Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Sting
1973 · George Roy Hill · The Sting on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the painted chapter cards name each stage of the con. (structure)
The Setup, The Hook, The Tale, The Wire, The Shut-Out, The Sting. The titles come from the working vocabulary of professional swindlers, and the film hands them to you in advance.
Payoff: Being told the structure makes you feel included in the operation, which is exactly the feeling a confidence man works to produce.
Count the small signals passing between Gondorff's crew. (staging)
A tug of the ear, a finger down the side of the nose, a glance held a half-second long. Hill blocks the scenes so you can see the cue and the person receiving it.
Payoff: You are trained to read the crew's private language, and after a while you start decoding scenes the way the grifters do. In the reading: mark. The reading calls these marks: gestures that mean by habit, where seeing one teaches you to expect what comes next.
Watch Newman's hands during the card game on the train. (performance)
Gondorff sloshes his drink, slurs, fumbles the deal, and misreads the room. The hands are doing precise work the whole time the man is performing incompetence.
Payoff: The film's best acting is characters acting badly on purpose, and the skill only becomes visible once you know what to look for. In the reading: the gest. The reading calls this a gest: a body deliberately wearing the wrong attitude so that mastery can be disclosed in retrospect.
Compare the green of Lonnegan's rooms with Gondorff's amber. (light)
Surtees keeps the mob world cold and cash-colored and the con operation warm and burnished, with the whole film slightly desaturated toward the look of an old photograph.
Payoff: The palette sorts the two sides for you and puts the story at one remove, somewhere between 1936 and a memory of it.
Listen for the ragtime piano running under 1936 Chicago. (sound)
Hamlisch arranged Scott Joplin, whose music belongs to the 1900s, not the Depression. The playing is light and bouncing and it never darkens with the plot.
Payoff: The score is itself a small forgery, charming enough that almost nobody notices the period is wrong by thirty years.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the hands. The film spends an hour teaching you to read the crew's signals.