The Sting

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This article is about the 1973 film involving con artists. For the Futurama episode see The Sting (Futurama).

The Sting is an Oscar winning caper film from 1973 set in September of 1936 and revolving around a convoluted plot by two professional grifters (Paul Newman and Robert Redford) to con a mob boss (Robert Shaw). The story created by screenwriter David S. Ward was inspired by some real life con games perpetrated by the brothers Fred and Charley Gondorf and documented by David W. Maurer in his book The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man. The title phrase refers to the moment when a con artist finishes the "play" and takes the mark's money. (Today the name is mostly used in the context of law enforcement sting operations.) If the con game is successful, the mark does not realize he has been "taken" (cheated), at least not until the con men are long gone.

The screenplay was divided into distinct sections with old-fashioned title cards that resembled illustrations from the Saturday Evening Post. The film was noted for its musical score—particularly its theme song, "The Entertainer", a piano rag by Scott Joplin, which was lightly adapted for the movie by Marvin Hamlisch.

A major box office success, it was the highest grossing film of 1974, taking in more than US$160 million.

A less-successful sequel with different players, The Sting II, appeared in 1983.

A deluxe DVD, The Sting: Special Edition (part of the Universal Legacy Series) was released in September, 2005, including a "making of" featurette and interviews with the cast and crew.

Plot

The movie's protagonist is Johnny Hooker (Redford), a small-time con man from Depression-era Joliet, Illinois. Johnny, with accomplices Luther Coleman (Robert Earl Jones) and Joe Erie (Jack Kehoe), manages to swipe $11,000 in cash. In the wake of this apparent success, Luther tells Johnny that he is retiring from his life of crime and moving to Kansas City, Missouri to work in a legitimate business with his brother-in-law; in order to soften the blow, he tells Johnny to seek out an old friend, Henry Gondorff, in Chicago, who will be able to teach Johhny the art of the 'big con'.

Unfortunately for the three con artists, the man they robbed was a numbers racket courier, transporting the money to Chicago for New York banker/gangster Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw). Corrupt Joliet police Lieutenant William Snyder (Charles Durning) confronts Hooker, demanding a cut of the $2,000 and revealing Lonnegan's involvement. Realizing that he and his partners are in danger, Hooker pays Snyder in counterfeit money (having lost his real share of the newfound wealth on a spin of a rigged roulette wheel) and goes to warn Coleman, but he arrives too late; Lonnegan has already had Coleman killed, and sent men to kill Hooker and Erie as well. Having nowhere else to turn, Hooker decides to enlist Gondorff's help in seeking revenge for Coleman's murder.

Gondorff (Paul Newman) is a seemingly broken-down con artist on the run from the FBI, who now lives in the back of an amusement hall that doubles as a speakeasy and brothel. After being rudely awoken from a drunken slumber, Gondorff warns Hooker about the dangers of going after a ruthless and intelligent man like Lonnegan, but Johnny is adamant. Gondorff decides to help, even though 'revenge is for chumps', in part because it will mean one last big score.

The only way that Gondorff knows to have revenge upon Lonnegan is to trick him, and deprive him of his money - something that will put the gangster's life in jeopardy once word gets out that he can be duped by confidence men. However, as Lonnegan is a clever man of few vices, and not about to be taken in a simple confidence scheme, Henry and Johnny decide on an elaborate plan involving 'two, three hundred guys' (possibly an exaggeration on Gondorff's part, but there are clearly at least a few dozen).

First, Gondorff's lover and partner in crime, Billie (Eileen Brennan), lifts Lonnegan's wallet on the famous 20th Century Limited train as it travels from New York to Chicago. Gondorff then buys his way into Lonnegan's private high-stakes poker game on the train with the latter's own money. For this purpose, Henry poses as a Chicago bookie named Shaw. "Shaw" presents himself as a drunken fool, annoying Lonnegan by repeatedly mispronouncing his name and insulting the competition after winning a few big hands. To punish Shaw, Lonnegan asks his loyal bodyguard, Floyd (Charles Dierkop), to 'stack him a cooler' - a deck that Lonnegan can use to cheat - and 'break that bastard bookie in one play'. Gondorff, having anticipated this, out-cheats a shocked Lonnegan, who finds himself $16,000 in the hole - and, thanks to the earlier pickpocketing, without enough money to pay his debt.

