About an hour into The Sting I began to understand it. Not the plot, which is clear enough, but the raison d'être. This Paul Newman-Robert Redford vehicle is set in the thirties, and I couldn't really understand why. Unlike (say) Bonnie and Clyde, the story isn't tied to the period. Why do it that way?… Audiences, I guess, aren't as nostalgic for the decade itself—most of them are too young to have known it—as they are for films of the decade. This isn't a film about the thirties as much as it's an attempt to make a thirties film. It's the Antiques Made to Order business. (p. 252)

Recurrently, to the point of galloping tedium, articles appear telling us how American films have lost the Golden Glow of the high Hollywood days … and how pictures may now be more mature and more serious and candid, but...