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DOI: 10.1057/9781137466891.0001
Publicity still for House of Games (David Mamet, 1987): Mike (Joe Mantegna) with
Margaret (Lindsay Crouse) [The Cinema Museum, London]
Screen Hustles,
Grifts and Stings
Amy Sargeant
Tisch School of the Arts, UK
DOI: 10.1057/9781137466891.0001
screen hustles, grifts and stings
Copyright © Amy Sargeant, 2016.
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication
may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be
reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission. In accordance
with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under
the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright
Licensing Agency, Saff ron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
First published 2016 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Th e author has asserted her right to be identifi ed as the author of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of Nature America, Inc.,
One New York Plaza, Suite 4500, New York, NY 10004–1562.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
ISBN: 978-1-137-46688-4
E-PDF ISBN: 978–1–137–46689–1
DOI: 10.1057/9781137466891
Distribution in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world is by Palgrave
Macmillan®, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England,
company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the
Library of Congress.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
A catalogue record for the book is available from the British Library
Contents
List of Figures vi
Introduction 1
1 Lone Operators 12
2 Two-Handers 26
3 Aesop and Brer Rabbit 41
4 The Big Store 60
5 The Long Con 78
Bibliography 90
Index 94
DOI: 10.1057/9781137466891.0001 v
List of Figures
1.1 A Nietzschean self-inventor: Stavisky (Jean-Paul
Belmondo) in Stavisky ... (Alain Resnais, 1974)
[The Cinema Museum, London] 23
2.1 Like father, like daughter: Ryan and Tatum
O’Neal as Moses and Addie Pray in Paper Moon
(Peter Bogdanovich, 1973) [The Cinema
Museum, London] 39
3.1 Danny (Marc Warren) channels Catch Me If You
Can, reuniting with Stacie (Jaime Murray, Albie
(Rober Vaughn) and Mickey (Adrian Lester) –
while Ash fetches the car: Hustle (BBC TV/
Kudos, Season Two, ep. 1) [screengrab] 57
4.1 Sexual and professional rivals: Myra (Annette
Bening) and Lilly (Anjelica Houston) compete
over Roy (John Cusack) in The Grifters (Stephen
Frears, 1990) [The Cinema Museum, London] 76
5.1 E lnett, curlers and cravats: reconstruction of the
‘actually happened’ in American Hustle (David
O’Russell, 2013): Irving (Christian Bale) flanked
by Richie (Bradley Cooper) and Sydney (Amy
Adams) [Screengrab] 88
vi DOI: 10.1057/9781137466891.0002
Introduction
Abstract: The introductory chapter comments on the lack of
academic discussion of the con film hitherto. It describes the
con as a subgenre of crime cinema, affiliated to but distinct
from the heist. It notes the recurrence of particular short
cons (some identified by Poe), literary precursors and sources
in literature. A fine – and sometimes indeterminate – line
is drawn between the con and the conduct of supposedly
legitimate professions. The pleasure of planning and
perpetrating the con, it is suggested, is matched in the
viewer’s vicarious experience of its enactment.
Sargeant, Amy. Screen Hustles, Grifts and Stings.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
doi: 10.1057/9781137466891.0003.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137466891.0003
Screen Hustles, Grifts and Stings
This project has been simmering on the back-burner for a long while. My
interest in the work of David Mamet began with his stageplay Oleanna,
which I saw in the production casting Lia Williams (as Carol, the
student) and David Suchet (as John, the professor) and with the contro-
versy it provoked. Both Oleanna and House of Games are concerned, in
some measure, with personal responsibility and with power authorised
by group affiliation. It seemed to me then that some critics of the play,
and, implicitly, of Mamet personally, were presumptuously reading into
the gaps left in the dialogue between the play’s paired protagonists, in
what is said and what is withheld.1 Similarly, there are many ‘gaps’ in
communication in Mamet’s screenplay for House of Games, his directorial
debut in 1987. I was impressed, as many others have been, by his stylistic
affinities with Pinter – the tautness of its overall shape and of its writing.2
Indeed, Mamet’s acknowledged admiration for Pinter (to whom his 1983
Glengarry Glen Ross, first performed in London, is dedicated) was recip-
rocated: Pinter directed the 1993 Royal Court production of Oleanna.
