting on a play, requiring countless sets, crew members, costumes, props and some kind of a script. One of the members of the endearing crew that runs the con is Kid Twist (a dashing, silkily-mustached Harold Gould), and serves the functions we’d tend to think of as “Producer” and “Stage Manager” if we were talking about a real-live theater troupe. Twist finances the operation up front (his extremely fine clothes and accessories clue us in to his wealth), but more than that, he is the procurer of the con’s aesthetic. He finds the locations, has them staged, interviews the extras they’re going to need, and provides costumes and props for them. Then again, there are limits to labeling this narrative as resembling “theater,” which is a “knowing” experience—after all, Gondorff, Hooker, and Co. create an immersive, alternate reality for Lonnegan. To Doyle Lonnegan, everything happening to him is real. To the con artists and viewers of The Sting, everything happening to him is fake.

The Sting is all about performance—grandiose, totally convincing performance that, if it goes well, will only be recognized as artificial by a second, external crowd: us, the spectators. This might seem intuitive, but it’s a tough hand to play. [SPOILER] See, while the crew’s chicanery must be totally realistic, its realism also must escalate to a point of spectacle that is so shocking and overwhelming that it will cause Lonnegan to abandon his money and flee, thus ending the con and awarding the victors their money. Therefore, the Big Con ultimately takes a turn for the sensational… all the hustling builds up to a gigantic confrontation in which Hooker’s character Kelly is revealed to have betrayed Gondorff’s character Shaw, and the FBI shows up, and then maybe Hooker is revealed to have actually betrayed Gondorff, and there’s a shootout that leaves both men bloody on the floor—crossing the film’s multiple layers of performance in an elaborate, explosive climax that shocks all its viewers. This is all drama (everyone is fine), but the spectacle causes Lonnegan to run away, dragged out initially by a crooked policeman who reminds Lonnegan that he had better not get mixed up in the murders. Fleeing the scene, he leaves a suitcase full of money behind.

The thing about the performative realism inherent to the Big Con is that it will get bigger and more realistic as more artifice is applied, but this arc eventually hits a point where everything gets so big that it becomes spectacle. That’s when the realism grows the most precarious—when it turns into something so big that it might seem profoundly unrealistic to Lonnegan, like the tragic, violent episode that scares him into fleeing. This moment requires the most moving parts and special effects to generate, and the large number of variables at work might cause the undermining of the whole thing. And the whole crew only has one chance to get it right.

Though the narrative within The Sting is about manufacturing realism, this is the last thing that the actual film accomplishes. As the plan transpires, it becomes less and less realistic a plot; the Big Con becomes so giant and unwieldy an operation that it is almost ludicrous. There’s an episode of the recent NBC sitcom Community in which characters watch The Sting to learn about real-life grifting, but are shocked to find that The Sting offers no help in this department, since the events of the movie could never be replicated in real life. This aspect might feel alienating to the audience if the film’s clever writing and the badassness (if I may) of the gang didn’t thoroughly work over its audience, tricking us into feeling kindred exhilaration with the characters. What makes The Sting’s layers of performance extra fascinating is that watching its sting unfold as someone in the know doesn’t mean being exempt from the pulls of illusion.

The Sting is set in 1936 Chicago, but its abilities to draw its dupes into something that feels real while delivering a spectacle with the potential to shatter all that came before it, goes back about a century, to the mid-nineteenth-century. Nineteenth-century theatrical performance in America as well as Europe was defined by its attempting to erase the physical surroundings of the theatre space. It was preoccupied with a kind of realism that was exceptionally ambitious and generally impossible to totally achieve, especially after its habitual combination with the contemporary thirst for theatrical spectacle. Theater during this time became exceptionally pictorial—both for the inclusion of richly-rendered tableaus, which would descend upon the stage during scene changes or non-action, as well as its commitment to representing scenes as evocatively as possibly—through elaborate sets, costumes, special effects, and mechanical innovations (including massive containers of water which would permit “aqua drama”—that is, true-life representations of naval battles reenacted on water). I mention this because The Sting seems to capture a bit of the forked impulse that swept the nineteenth-century public, which was a desire for both serious realism and simultaneous displays of shock, awe, and emotion both achieved through strenuous orchestrations. Which makes sense, given that The Sting’s main characters were born around the end of this era, and would have grown up in the shadow of its dominant cultural milieu.

