| The Sting | |
|---|---|
.jpeg) Theatrical release poster (alternate design) | |
| Directed by | George Roy Hill |
| Written by | David S. Ward |
| Produced by | |
| Starring | |
| Cinematography | Robert Surtees |
| Edited by | William Reynolds |
| Music by | Marvin Hamlisch |
Production companies | |
| Distributed by | Universal Pictures |
Release date |
|
Running time | 129 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $5.5 million[1] |
| Box office | $257 million |
The Sting is a 1973 Americancaper film. Set in 1936, it involves a complicated plot by two professionalgrifters (Paul Newman andRobert Redford) tocon a mob boss (Robert Shaw). The film was directed byGeorge Roy Hill,[2] who had directed Newman and Redford inButch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). The screenplay byDavid S. Ward was inspired by real-life cons perpetrated by brothers Fred and Charley Gondorff and documented byDavid Maurer in his 1940 bookThe Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man.
The film plays out in sections introduced by old-fashionedtitle cards, drawn by artist Jaroslav "Jerry" Gebr in a style reminiscent ofThe Saturday Evening Post. It is noted for its use ofragtime, particularly the melody "The Entertainer" byScott Joplin, which was adapted (along with other Joplin pieces) for the film byMarvin Hamlisch, producing aBillboard-toppingsoundtrack and atop-10single. The film's success created a resurgence of interest in Joplin's work.[3]
Released on Christmas Day of 1973,The Sting was a critical and commercial success and hugely successful at the46th Academy Awards, where it won seven of its 10Oscar nominations, includingBest Picture,Best Director,Best Film Editing andBest Original Screenplay; Redford was also nominated forBest Actor. The film grossed $257 million worldwide and rekindled Newman's career after a series of big-screen flops. Regarded by theWriters Guild of America as having one of the best screenplays ever written,The Sting was selected in 2005 for preservation in the U.S.National Film Registry of theLibrary of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". Asequel film, also written by Ward, was released in 1983.
In 1936, amid theGreat Depression,grifter Johnny Hooker and his partners, Luther Coleman and Joe Erie, con $11,000 in cash from an unsuspecting victim inJoliet, Illinois. Hooker loses his share of the con on a rigged roulette game, while Luther, buoyed by the windfall, decides to retire. He tells Hooker to seek out his old friend, Henry Gondorff, in Chicago, to learn "the big con". Corrupt Joliet police lieutenant William Snyder confronts Hooker, revealing that their mark was a courier for vicious Irish-American crime boss Doyle Lonnegan. Lonnegan's men murder Luther and the courier. After finding Luther dead, Hooker flees to Chicago.
Hooker finds Gondorff drunk and in hiding from theFBI, running a carousel that is afront for abrothel, and asks for help taking down Lonnegan. Initially reluctant, Gondorff relents and recruits a team of experienced con men. They decide to resurrect an elaborate, obsolete scam known as "the wire", using a large crew to create a phonyoff-track betting parlor. Snyder and Lonnegan's men track Hooker to Chicago; Gondorff warns Hooker that if either of them finds him, the con will have to be called off.
Aboard the opulent20th Century Limited, Gondorff, posing as the boorish Chicagobookie "Shaw", buys into Lonnegan's private, high-stakespoker game, being facilitated by the train's conductor. "Shaw" infuriates Lonnegan with his obnoxious behavior, then cheats him out of $15,000 ($339,892 in2024). Hooker, posing as "Shaw's" disgruntled employee "Kelly", is sent to collect the winnings and convince Lonnegan to help him take over "Shaw's" operation – a tactic Lonnegan has used repeatedly to build his crime empire. Hooker returns home to find Lonnegan's men waiting to assassinate him, but he avoids their efforts. Their attempt spooks Gondorff, but Hooker convinces him to keep the con alive.
Lonnegan, frustrated with his men's inability to kill Hooker for the Joliet con – and unaware that "Kelly" is Hooker – orders the job to be given to Salino, his best assassin. A mysterious figure, wearing black leather gloves, begins to follow and observe Hooker. Meanwhile, Snyder's pursuit of Hooker attracts the attention of undercover FBI agents led by Agent Polk, who orders Snyder to bring Hooker in to entrap Gondorff.
"Kelly" gives Lonnegan a tip on a 7-to-1 long shot in a horse race that pays off. When Lonnegan presses him for details, he reveals that he has a partner, "Les Harmon" (actually con man Kid Twist), in the ChicagoWestern Union office, who will help them topple "Shaw" by winning bets he books on horse races throughpast-posting. Lonnegan is convinced after being provided thetrifecta of another race, and agrees to finance a $500,000 bet ($11.3 million in2024) to break "Shaw" and get revenge. Shortly thereafter, Snyder captures Hooker and brings him before Polk, who forces Hooker to betray Gondorff by threatening to jail Luther Coleman's widow.