Both House of Games and Oleanna are concerned with the authority
attached to the usage of ‘terms of art’ (or professional groupspeak); in
Glengarry Glen Ross, ‘verbal magic’ is deployed as a mode of persuasion
and entrapment.3 I am also struck by Mamet’s respect for the themes and
articulation of such ‘well-made’ plays as Harley Granville-Barker’s The
Voysey Inheritance (1905) and Terence Rattigan’s The Winslow Boy (1946 –
directed on screen by Mamet in 1999).4
House of Games, here to be discussed in some detail (see Chapters 4
and 5), in turn prompted an interest in literary and cinematic con men
more generally. I was especially interested in the similarities, identified
by Mamet in House of Games and Glengarry Glen Ross, between the cons
practised on either side of supposedly legitimate behaviour and the
susceptibility of certain professions to be marked for conning: David
W. Maurer, the magisterial lexicographer of cons in the ‘Augustan age’,
comments that real estate men are ‘the fattest and juiciest of suckers’,
perhaps because they are born ‘boosters’ (as Mike, the professional
criminal, says of Margaret, the psychoanalyst, in House of Games
(see Chapter 4).5 Esate agents’ ‘prospects’ (pumped and flattered) are
equivalent to marks; Hustle compares bankers to ‘ropers’: they have
larceny in their veins (see Chapter 3). Narratively, I was interested in
Mamet’s use of American mythology (agents in Glengarry Glen Ross
fondly imagine themselves as adventuring ‘frontiersmen’) and in his
use of classic cinematic devices – cinema in its ‘Augustan age’ – to con
DOI: 10.1057/9781137466891.0003
Introduction
the viewer into a particular position vis-à-vis the depiction of events as
they are presented by the narrative. In a doubling of senses, there is a
framing of the ‘mark’.
In the intervening years, a number of books have appeared discussing
the crime film as genre or category. One might have expected the con
man and the con game to feature larger in these surveys. Phil Hardy’s
1997 BFI Companion to Crime included an entry devoted to Con Men (and
Women) and pointed the reader to a number of films that seemingly
blur the distinction of legitimate behaviour (for example, the publicity
huckster in Alexander MacKendrick’s 1957 The Sweet Smell of Success and
the spiv hustler in Jules Dassin’s 1950 Night and the City). George Roy’s
1973 The Sting is designated as an archetypical con film.6 More remains
to be said, I reckon, as to how and why the structure and mood of The
Sting might constitute an archetype, more of its sources (notably Maurer)
and precursors, its appeal to audiences and its subsequent imitations, on
large and small screen (see Chapter 2). The particular patterns evinced
by cons essentially lend themselves, I suggest, to adaptation from novels
(The Grifters, Matchstick Men, The Two Faces of January, Addie Pray, the Il’f
and Petrov fable, The Twelve Chairs – possibly drawing on Mark Twain),
to sequels (The Sting), re-makes (Ripley, Gambit, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
and Nine Queens) and seriality (Patrick Hamilton’s Gorse Trilogy and
BBC TV’s Hustle).7 The escapades of Grant Allen’s illustrious masquer-
ader Colonel Clay were first published as a series in The Strand magazine.
The final ‘Episode of the Old Bailey’ refers to the notorious Tichborne
Claimant (as does Patrick Hamilton’s 1953 Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse),
‘The Episode of the German Professor’ to the Koh-i-noor diamond, and
‘The Episode of the Game of Poker’ to The Strand itself, in other words,
to actual phenomena known to Allen’s original readership. The predict-
ability and reflexivity of repetition is offset against the novelty of varia-
tion (both within a single text and across texts – sometimes consciously,
intertextually, acknowledged). Furthermore, at their best con films are
films that solicit repeated viewing. How and when does the con start?
How was it achieved? Who is and is not party to the con? The viewer,
like the mark, is willingly thrilled. As Mike says to Margaret in House of
Games, ‘we’ve had fun! You must say that’; ‘What is life without adven-
ture?’ Matchstick Men (Ridley Scott, 2003) concludes that ‘We had a good
time, though, didn’t we?’
As Maurer and Jay Robert Nash (a source, I suspect, for a number
of Hustle’s scenarios) noted, many cons, short and long, recognisably
DOI: 10.1057/9781137466891.0003