On all of its levels, then, The Sting is a movie about the power of images and scenery: about being overwhelmed by the senses and caught up in drama. Within the narrative, Hooker, Gondorff, Twist and the crew learn that words aren’t good enough to fool Lonnegan, and that they have to show him goods that are so good that they are almost unreal. The con that they propose, which involves getting Lonnegan to bet money on a horse, doesn’t convince him fully when it’s told to him. He wants to meet Hooker’s contact, see the operation for real. And so, the story within The Sting is one about the measurements of physical artifice, and how ornate it can get before it becomes unbelievable. Kid Twist is the film’s arbiter of this kind of showmanship; while he’s not the director, he is in charge of the production.

And just as the crew plays with Lonnegan’s senses, the movie itself plays with its audience’s. It demands an incredible emotional investment from its audience, all while constantly reinforcing just how much it is a construction. The beautifully-detailed Rockwell-esque title cards which break the story into chapters (themselves kinds of theatrical tableaux) constantly interrupt the events, reminding that they are segments of a narrative. Its score is mainly comprised of Scott Joplin’s 1902 piano rag “The Entertainer,” and this is played over and over. It works, don’t get me wrong, but it’s a curious choice—out of the film’s period (like some of the theatrical conventions The Sting fancies, it’s a relic from the turn of the century) and already well-known to the audience, it seems more likely to snap the audience out of their trance rather than draw them further in (or at least point out that they’re being dazzled by professional showmen). The sets and costumes of The Sting are also a bit larger-than-life. In his New York Times review of the film in 1973, Vincent Canby wrote that ‘“The Sting’ [sic] looks and sounds like a musical comedy from which the songs have been removed, leaving only a background score of old-fashioned, toe-tapping piano rags that as easily evoke the pre-World War I teens as the nineteen-thirties. A lot of the other period details aren’t too firmly anchored in time, but the film is so good-natured, so obviously aware of everything it’s up to, even its own picturesque frauds, that I opt to go along with it.” This a helpful allegory: nothing is quite possibly more artificial in this world than a musical.

But The Sting has more up its sleeve than this. In the same review, Canby called the movie, the whole movie, “a con game.” This is true—The Sting grabs its audience like few films can, only to turn the tables on us. While the film is about tricking Lonnegan into believing what he’s seeing, it tricks its real audience into thinking that it’s been frank with them, this whole time. Which the audience shouldn’t believe anyway, knowing that they’re watching a parable about fakery to begin with. In an essay in Bright Wall, Dark Room, Helena Bacon writes of Hill’s direction, “He consistently fills the frame with the kind of pertinent detail that, some 40 years later, Guillermo del Toro would denominate “eye-protein,” as opposed to “eye-candy”—rather than decorative but empty calories, every detail is deliberately imbued with narrative significance. This narrative feast hooks us in, making us feel like part of the team. As a result, even when The Sting’s climax makes marks of us, it does so with such transparency that we walk away feeling not foolish but wiser.” In The Sting, the mise-en-scene is meant to dazzle us, and within this, trick us and clue us in, alike. The more information we see, the more we know and the more we don’t know. The film does trick us, ultimately, but unlike Lonnegan, it also wants us to know it.

Ultimately, The Sting is the ultimate performative exercise—a story about performing for someone who doesn’t realize he’s its audience, and tricking a real-live audience by pretending to tell it the truth, even though “truth” is not what they’ve been watching at all, or even what they necessarily came for. And it does this as easily and as bewilderingly as a deft dealer (one better than Henry Gondorff, even) might shuffle a deck of cards. The Sting transforms a story into reality, and then it transforms reality into a story. There is nothing realistic, nothing believable in The Sting, on any of its levels. But I saw it all happen. I saw it all happen on a giant screen, and it felt like I was there.