The Sting

The film plays out in distinct sections with old-fashioned title cards drawn by artist Jaroslav "Jerry" Gebr in a style reminiscent of the Saturday Evening Post.Regarded 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 the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".In 1936, amid the Great Depression, grifter Johnny Hooker and his partners Luther Coleman and Joe Erie con $11,000 in cash from an unsuspecting victim in Joliet, Illinois.Corrupt Joliet police lieutenant William Snyder confronts Hooker, revealing that their mark was a courier for vicious Irish-American crime boss Doyle Lonnegan.Aboard the opulent 20th Century Limited, Gondorff, posing as the boorish Chicago bookie "Shaw", buys into Lonnegan's private, high-stakes poker game, being facilitated by the train's conductor.When Lonnegan presses him for details, he reveals that he has a partner, "Les Harmon" (actually con man Kid Twist), in the Chicago Western Union office, who will help them topple "Shaw" by winning bets he books on horse races through past-posting.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.[5] Years later, director Rob Cohen recounted how he found the script in the slush pile when working as a reader for Mike Medavoy, a future studio head, but then an agent.[6] Academic David Maurer sued for plagiarism, claiming the screenplay was based too heavily on his 1940 book The Big Con, about real-life tricksters Fred and Charley Gondorff.Phillips' book asserts that Shaw was not nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award because he demanded that his name follow those of Newman and Redford before the film's opening title.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 old Saturday Evening Post illustrations, a popular publication of the 1930s.One forgives its unrelenting efforts to charm, if only because The Sting itself is a kind of con game, devoid of the poetic aspirations that weighed down Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."[22] 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.[25] Pauline Kael of The 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.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] The soundtrack album, executive produced by Gil Rodin, includes several of Scott Joplin's ragtime compositions, adapted by Marvin Hamlisch.