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.
Once you have seen it
Count the people in the parlor who were in on it. (structure)
The agent, the cops, the bystanders, the men with the guns. Every face the film presented as an outside force turns out to be staff.
Payoff: One moment rewrites every cue you thought you had decoded, including the ones the film taught you in its first twenty minutes. In the reading: demark. The reading calls this a demark: the anomaly that breaks the habit you were taught and sends you back to reinterpret the chain.
Watch how the fake parlor is built to be performed in. (staging)
Bumstead's shop has a counter, a board, a crowd of extras with parts to play, and an entrance that works like a stage door. The room is a set inside the film.
Payoff: The revenge is carried out as theater rather than violence. Nobody shoots Lonnegan. He is out-staged by a company of actors.
Notice the iris wipes and the freeze frames styled as stills. (cutting)
Reynolds joins scenes with devices from silent serials and early talkies, and stops the picture on posed images that look like photographs from the period.
Payoff: The film is dressed as an older film, so its form is in costume the same way its characters are.
Watch how much Hooker is never told. (performance)
Redford plays eager, impulsive, and half-informed throughout, taking Gondorff's competence on faith. His confusion in a scene is usually the film's way of measuring yours.
Payoff: The apprentice is your seat in the operation. Everything he does not know is being withheld from you by the same hand.
Carry this in: Watch the hands. The film spends an hour teaching you to read signals it fully intends to use on you.