Henry tells Lonnegan that he will 'send a boy' to his room in fifteen minutes to collect the money. Naturally, the boy is Johnny, posing as an employee of Shaw's named Kelly. "Kelly" plays on Lonnegan's desire for revenge by telling him about a scheme to take over Shaw's business. Johnny convinces Doyle that he has a partner in the Chicago Western Union office (portrayed at a meeting by con man 'Kid Twist', played by Harold Gould), and that he can use this connection to win large sums of money in the off-track betting (OTB) establishment run by Shaw by past-posting. All of this, including the OTB establishment itself, is in reality an extremely elaborate hoax instigated solely for Lonnegan's benefit; for example, the con men get the supposed play-by-play from a surplus tickertape wire, and then have an accomplice in the back (the con man 'J.J.', played by Ray Walston) read it through a microphone to make it sound as if it were live on the radio; meanwhile, Erie manages to prove his own worth as a con-man, posing as a regular gambler in 'Shaw's place' to help convince Lonnegan of the reality of the place.

In addition to luring Lonnegan into this con as Kelly, and eluding the assassins Lonnegan has sent to kill him as Johnny, Johnny has to continually avoid Snyder, who has followed him to Chicago, looking for either his cut of the original $11,000 or revenge on Johnny for cheating him. Snyder's efforts are derailed when FBI agents make their presence known to him and Hooker, coercing the latter into helping them capture Gondorff. Meanwhile, Johnny begins a romance with a local waitress, and we watch as a new and truly professional killer ('Cellino') is brought in to find and kill Johnny after he twice escapes the clutches of Lonnegan's other 'torpedoes'.

All of this sets the stage for a memorable conclusion, including two major twists which amount to cons played on an audience accustomed to being on the inside of all of the characters' schemes.

Cast

• Paul Newman: Henry Gondorff aka Shaw
• Robert Redford: Johnny Hooker aka Kelly
• Robert Shaw: Doyle Lonnegan
• Charles Durning: Lt. William Snyder
• Ray Walston: J.J. Singleton
• Eileen Brennan: Billie
• Harold Gould: Kid Twist
• John Heffernan: Eddie Niles
• Dana Elcar: FBI Agent Polk
• Larry D. Mann: Mr. Clemens
• Sally Kirkland: Crystal ("Hooker's hooker")
• Jack Kehoe: Joe Erie
• Robert Earl Jones: Luther Coleman (credited as Robertearl Jones)
• Dimitra Arliss: Loretta
• Joe Tornatore: Black-gloved gunman
• Charles Dierkop: as Floyd, Lonnegan's Bodyguard
• [Lee Paul] as Lonnegan's bodyguard
• Leonard Barr: Leonard (burlesque comic)

Awards

Wins

• Academy Award for Best Picture
• Academy Award for Directing - (George Roy Hill)
• Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures - (George Roy Hill)
• Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay - (David S. Ward)
• Academy Award for Best Art Direction - (Henry Bumstead and James W. Payne)
• Academy Award for Best Costume Design - (Edith Head)
• Academy Award for Film Editing - (William H. Reynolds)
• Academy Award for Best Music, Scoring Original Song Score and/or Adaptation - (Marvin Hamlisch)

Nominations

• Academy Award for Best Actor - (Robert Redford)
• Academy Award for Best Cinematography - (Robert Surtees)
• Academy Award for Sound - (Ronald Pierce & Robert R. Bertrand)
• Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay - Motion Picture - (David S. Ward)
• WGA Award for Best Drama Written Directly for the Screen - (David S. Ward)

Music

The soundtrack album contained the following selections, most of which are Scott Joplin ragtime pieces. There are some variances from the actual film soundtrack, as noted. Ironically, Joplin's ragtime music was no longer popular during the 1930s. The two Jazz Age style tunes written by Hamlisch are chronologically much closer to the film's time period than are the Joplin rags:

