The Sting

Photo Credit: Copyright ©2005 Universal Studios Home Entertainment.

“The Sting” is classical American cinema. It combines the art of film, which Kael referred to as our national theater, with the American experience of the Great Depression, a great con, and the ragtime music of Scott Joplin as adapted by Marvin Hamlisch.

The film opens on a disheveled streetside in Joliet, Illinois, at what appears to be the height of the Great Depression. A bookie, Granger (Ed Bakey) steps out of his office and witnesses a thief making off with an old man’s wallet. Johnny Hooker (Robert Redford) stops the thief. The old man, Luther Coleman (Robertearl Jones), explains to them that he had to deliver that money to someone fast or face a mob hit. He offers Hooker and Granger $100 to deliver it on time. Hooker advises Granger to put his own earnings in the envelope with Luther’s money, and stuff it down his pants, where he isn’t likely to get frisked.

Granger thinks he just made off with Luther’s cash. He’s been taken by Hooker, Luther and Erie Kid (the thief)—collaborators in confidence scams. Unfortunately, for these three, the money the bookie was handling belonged to an individual much higher on the totem pole—Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw).

Lonnegan’s henchman advises that they’re missing $11,000 from their books, and they think the bookie was either robbed or made off with it himself.

“Have some local people take care of him. Nothin’ fancy. We gotta discourage this kind of thing,” says Lonnegan.

Luther decides he wants out of the game. It’s not easy for him at his age, and he thinks he can’t do much more than this. He’s reached the pinnacle of his career. Hooker gets the shakedown from a dirty cop, Lt. Snyder (Charles Durning), who threatens to finger him to Lonnegan. Hooker already lost all his money gambling. So he lies to the cop, saying his take was only $1000. He gives the cop some money, but it’s counterfeit money (the same they used for the original con).

“If Snyder knows about it then so does everybody else. He never gets anything first,” says Hooker.

Hooker runs back to Luther’s place to warn him. By the time Hooker arrives, Luther has jumped out the window and is found dead on the street. Hooker then pursues the legendary con artist, Henry Gondorff (Paul Newman). He finds Gondorff drunk, off his feet and stuck between the bed and the wall.

“The great Henry Gondor,” Hooker mutters.

Hooker has discovered that Lonnegan is behind Luther’s death. He’s come to Gondorff because he wants to get Lonnegan—in a great con.

“The Sting” involves a scheme to set up Lonnegan for the ultimate revenge—being out-cheated at his own game. “The Wire” as they call it, involves a rather elaborate setup requiring a couple of fronts. This is the beauty of “The Sting”—misdirection. Lonnegan thinks he’s being conned out of a few thousand but he’ll walk right into being conned out of hundreds of thousands.

Countless other films have referenced or been inspired by the trickery and deception in what I think is director George Roy Hill’s masterpiece. He has taken the irresistible charm and chemistry of Newman and Redford from his experience with “Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid” and polished it to perfection. There’s nothing extraneous here. It is exactly as it should be.

The Universal Studios Legacy Series DVD is no exception. The first thing I observed was the richness of tans, browns, oranges, beiges… some ruddy colors that in many westerns appear drab, but in this particular remaster, they’re unmottled, soft—like velvet. I’m not a big fan of production designs that incorporate a lot of tan and beige (maybe that’s why I dislike westerns…) but the digital transfer is clean enough that one can be drawn into the mood of the Depression era, and still perked up by the excellent remaster of Hamlisch’s arrangements of Joplin’s classics.

The extras are rather limited, but as I’ve stated in other DVD reviews, I’m not a big fan of extras. I look to DVD’s primarily for a decent quality transfer of the main feature that will last considerably longer than VHS. I say “considerably longer” because optical media can degrade over time.

DVD Care Tip: To preserve your DVD’s, do not store them in “sleeve” or “pocket” multi-disc holders. Keep them in the original cases, and avoid rubbing or putting any weight on the label side of the disc. The label side has a thinner coating than the playback side, and when it is worn down, the metals inside oxidize and eventually you’ll start seeing very tiny perforations in the metal—rendering the disc defective.

There’s a series of behind-the-scenes interviews that provide some wonderful background and hilarious anecdotes from Redford, Newman, the writer David Ward, composer Marvin Hamlisch, and others.

One thing that impresses me most about the quality of this DVD is the fact that, for a 1973 film, the digital transfer seems to contain no noticeable errors. There are two reasons I find this interesting. Lately, I’ve seen a higher degree of manufacturing defects on newly distributed DVD’s—old and new titles. I think this is because the sheer volume of DVD manufacturing has resulted in a decline in quality control, but also because the MPAA’s antipiracy strategy of releasing DVD’s much sooner after the theatrical run puts the crunch on DVD authoring houses to turn product out faster—resulting in even more errors.

Restorations often seem to suffer from dropped frames or badly transcoded MPEG-2 video—the digitally-encoded format in which DVD content is stored on the optical disc. I think it’s most noticeable with trilogies or other “box set” re-releases to DVD of older titles (e.g. “Star Wars”) because there’s simply too much content being remastered in too short a time period to meet some distributor’s deadline. Here, it appears that the engineers were able to take their time with it and get it done right.

The Sting: Legacy Series DVD • Running Time: 2 hours 9 minutes • DVD Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 • Dolby® Digital 2.0-channel stereo and 5.1-channel surround sound encoding • MPAA Rating: PG