“The typical American passion for colossal jokes, for the overstatement of deceit, for the beloved elephantine scam dear to Melville, Twain and Faulkner,” is what Franco La Polla, many years ago, traced in The Sting, without however liking the film, and considering it alien to the impetuous movement that in those years was rewriting the industrial and creative rules of American cinema. Certainly, they were formidable years, if in that same 1973 Mean Streets and The Exorcist were released, and were halfway between the two chapters of The Godfather, and Robert Redford brought to the screen the most crepuscular Fitzgeraldian hero of the time, who was naturally not Gatsby but Hubbell in The Way We Were. Redford, who was one of the most charismatic faces of the new American cinema and certainly the most handsome (a photogenic quality not seen since the days of Gary Cooper, and perhaps never seen again), is here again alongside Paul Newman, five years after Butch Cassidy: no longer irresistible desperados but irresistible swindlers, no longer the playful lyricism of Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head but the two highly successful notes of Scott Joplin’s ragtime.
The Sting, with its seven Oscars and great popular favour, was indeed one of the signs that everything was changing in Hollywood, and yet everything remained the same. A period film set in 1930s Chicago, more affectionately parodic than nostalgic, featuring a lively and stylish direction (curtains, irises, a certain oblique form, certain authentic exteriors of Chicago to which the beautiful photography by Robert Surtees gives a tasty period thickness), a complicated screenplay sometimes bordering on boredom and never reaching it, because here comes the thrill of that two-player game, a contagious smile, a perfect closeup, a nod of understanding in the flash of blue eyes, the seductive captatio that the viewer cannot escape – what a joy and a luxury, to witness such a handover between two seasons of virile mythology. The Sting contains the pure driving force of stardom as it always was, as it would always be (the same thrill that will run through, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, a film in many ways superior like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood). In a contemporary and curiously enthusiastic review of The Sting, Roger Ebert defined it as “Jacques Tati crossed with Robert Altman”. Perhaps he was thinking of M*A*S*H or perhaps of The Long Goodbye, which also came out in that exciting 1973 and, after every illusion was shattered, ended with a mocking “Hooray for Hollywood!”

Paola Cristalli