Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
Make a sustaining gift today to support local journalism!

Home Video Picks: 'The Sting'

Paul Newman and Robert Redford in <em>The Sting</em>.
Universal Pictures Home Entertainment
Paul Newman and Robert Redford in The Sting.

Time now for a home-viewing recommendation from movie critic Bob Mondello. He's says he's excited about the Blu-ray release of The Sting...and that's no con.

All it takes is a few notes of that Scott Joplin rag and the whole movie starts playing in my head: In Depression-era Chicago, two grifters, experts in the confidence game, come up with a big con to get back at a crooked banker who'd killed a friend. Robert Redford is Hooker, a small-timer with a cause; Paul Newman is Gondorf, an old-timer with experience.

In my memory, the whole movie is sepia-toned, but in this Blu-ray transfer, the colors are vibrant. in fact "Blu"-ray, for once, seems appropriate given the two pairs of baby-blues it's adding luster to. Redford and Newman had just teamed up with director George Roy Hill a few years earlier for Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, so re-teaming them in another buddy flick was a no-brainer. And this time they're surrounded with a great supporting cast — limping bad guy Robert Shaw, growling cop Charles Durning, sashaying madame Eileen Brennan, and a whole raft of character types.

The Blu-ray packaging is handsome without being terribly informative. Most of the extras aren't new — a three-part making-of film was already on previous releases, and the studio's self-promotional, Centennial stuff mostly amounts to a come-visit-Universal-Studios ad. But the extras in this case are just window-dressing. The reason to see The Sting is to luxuriate — either again, or if you're really lucky, for the very first time — in the confidence of the con.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Bob Mondello, who jokes that he was a jinx at the beginning of his critical career — hired to write for every small paper that ever folded in Washington, just as it was about to collapse — saw that jinx broken in 1984 when he came to NPR.

You make NHPR possible.

NHPR is nonprofit and independent. We rely on readers like you to support the local, national, and international coverage on this website. Your support makes this news available to everyone.

Give today. A monthly donation of $5 makes a real difference.