Feeling despondent the night before the sting, Hooker sleeps with a diner waitress named Loretta. The next morning, as she walks toward him in an alley, the black-gloved man appears and shoots her dead before she can shoot Hooker. The man reveals to Hooker that Gondorff hired him to protect him, and that the waitress was, in fact, Salino.
After "Harmon" telephones directions to "Place it on Lucky Dan", Lonnegan bets $500,000 at "Shaw's" parlor on the horse named Lucky Dan to win. As the race begins, "Harmon" arrives and expresses shock at Lonnegan's bet: when he said "place it", he meant that the horse would "place" (i.e.,finishsecond). In a panic, Lonnegan rushes to the teller window and demands his money back, at which point Polk, Snyder, and a half-dozen FBI agents storm the parlor. Polk tells Hooker he is free to go. Shocked at the betrayal, Gondorff shoots Hooker. Polk shoots Gondorff and orders Snyder to get the ostensibly respectable Lonnegan away from the crime scene.
With Lonnegan and Snyder safely away, Hooker and Gondorff rise ("bleeding" only fromfake bullets) amid cheers and laughter. "Polk" is actually Hickey, a fellow con man, who has been running a con atop Gondorff's con with his "FBI agents" to divert Snyder and ensure that Lonnegan abandoned the money without ever realizing he was taken. As the con men strip the room of its contents, Hooker refuses his share of the money, claiming he would lose it anyway, and walks away with Gondorff.
ScreenwriterDavid S. Ward has said in an interview that he was inspired to writeThe Sting while researching pickpockets: "Since I had never seen a film about a confidence man before, I said I gotta do this." Daniel Eagan said: "One key to plots about con men is that film goers want to feel they are in on the trick. They don't have to know how a scheme works, and they don't mind a twist or two, but it's important for the story to feature clearly recognizable 'good' and 'bad' characters." It took Ward a year to fine-tune this aspect of the script and to determine how much information he could withhold from the audience while still making the leads sympathetic. He also imagined an underground brotherhood of thieves who assemble for a big operation and then melt away afterward.[4]
Years later, directorRob Cohen recounted how he found the script in theslush pile when working as areader forMike Medavoy, a future studio head, but then an agent. He wrote in his coverage that it was "the great American screenplay and … will make an award-winning, major-cast, major-director film." Medavoy said that he would try to sell it on that recommendation, promising to fire Cohen if he could not. Universal bought it that afternoon, and Cohen keeps the coverage framed on the wall of his office.[5]
AcademicDavid Maurer sued for plagiarism, claiming the screenplay was based too heavily on his 1940 bookThe Big Con, about real-life tricksters Fred and Charley Gondorff. Universal settled out of court for $600,000, irking Ward, who resented the presumption of guilt implied by an out-of-court settlement done for business expediency.[6]
Writer/producerRoy Huggins maintained in hisArchive of American Television interview that the first half ofThe Sting plagiarized the 1958Maverick television seriesepisode "Shady Deal at Sunny Acres", starringJames Garner andJack Kelly.
Jack Nicholson was offered the lead role but declined it.[7] He later said "I had enough business acumen to knowThe Sting was going to be a huge hit, [but] at the same timeChinatown andThe Last Detail were more interesting films to me."[8]
Newman signed on to the film after the producers agreed to give him top billing, $500,000, and a percentage of the profits. His previous five films had been box-office disappointments.[9]
In her 1991 autobiographyYou'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, producerJulia Phillips writes that Hill wantedRichard Boone to play Lonnegan. Much to her relief, Newman had sent the script toRobert Shaw while shootingThe Mackintosh Man in Ireland to ensure his participation in the film. Phillips' book asserts that Shaw was not nominated for anAcademy Award for Best Supporting Actor because he demanded that his name follow those of Newman and Redford before the film's opening title.[10]
Shaw's character's limp in the film was authentic. Shaw had injured his leg while playing handball shortly before filming began. Director Hill encouraged him to incorporate the limp into his character rather than withdraw from the project.[11]
Hill wanted the film to be reminiscent of movies from the 1930s and drew inspiration from films of that decade. He noticed that most '30s gangster films had no extras. "For instance", Andrew Horton's bookThe Films of George Roy Hill quotes Hill as saying, "no extras would be used in street scenes in those films:Jimmy Cagney would be shot down and die in an empty street. So I deliberately avoided using extras."[12]
Along with art directorHenry Bumstead and cinematographerRobert L. Surtees, Hill devised a color scheme of muted browns and maroons for the film and a lighting design that combined old-fashioned 1930s-style lighting with some modern tricks of the trade to get the visual look he wanted.Edith Head designed a wardrobe of snappy period costumes for the cast, and artist Jaroslav Gebr created inter-title cards to be used to introduce each section of the film that were reminiscent of the golden glow of oldSaturday Evening Post illustrations, a popular publication of the 1930s.
