Hill: The Sting (1973)

The Sting was George Roy Hill’s second collaboration with Robert Redford and Paul Newman and it’s every bit as jaunty and light-hearted as the first. This time around it’s a heist film, set against Prohibition-era Chicago rather than the Western landscapes of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but once again it plays as a comedy, or even a musical, closer in spirit to Thoroughly Modern Millie than the more austere and atmospheric crime films of the 70s. That’s not to say that it’s not atmospheric in its own right, but that it’s anxious to recreate a very different kind of atmosphere, namely the can-do, makeshift opportunism of the Great Depression, and the universe of hustlers, grifters, gamblers, con artists and racketeers who learned to live with it. At one level, that also means paying homage to the peculiar exuberance of the late silent era, as evinced in Hill’s taste for classical chase sequences, as well as the way in which he harks back to a time when transitioning between shots still felt like something of a confidence trick in itself, since it's hard to imagine another film shot in the 70s being this keen to show off every possible brand of wipe, cut and iris, nor a 70s director so keen to demonstrate how dexterously and professionally he can slide one image over another, or replace one image with another. At the same time, the film itself feels somewhat opportunistic in the manner of the era it depicts, suffused with a brown-and-beige palette that gives the impression that every scene has been shot on recycled or reused sets, somewhere deep in the deepest recesses of the backlot. Perhaps that’s why the very crux of Redford and Newman’s heist involves building and orchestrating an elaborate set, which in turn expands to a kind of film-within-the-film that often makes the film proper feel like something of an allegory of silent film production itself, tribute to an era when directors simply made do with what they had. In that sense, it offers a quite cinephilic access to the Hollywood backlot, a time capsule of the 70s as much as the 30s, especially since the twist revolves around sets that we don’t quite recognise as sets, or whose set design we waver between attributing to Hill and his characters. And yet, as a set-up film with an emphasis on the sets, it’s only nostalgic in the most picaresque way - like the trips down memory lane once afforded by old fairs or amusement parks, it’s no more picturesque or exotic than it would have seemed at the time it commemorates, and there’s an authenticity in that, a modesty that’s as courteous as it is charming.