When I have an earworm, you must suffer.

Actually, the earworm’s a pretty good one. “Solace,” (also known as “Mexican Serenade”) by Scott Joplin. I picked up a cheap DVD of the movie, “The Sting,” and watched it Sunday, and now the song’s stuck in my brain (I was going to embed a YouTube performance, but couldn’t find one I liked).

“The Sting” got me thinking about the general falseness of the film medium in general, and the general awfulness of con men in particular. I’ll leave my deathless thoughts on movies for tomorrow. My subject tonight is con men.

One of the standard dishonesties of the cinema is to make us like somebody by putting them up against somebody even worse. The Man With No Name in the Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns, for instance, wasn’t particularly admirable, but he was an absolute saint compared to the desperadoes he gunned down. In the same way, the makers of “The Sting” got us to tolerate—even delight in—the dishonesty of the protagonists by making them the little guys, trying to get some revenge on the vicious crime lord, The Big Mick, who killed their friend Luther.

There’s one tip of the fedora to morality, when Paul Newman’s Henry Gondorff tells Hooker (Robert Redford) that (I’m quoting from memory, so I’ve certainly got it wrong), describing his career, “It all stunk. There’s no point doing this if it’s just like what everybody else does.”

In spite of the fact that I like this movie enough to actually spend money on the DVD, I hate, hate, hate the glamorization of con artists in movies and on TV.

At the very beginning of the movie, we see Hooker pulling what he thinks is a small con on a “mark” who (he’s not aware) is actually a mob courier. The con he uses is the classic “Pigeon Drop,” in which you persuade the mark to give you his or her money, which you then wrap up in a handkerchief. You do some diversionary business with it, and return to them a handkerchief which they think is the original, but is in fact stuffed with newspaper. You work it so that by the time they realize this, you are far away.

The Pigeon Drop is very popular with Gypsy fortune tellers, who like to play it on old ladies, persuading them that their money is “cursed” and needs to be ceremonially cleansed.

We’re talking old ladies here. Widows. With their life savings, frequently.

You’ll note that the oft-quoted con man’s self-justification, “You can’t cheat an honest man,” is a lie (and why would you be surprised that a con man would lie to you?). The old ladies who fall for the pigeon drop aren’t trying to cheat anybody.

Another classic is the Bank Examiner Scheme. This is similar to the Pigeon Drop, but the con man presents himself as a bank examiner who needs the mark’s help in catching a dishonest employee at his bank. The mark is instructed to withdraw money from his account, money which he is persuaded to turn over to an “officer.” Of course he never sees his money again. This is another con that plays on the honesty and helpfulness, not the greed, of the mark.

I’ve had a couple encounters with con men. Some of you will recall that I almost fell for an e-mail rental scam when I last advertised a room for rent in my house (much thanks to our readers for warning me in time). I also was once taken in by a “change raiser” when I worked at a gas station in Florida. The con man asked for some change for a bill, then decided he wanted the change in different denominations, and confused me enough to make some money before I realized what he was doing and cut him off.

There was nothing glamorous about either occasion, and it had nothing to do with “what happened to Luther.”