Ray Walston – Movie Musings

Newman and Redford pull the mother of all confidence tricks in The Sting

Director: George Roy Hill

Cast: Paul Newman (Henry Gondorff), Robert Redford (Johnny Hooker), Robert Shaw (Doyle Lonnegan), Charles Durning (Lt William Snyder), Ray Walston (JJ Singleton), Eileen Brennan (Billie), Harold Gould (Kid Twist), John Heffernan (Eddie Niles), Robert Earl Jones (Luther Coleman), Jack Kehoe (Erie Kid), Dimitra Arless (Loretta Salino), Sally Kirkland (Crystal)

From its opening, to the ragtime charm of Joplin’s The Entertainer, it should be pretty clear what you are in for with The Sting. A nostalgia-tinged star-vehicle, The Sting is gloriously unpretentious, a film that means only to entertain. Charming and good-natured, you can forgive it an awful lot because it wants so little from you: other than to put a smile on your face (a real “aw shucks I never saw that coming!” grin). A slice of pure entertainment, with more than a hint of nostalgia, it hoovered up seven Oscars (in an admittedly weak year – its nearest competitor was The Exorcist and it says something for how eclectic American cinema can be that those two films hailed from the same year) at a time when the nation needed a lift.

The Sting is perhaps the ultimate confidence-trick, caper movie. It’s been effectively remade so many times (it’s basic plot was copied exactly for the first episode of BBC’s confidence trick dramedy series Hustlers among others) it’s likely that you will recognise some of its tricks long before viewers at the time did. But that doesn’t really matter, because like all tricksters, it tells a great story. In 1930s Illinois Johnny Hooker (Robert Redford) is a grifter who makes a score off the wrong guy: a courier for vicious crime boss Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw). In the violent aftermath, his partner and mentor Luther (Robert Earl Jones) is murdered. Hooker heads to Chicago to partner up with famous grifter Henry Gondorff (Paul Newman) to get his revenge. The plot comes together – but can they stay ahead of Lonnegan, the cops (led by Charles Durning’s Lt Snyder) who are after Hooker and the FBI who are hunting Gondorff? Or will they fool everyone?

Well what do you think? Directed with a professional (Oscar-winning) smoothness by George Roy Hill, this is basically Butch and Sundance Go Grifting. The film follows pretty much exactly the same nostalgia soaked journey following two charming Hollywood mates thumbing their nose at authority. The recreation of the period is extremely detailed (it won Oscars for production design and costumes), but above all safe and cosy. For all that it grifts in the rough-end of town, it’s a very clean and uncrowded world (the street scenes are notably empty) and very little reality is allowed to get in the way of what is effectively a shaggy-dog story.

The vision of the past it presents is designed from top-to-bottom to be comforting and the film is devoid of any sense of danger connected with grifting, or any sense of moral complexity around people who make their living from conning others. It’s a world where the only people conned are them-what-deserves-it and the conmen are plucky underdogs, making a buck off the crooked big man while fighting the corner of the little guy. It basically repackages conmen as fairytale heroes – and does so, so successfully most conmen films since have followed its lead.

It’s fairy-tale style is carried across in the chapters (with some lovely nostalgic hand-drawn chapter opener pages) that the film is split into, not to mention the structure of a callow youth, a rough but wise mentor, a hissible villain and righteous mission. The only thing it really misses is a princess to save (although there is the gentlest femme fatale you’ll ever see). But then there isn’t really room as, even more so than Butch and Cassidy this is a bromance played out in the same sepia-toned “good-old-days” warmth.

Newman and Redford are of course huge fun, using every inch of star-power gusto and cool. Newman has great fun as the sort of cigar-chomping, hard-drinking maverick only ever seconds away from bounding up from a scruffy sleep to perform all manner of tricks with assured cool. Newman generously cedes most of the richer material to Redford, but he can hardly have minded when he gets such glorious set-pieces as his faux-drunken card-sharp routine when he muscles in on Doyle’s cross-country train card game. I’ll also give a shout out to a wonderful moment when Gondorff goes through an elaborate show-off run-through of his card-sharp skills – only to get over-confident and spill the deck. It’s a good laugh, but also adds a little beat of tension (needless to say he performs flawlessly on the night).

