He may never make the auteur circuit (something devoutly to be wished), but George Roy Hill is a director to be reckoned with, a clever fellow capable of fluffing up the thinnest stuff into a plausible tangle, a kind of cinematic back-combing, for amusement—Period of Adjustment (1963), Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967)—and, better yet, totally alert to the potential of a really useful script. His Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid latched on to the mostly excellent words of William Goldman: his The Sting neatly repays its debt to a script of unusual brevity, wit and purpose by David S. Ward. You could say that Mr Hill has gone Butch again, engaging the same charmers—Paul Newman and Robert Redford—to enlist our sympathies on the side of criminals. The period this time is post-Depression, 1936 the year, and nostalgia an ally. The affair draws on our notorious affection for...