Sightlines · reception
How The Sting was received
1973 · George Roy Hill · The Sting on Sightlines
The arc
A massive hit on release — it won seven Oscars including Best Picture and out-grossed nearly everything in 1973-74 — and unlike many Best Picture winners it never suffered a backlash: it's aged into a beloved, endlessly rewatchable comfort classic.
What’s debated
The perennial debate is whether it deserved Best Picture over The Exorcist and American Graffiti, or whether 'pure entertainment' was exactly the right call.
Its footprint
Its Scott Joplin ragtime score — especially 'The Entertainer' — became a genuine pop phenomenon and is still shorthand for playful trickery, and the film basically wrote the template every con-artist movie (Ocean's Eleven included) has followed since.
Where it stands
It's the gold standard of the con movie and a fixture of the 'perfect crowd-pleaser' canon — the Newman-Redford double act people tell you to watch right after Butch Cassidy.
Did you know? Marvin Hamlisch's Oscar-winning ragtime score is a deliberate anachronism — Scott Joplin's music dates from decades before the film's 1936 setting — and it single-handedly sparked a 1970s Joplin revival, sending 'The Entertainer' onto the pop charts.