• 1. "Solace" (Joplin) - orchestral version
• 2. "The Entertainer" (Joplin) - orchestral version
• 3. "The Easy Winners" (Joplin)
• 4. "Hooker's Hooker" (Hamlisch)
• 5. "Luther" - same basic tune as "Solace", re-arranged by Hamlisch as a dirge
• 6. "Pine Apple Rag" / "Gladiolus Rag" medley (Joplin)
• 7. "The Entertainer" (Joplin) - piano version
• 8. "The Glove" (Hamlisch) - a Jazz Age style number; only a short segment was used in the film
• 9. "Little Girl" (Hamlisch) - another Jazz Age style number; was not used in the film
• 10. "Pine Apple Rag" (Joplin)
• 11. "Merry-Go-Round Music" medley (traditional) - "Listen to the Mocking Bird" was the only portion actually used in the film, along with the second segment of "King Cotton", a Sousa march, which was not on the album
• 12. "Solace" (Joplin) - piano version
• 13. "The Entertainer" / "The Ragtime Dance" medley (Joplin)

The album sequence differs from the film sequence, a standard practice with vinyl LP's, often for technical reasons having to do with the varying rotational speed of the disk and/or for perceived aesthetic reasons. Some additional content differences:

• Selected snippets of Joplin's works, some appearing on the album and some not, provided linking music over the title cards that were used to introduce major scenes. (The final card, "The Sting", introducing the film's dramatic conclusion, had no music at all.)
• Some of the tunes in the film that appear on the album were different takes than those on the album.
• The most obvious Joplin tune used in the film but not appearing in the soundtrack album was "Cascades". The middle (fast) portion of it was played when Hooker was running away from Snyder along the 'L' train platform.

Trivia

• After Hooker's girlfriend Crystal comes offstage (in the foreground of the scene) from doing her burlesque act, Leonard goes onstage (in the background) and tells a joke to the out-of-sight audience. Hooker and Crystal mostly talk over the joke, so the film's audience only hears the punchline. The complete joke involves a man who had just bought a live chicken and then impulsively goes to a movie theater, hiding the chicken in his pants so the ticket-taker won't hassle him about bringing a bird into the theater. Once in his seat, sitting next to two women, he opens his fly so the chicken can stick out its head and breathe easily. In the darkened theater, the women misinterpret what the man is doing. Most of this part of the joke is heard in the film: "The first woman says to her friend, 'This man's fly is open!' The second woman says, 'When you've seen one, you've seen 'em all!' The first woman says, 'Yeh, but this one's eating my popcorn!'"

• An ironic foreshadowing of what Lonnegan would be up against, if Johnny Hooker and Henry Gondorff were to be successful in taking a large sum of money from him, is revealed early in the film. Lonnegan's bodyguard, Floyd, tells him about grifters having conned one of Lonnegan's runners out of a few thousand dollars (as the audience knows, but as Doyle does not, Floyd is, of course, referring to Johnny, Joe Erie and Luther Coleman). Lonnegan tells him the grifters have to be dealt with quickly and harshly, because if word got out that he had been swindled out of even that small amount, Lonnegan would have to kill his childhood friend and business competitor along with everyone else who would try to muscle in on his racket.

• Plans were made for a prequel to The Sting. The film was to be based on the early days of Henry Gondorff (Paul Newman). His mentor was to be the infamous 19th century confidence man Soapy Smith, known as the king of the frontier con men. Plans were scrapped after the failure of the sequel, starring Jackie Gleason.

• Harold Gould's character, "Kid Twist", shared the name (though apparently not the profession) of at least two different mob hit men, Max Zwerbach and Abe Reles.

See also

• 1930s Nostalgia Films

External link

Films Directed by George Roy Hill

Period of Adjustment | Toys in the Attic | The World of Henry Orient | Hawaii | Thoroughly Modern Millie | Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid | Slaughterhouse-Five | The Sting | The Great Waldo Pepper | Slap Shot | A Little Romance | The World According to Garp | The Little Drummer Girl | Funny Farm

 

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