Redford got his only acting Oscar-nomination here and, while it’s not his most challenging role, it’s certainly one where his magnetic Hollywood charm was used to its best effect. He gets the meat of the plot, walking a difficult line between being both an audience surrogate and keeping us uncertain about how much of what we are seeing is true. Redford’s handsome boy-next-door charm works perfectly for Hooker – and he’s got a sweet shocked horror at violence when it comes – and he has a rather winning naivety mixed in with a youthful energy. Sure, it’s hardly Hamlet, but as a riff on his WASPY version of counter-culture cool, it’s pretty much spot-on. (Redford is also of course a very safe presence – there’s nothing dangerous to him, which is of course perfect for the film’s tone.)

These two energetic and charismatic performers – both having a whale of a time – are the main selling point of a movie that rattles through fun set-pieces. Like all the best con movies, it lays out all its pieces and only assembles them all into a picture right at the very end. It makes for something little more than a fairground entertainment – Marvel as Gonrdorff and Hooker Hoodwink a Man Before Your Very Eyes! – but when it’s told with such zip, charm and lightness as this it hardly matters. Even the heavy – a growling Robert Shaw – gets a bit of light-banter under the menace (“What was I supposed to do” he bemoans after Gondroff swops out the crooked cards he’s dealt him “call him for cheating better than me?”).

The Sting isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel or tell you anything serious. It just wants you to grin. While we might be told grifting can be dangerous, the main impression of the film is that it’s matey boys-own blast. And it wants us to enjoy the entertainment as much as the conmen do. It knows that, like a good magic trick, we love to see how the illusion works and there are few things more engrossing than watching professionals execute a difficult task flawlessly. It’s one of the lightest Best Picture winners, but then it’s also one of the most purely enjoyable.

Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine in an unusual relationship in the brilliant The Apartment

Director: Billy Wilder

Cast: Jack Lemmon (CC “Bud” Baxter), Shirley MacLaine (Fran Kubelik), Fred MacMurray (JD Sheldrake), Ray Walston (Joe Dobisch), Jack Kruschen (Dr Dreyfuss), David Lewis (Al Kirkeby), Edie Adams (Miss Olsen), Hope Holliday (Mrs Margie MacDougall), Joan Shawlee (Sylvia), Naomi Stevens (Mrs Mildred Dreyfuss)

How do you get ahead in business (without really trying)? Well a good way of going about it might be just farming your New York apartment out so your bosses can take ladies who aren’t their wives there. It works for CC Baxter (Jack Lemmon) – known to all his superiors as “Buddy” – who makes his apartment freely available on rotation to a host of executives as bolt holes for their mistresses. Just arrange a start and finish time, pick up the key from under the mat, and Baxter will keep out of the way. However, things get complex for Baxter when the Head of Personnel, Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), demands exclusive use of the apartment – and when it turns out his mistress is none other than Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), the lift attendant Baxter himself has fallen in love with.

The Apartment is a brilliant mix of bitter social satire and comedy. It’s striking that the film is remembered as a sort of dark romantic comedy, as I think I’d be hard pressed to think of a film with as bitter a view of America and its values. Baxter and Kubelik make for a sweet couple (eventually) but the pair of them are in awe of the American dream. This working dream is however a complete fake, one in which the rich and powerful take what they want and those at the bottom bend over backwards to assist them, praying that the next big job or the next big marriage is round the corner.

