From Melville to Madoff, the Confidence Man is an essential American archetype. George Roy Hill’s 1973 film The Sting treats this theme with a characteristic dexterity. The movie was warmly received in its time, winning seven Academy Awards, but there were some who thought the movie was nothing more than a slight throwback. Pauline Kael, among others, felt Hill’s film was mechanical and contrived: a callow and manipulative attempt to recapture the box-office success of Robert Redford and Paul Newman’s prior pairing, Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid.

Matthew Specktor’s passionate, lyric meditation turns The Sting on its head, on its side, and right-side-up in an effort to unpack the film’s giddy complexity and secret, melancholic heart. Working off interviews with screenwriter David S. Ward and producer Tony Bill, and tacking from nuanced interpretation of its arching moods and themes to gimlet-eyed observation of its dizzying sleights-of-hand, Specktor opens The Sting up to disclose the subtle and stunning dimensions—sexual, political, and aesthetic—of Hill’s best film. Through Specktor’s lens, The Sting reveals itself as both an enduring human drama and a meditation on art-making itself, an ode to the necessary pleasure of being fooled at the movies.

Matthew Specktor is a former film executive for Tribeca Productions and 20th Century Fox. He is the author of the novel, That Summertime Sound, and his writing has appeared in various periodicals, including Open City, Five Chapters, and Salon. He is presently completing his second novel, American Dream Machine. He lives in Los Angeles.

In some quarters, at least, the movie was met as if it were the product of some boardroom calculation, a “sequel” back when such screamed sell-out, cash-in! Back when this was something to be sneered at. Redford and Newman were the pretty, plasticized face of this allegedly-condescending confection. Pauline Kael, overthinking the matter by a mile, wrote “I would much rather see a picture about two homosexual men in love than see two romantic actors going through a routine whose point is that they’re so adorably smiley butch that they can pretend to be in love and it’s all innocent,” going on to criticize the movie as “mechanical.” Such a response strikes me as feeble and reactionary, as “progressive,” in point of actual fact, as the picture’s own situation of Hooker’s racial attitudes. More than anything, it seems joyless, like caviling about hot dogs at a carnival. The two actors aren’t supposed to enjoy one another, aren’t supposed to throw such deliciously fricative sparks? The characters enjoy one another. The actors, clearly, do too . . . Blaming a movie like this for having good—looking stars is like blaming a car for its paint job. It’s there, sure, and if you’re reluctant to enjoy the shine—maybe there are other reasons besides ingrained Puritanism for such reluctance—at least recognize it has little to do with the ride’s quality. In the end it’s still about what’s under the hood.