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The movie was filmed on theUniversal Studiosbacklot, with a few small scenes shot inWheeling, West Virginia, some scenes filmed at theSanta Monica pier's carousel,[13] in Southern California, and in Chicago atUnion Station and the formerLaSalle Street Station.[14][15] An antique car buff, co-producerTony Bill helped round up several period cars to use inThe Sting. One of them was his own 1935Pierce-Arrow limousine, which served as Lonnegan's private car.
The film was a box-office smash in 1973 and early 1974, grossing $156 million in the United States and Canada.[16] As of August 2018,[update] it was the 20th highest-grossing film in the United States adjusted for ticket price inflation.[17] Internationally, it grossed $101 million[18] for a worldwide gross of $257 million.
Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars and called it "one of the most stylish movies of the year".[19]Gene Siskel awarded three-and-a-half stars out of four, calling it "amovie movie that has obviously been made with loving care each and every step of the way."[20]Vincent Canby ofThe New York Times wrote that the film was "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. One forgives its unrelenting efforts to charm, if only becauseThe Sting itself is a kind of con game, devoid of the poetic aspirations that weighed downButch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."[21]Variety wrote, "George Roy Hill's outstanding direction of David S. Ward's finely-crafted story of multiple deception and surprise ending will delight both mass and class audiences. Extremely handsome production values and a great supporting cast round out the virtues."[22]Kevin Thomas of theLos Angeles Times called it "an unalloyed delight, the kind of pure entertainment film that's all the more welcome for having become such a rarity."[23]John Simon wrote thatThe Sting as a comedy-thriller "works endearingly without a hitch".[24]
Pauline Kael ofThe New Yorker was less enthusiastic, writing that the film "is meant to be roguishly charming entertainment, and that's how most of the audience takes it, but I found it visually claustrophobic, and totally mechanical. It keeps cranking on, section after section, and it doesn't have a good spirit."[25][26]
In 2005, the film was selected for preservation in the United StatesNational Film Registry by theLibrary of Congress as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".[27] In 2006, theWriters Guild of America ranked the screenplay #39 on its list of 101 Greatest Screenplays ever written.[28] OnRotten Tomatoes,The Sting holds a rating of 92% from 101 reviews, with an average rating of 8.3/10. The site's critical consensus reads: "Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and director George Roy Hill prove that charm, humor, and a few slick twists can add up to a great film."[29] OnMetacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 83 out of 100, based on 17 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[30]
The soundtrack album, executive produced byGil Rodin, includes several ofScott Joplin'sragtime compositions, adapted byMarvin Hamlisch.
According to Joplin scholarEdward A. Berlin, ragtime experienced a revival in the 1970s due to several events: abest-selling recording of Joplin rags on the classicalNonesuch Records label, along with a collection of his music issued by theNew York Public Library; the first full staging of Joplin's operaTreemonisha; and a performance of period orchestrations of Joplin's music by a student ensemble of theNew England Conservatory of Music, led byGunther Schuller. "Inspired by Schuller's recording, [Hill] had Marvin Hamlisch score Joplin's music for the film, thereby bringing Joplin to a mass, popular public."[3]
Mark Hollmann andGreg Kotis (music and lyrics), writerBob Martin, and directorJohn Rando created astage musical version of the movie. The musical premiered at thePaper Mill Playhouse inMillburn, New Jersey on March 29, 2018. Henry Gondorff was played byHarry Connick Jr., with choreography byWarren Carlyle.[40] The stage musical incorporates Joplin's music, including "The Entertainer".[41]
Robert Weverka adapted the film into a full-length novel,The Sting (1974), based on the screenplay byDavid S. Ward.[42]
The movie was issued on DVD byUniversal Studios Home Video in 1998. "If Paul Newman really does retire, he can spend his rocking chair years feeling smug about this," enthused Bruno MacDonald forOK! "The story's not the important thing: what makes it are the quirky soundtrack, the card-sharp dialogue and two superduperstars at their superduperstarriest."[43]
A deluxe DVD –The Sting: Special Edition (part of the Universal Legacy Series) – was released in September 2005. Its "making of" featurette,The Art of the Sting, included interviews with the cast and crew.
The film was released onBlu-ray in 2012 as part of Universal's 100th anniversary releases.
The Sting was released onUltra HD Blu-ray on May 18, 2021.[44]
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