Wilder’s film skewers the ambition and manipulation behind the American dream. Baxter, a down-trodden schmo, works in an office where hundreds of workers sit in lines entering data like worker ants. (The sequence was Wilder’ visual tribute to King Vidor’s 1928 The Crowd). Acclaimed French art director Alexander Trauner (thegenius behind Les Enfants du Paradise) created the effect with intelligent use of false perspective (those at the back are little people made to look far away), and Baxter’s office is a triumph of capitalist indifference made flesh. The big wigs (the only ones with individual offices) are interested only in getting what they want and value nothing more than the keys to the executive bathroom.

It’s Mad Men before its time. A drunken Christmas party is a picture of debauchery, a hotbed of drinking and sex. Kubelik can hardly operate her lift without getting her bottom pinched by an executive. At the apex is Sheldrake the personnel manager, brilliantly played by Fred MacMurray as a heel who thinks he’s reasonable. Sheldrake is the personification of selfish indifference, interested only in getting what he wants all the time. He strings along both Kubelik and Baxter with empty promises (of marriage and promotion), constantly with the fixed smile of the uncaring professional, glancing at his watch during illicit dates with Kubelik and interested in Baxter only as long as he can gain access to his apartment.

As the owner of that apartment, Jack Lemmon is superb as the nebbish Baxter. No one could look or sound more like a struggling nobody like Lemmon, the film brilliantly playing on his relatable every-dayism. With his head jutting forward, his voice and manner always too eager to impress, to ingratiate, he’s the American dreamer ground down by the reality of having to get ahead. It works so brilliantly due to Lemmon’s charm, even though many of the things Baxter does in the film are slightly unpleasant. He’s ambitious, but only because he feels like it’s the only chance he has. But deep down Baxter is kind, he’s playing the role that he thinks he needs to play to make a success of life – so you never stop kind of loving him, even as he enables cheating spouses and good-time girls (at least one of whom is a not-even veiled spoof of Wilder’s bette noir, Marilyn Monroe).

But Baxter is one of us, he’s a down-trodden, a bit clueless and so his good intentions are constantly misdirected. So we care about him, just as we care about Kubelik, wonderfully played by Shirley MacLaine. She’s sweet and endearing, full of quirky charm and endearing sparkiness. But it covers the pain of all misused mistresses, constantly being strung along by their lovers with the promise that yes, eventually, they will leave their wives. The film heads into dark territory with the impact this has on Kubelik but even after all this, she still gives Sheldrake yet another chance. Because, in Wilder’s world, it’s hard to turn your back on how the world works.

It’s the same rules of the world that leave Baxter sitting outside his apartment in the rain, waiting for his boss to “finish”, or spend the night walking the streets or being stood up at the theatre because his prospective date is his boss’ mistress. But despite all this, the film is funny, partly because the set-up is in itself funny and Wilder laces the cynicism with plenty of humour (acidic or otherwise). There are hilarious misunderstandings – all of Baxter’s neighbours think he is the ultimate party animal – and relatable comedy of the lonely, with Baxter’s TV dinners and imaginative use of tennis rackets to strain spaghetti.

The film also throws together a neat romantic plot between Baxter and Kubelik that’s underplayed, endearing and feels truthful. Many people have criticised the ending as feeling tacked on and betraying the coldness of the film’s social satire. But I think it’s there throughout – this is a film that has a fury for the cruelty of capitalism and people like Sheldrake, but no end of affection for the real people who are trapped at the bottom of it. Baxter and Kubelik are never the film’s targets and always the film’s heart. Their eventual happy ending – with the film’s famous closing line of “shut up and deal” – might seem like it flies in the face of the acid of the film, but that’s to overlook the heart that underpins all their interactions.

The Apartment is a near perfect mix of both comedy and drama, dealing with deep and dark themes with an assured and gentle touch, with a wonderful script by Wilder and IAL Diamond. With its two lead roles filled with a brilliant aplomb by Lemmon and MacLaine, plus superb support from MacMurray and Oscar-nominated Jack Kruschen as Baxter’s next-door neighbour, it’s still a superb treat.