The Sting (George Roy Hill, 1973)

SPOILERS but who could possibly care?

I've written about the tendency of 1970s Hollywood filmmakers to inflate their genre pics into white elephant art. But I didn't anticipate I'd be throwing The Sting, a film I hadn't seen in probably 40 years, onto the pile. What a slog! It starts out as a promising example of the gambling film, a favorite genre probably because gambling has always seemed so butch and beyond me. All the proper nouns, especially names like Horse Face Lee and Suitcase Murphy, and card terms (slice it to the side, horizontal ponies*) announce themselves as standards of traditional masculinity that I will never attain. It's a turn on, in a way. But lawd, why did this thing have to be 129 minutes? The pace slows in the last third to accommodate, you guessed it, compulsory heterosexuality, a waste of time in a film that couldn't care less about women. The entire Loretta (Dimitra Arliss) subplot could be excised. Hooker (Robert Redford) pining for her serves only to postpone the sting to the last ten minutes of the film. And could the sting be any lamer? The earlier card game on the train is far more intense. We know Hooker and Gondorff (Paul Newman, with inhuman eyes) can't die. So when we see them get shot, the "sting" is blunted. This was the best picture of the year according to Oscar? Come back, The Exorcist, all is forgiven.

Grade: C+

*I made those up.