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Partners
The StingFollowing on from the huge success of Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, Paul Newman and Robert Redford teamed up once again with director George Roy Hill to make this slick crime caper.
First released in 1973, the joke at the time was that the stars had simply swapped moustaches since The Sting was, to all intents and purposes, a reinterpretation of their earlier outlaw roles as Butch and Sundance. However, massive box office takings and seven Academy Awards (it trounced The Exorcist in most categories) quickly conferred classic status upon it. Was such acclaim deserved? Not really, but given the subject matter there's a delicious irony in the fact that such a good-looking, efficiently constructed and commercially-oriented film pulled a fast one over the critics and Academy voters.
Set in Chicago in 1936, Redford stars as short-con operator Johnny Hooker who, together with long-term mentor Luther (Jones), unwittingly rips off $5000 from menacing Irish mobster Lonegan (Shaw). When Lonegan's henchmen kill Luther, Johnny wants revenge and seeks out Henry Gondorff (Newman), a washed-up, but still wily, confidence trickster to help him take Lonegan for half-a-million dollars.
Working from a tightly constructed script by David S Ward, both leads have an easygoing chemistry that Hill exploits with a lightness of touch that keeps proceedings moving at a brisk pace. The anachronistic ragtime score, sepia-tinged cinematography and romanticised period details gave the film a deliberately old fashioned feel back in 1973, with means that it hasn't dated. Watched now, it's still an exhilarating film that delights in showing us the machinations of the con, yet keeps its cards close enough to its chest to keep us guessing right up to the final reel. An exquisite example of an empty genre, its influence can be seen most obviously in Steven Soderbergh's lovable crook caper Ocean's Eleven, not to mention a raft of inferior heist movies.
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