With one of the most recognizable scores in the history of American cinema, The Sting walked away with the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1973. It actually dominated Oscar night with a total of seven wins, including Best Director (George Roy Hill), Best Writing (David S. Ward) and Best Music (Marvin Hamlisch). After starring together four years earlier in the Oscar nominated Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Robert Redford and Paul Newman, two of the biggest stars of the era (and of all time), got together again, and again made cinema history.

This truly is a wonderful film, but even though it isn’t necessarily one of my favorites. In looking back and comparing it to the winners that preceded it, I’d say that for me The Sting rates somewhere maybe a little bit higher than the middle of the pack. I had seen it before, but not for many years, so I was essentially watching it as though it was the first time. This film has it all. It has first rate performances from Redford, Newman and Robert Shaw, as well as the supporting cast. It has a wonderful script, as evidenced by the Oscar that it won, and the script has terrific dialogue and a well-structured and complex storyline. George Roy Hill, who also directed Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, did a fine job of directing it and crafted a film that is visually stimulating and intellectually intriguing. This is a film that you have to pay attention to and follow carefully or you will get lost.

So why doesn’t The Sting rank higher for me? Why did it not affect me the way other Best Picture winners have, especially some of the films that I had not seen or had not seen for a long time affected me? I must say that I don’t know the answer. I like this movie. I liked it a lot, but I never was fully engaged with the characters on an emotional level. Like the outlaws in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Redford’s Johnny Hooker and Newman’s Henry Gondorff are con men who make their living outside the law. The fact that their target for a big score (Shaw’s Doyle Lonnegan) is a bigger crook than they are helps us to root for them, as Hooker wants revenge on Lonnegan for having his partner killed. Redford is one of the great actors of all time, and was nominated for Best Actor for The Sting, but I really think Newman stole the show every time he was in a scene. Newman’s Gondorff is a roguish devil who isn’t afraid to drink too much and isn’t afraid to crack wise, even to men like Lonnegan. Newman has some of the best lines in the picture and the scene where he plays poker with Lonnegan and out-cheats him is one of the best scenes in the film.

Newman and Redford rightly get a lot of credit for how well this film turned out and is remembered, but there was a lot more going on that made this film what it was, and a lot of that had to do with the expert direction of George Roy Hill. As mentioned above, this is a complex story. Movies about cons are always complex, as one of the components to a con movie is always staying one step ahead of the audience. As a director you have to take chances like hoping that the audience isn’t paying close enough attention to remember that the actor playing the phony FBI agent was the same guy at the very beginning of the film running the bookie operation. But then you have to hope that they are paying close enough attention to catch all of the nuances that fill in blanks that are easy to miss. A film like The Sting is all about the details. Just like the con is about the details, if the director misses a trick, then the whole thing will be a bust.

David S. Ward is also due a lot of credit for is Oscar-winning screenplay. Not only does he deliver snappy dialogue that fits the period, he also crafted the complexity of the story without making it so complicated that it would lose the audience. There is a pretty well-developed Hero’s Journey written in to the script, but that isn’t what the story relies on. Generally speaking, Hooker is the hero of the story. His Ordinary World is one of a small-time con artist who makes a big score when he and his partner Luther con money out of a runner for Lonnegan. It’s more money than they’re used to, and Lonnegan has Luther killed, and has his henchmen on the lookout for Hooker. Hooker’s Call to Adventure happens a little earlier when Luther, who also starts out the film as Hooker’s Mentor, tells him that he’s retiring and that if Hooker wants to get a real big score and hit the big time, then he should go meet Henry Gondorff, who has pulled off plenty of big scores. After Luther is killed, Hooker Crosses the First Threshold and enters the Special World by finding Gondorff and convincing him to help pull a big job on Lonnegan in order to get revenge for him having Luther killed. The Tests, Allies and Enemies portion of the script occurs when Lonnegan puts the team together for the con, all the while Hooker has to escape Lonnegan’s men and the crooked cop Snyder (Charles Durning) who believes Hooker owes him money. The Approach is the planning of the con and the Supreme Ordeal occurs on the train when Gondorff out cheats Lonnegan at the poker game. The Reward is Hooker gaining Lonnegan’s trust as they trick him into betting on horse races that aren’t really happening. The Road Back has Hooker seemingly arrested by the FBI and having to agree to turn Gondorff in at the end of the job. There is a literal Resurrection during the climax of the film where the con is pulled, but the FBI show up and it appears that Hooker has betrayed Gondorff, and Gondorff retaliates by shooting Hooker in the back. The FBI agent then shoots Gondorff. Not knowing what’s going on, Snyder rushes Lonnegan out of there, leaving his half a million dollars behind. Then Hooker and Gondorff get up, the bullets as fake as the FBI agents. The Return With the Elixir is the satisfaction of the con pulled off. Neither Hooker nor Gondorff even wants the money. Hooker, especially, is just happy that he got his revenge on Lonnegan.

The narrative of the Hero’s Journey is pretty straight forward and simple. The cleverness of the script comes out in not only the details of the story, but the twists that it takes along the way. You never quite know who you can really trust, and whom you cannot. There are plenty of surprises along the way and Ward wrote a wonderful script that Hill was able to craft into an equally wonderful film.

Technically this is a great film, but it just didn’t hit me emotionally. It’s ultimately a feel-good movie with a happy ending and no real tragedy. There’s nothing wrong with that at all, and you would expect that from a film like The Sting. It’s a romp, in the manner of its kin, like Ocean’s Eleven and any number of other con movies. It’s fun and it’s a bit of a ride in trying to figure out the con as it’s playing out in front of you. While there are moments of danger and suspense, The Sting doesn’t have the tone of a film that could have anything other than a feel-good kind of ending and that is somewhat rare for a Best Picture winner. Perhaps that’s why it doesn’t feel like a Best Picture winner to me. Especially with many of the recent winners leading up to The Sting, many ended on pure down notes, or had ambiguous endings. Not since the days of the Musical winning almost every other year had we seen something like The Sting, which was a feel-good movie with a happy ending that won Best Picture.

Did the Academy get it right?

I’m inclined to say that they did. I like The Sting, but it’s not one of the stronger winners. However in looking at the competition that it was up against for 1973, The Sting was the most deserving. American Graffiti is a terrific film, and it launched the film careers of George Lucas, Ron Howard, Richard Dreyfus and Harrison Ford. Those men would go on to be some of the most important names in film over the next four decades, but American Graffiti itself wasn’t a better film than The Sting. Cries and Whispers was a Swedish that was a little too depressing for most voters. The Exorcist was an absolute phenomenon that completely changed the Horror genre. I was at a recent screening of it, and I must say that even though the horror doesn’t hold up, it’s still an amazing film with a dramatic and compelling story. It’s really more of a cop film than a horror film, and it deserved Academy recognition. I do not, however, think it deserved to be Best Picture, because while the story is compelling, it’s not nearly as well-crafted as the story in The Sting. A Touch of Class was a romantic comedy, and as we’ve seen before, romantic comedies rarely win the Oscar. So overall, based on the competition more than anything else, I believe The Sting was the correct winner for Best Picture of 1973.