365 Films A Year!

The Sting is an old-fashioned movie made at a time when films were getting grittier and grittier, I think the fact that it is a throwback is part of the reason it holds up better than a lot of its contemporaries.

Paul Newman and Robert Redford play off each other beautifully and (as part of the plot) the audience never knows if they are really working together or not. They make every possibility completely believable. Redford is the lead, but without Newman, it would fall apart.

The supporting cast is also excellent with great performances by Robert Shaw, Charles Durning, Harold Gould and many others. The music is great and the look and feel is impeccable.

But, of course, it is David S. Ward’s brilliant script that makes The Sting. Clever without ever being obnoxious, complicated without ever being impenetrable, it is one of the greatest pure scripts in the history of film. Director George Roy Hill deserves credit for bringing it all together, but a script like this is easy to screw up (see The Sting II) and difficult enough just to make workable. But this one never misses a step.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 28th, 2009 at 2:09 pm and is filed under 1973, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Historical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.