The Sting

The Sting is one of the most purely enjoyable films ever to win the Best Picture Oscar. George Roy Hill directs with a light, oblique touch that keeps the audience perpetually a step behind the action, while David S. Ward's screenplay builds a con so intricate that watching the filmmakers keep the mechanics straight is half the fun. Newman and Redford reteamed with the easy chemistry that made them the era's defining duo, and Robert Shaw's cold, easily-baited mark is the perfect foil; a deep bench of character actors keeps every scene alive. Marvin Hamlisch's ragtime score, built on Scott Joplin, is so woven into the film's identity that it single-handedly revived ragtime in popular culture.

The film is knowingly, even relentlessly, charming: 1930s Chicago is rendered in playful wipes, irises, exaggerated fashions, and gentle mockery of the period's style. That charm is exactly what a small but consistent minority of critics have always held against it — calling it lightweight, pure popcorn, a good-natured confection whose elaborate scheme doesn't bear close scrutiny and whose unrelenting efforts to please can cloy. Most reviewers, then and now, consider that complaint to miss the point: it's a crime movie more concerned with wit and character than blood and gore, and its self-aware gamesmanship is the source of its durability.

Where critics genuinely split, the argument is about ambition rather than execution — whether entertainment this effortless can count as great, or only as flawless at being fun. The overwhelming consensus, backed by an Academy Awards sweep, preservation in the United States National Film Registry, and generations of later critics hailing it as the definitive con-artist comedy, is that the two are the same thing. It remains a rare Best Picture winner audiences revisit for pleasure rather than obligation, and its fingerprints are all over every slick heist comedy that followed.