By Sean Axmaker
Special to MSN Movies

Fraud. Flimflam. Scam. Swindle. Confidence game. Call it what you will. In the real world, it's a crime perpetrated by sleazy crooks that prey upon the trusting innocents. But drop it into a big-screen fantasy and suddenly it's a romantic world where con artists are the knights errant of the criminal world, where the innocent are off-limits and only the most crooked are targeted for their Robin Hood exploits.

Con men and women have been part of the movies since before they learned to talk, and why not? You could argue that the movies are the biggest and most entertaining con of them all, the one place we happily play the patsy for a well-told fiction. But it was "The Sting" that suckered audiences into the most elaborate swindle the movies had perpetrated on-screen and turned the confidence film into a fine art. We have been suckers for a well-played scam ever since, from David Mamet's "House of Games" to John Dahl's noir-tinged "The Last Seduction" to Ridley Scott's bouncy "Matchstick Men." Even "The Illusionist" reveals its stage magic as part of an elaborate, long con. On the small screen, we have the swindles of Sawyer on "Lost," the crack team of long con pros on "Hustle" and the "traveler" clan who takes their road show to the big time in "The Riches."

And those are just the fake fakes. "Color Me Kubrick" makes a comedy of the real-life antics of Alan Conway (played with preening flamboyance by John Malkovich), who passed himself off as the reclusive director Stanley Kubrick, while Lasse Halstrom's "The Hoax" revives the literary scandal of Clifford Irving (played by Richard Gere), whose biography of Howard Hughes turned out to be a fraud perpetrated on both the publisher and the public.

The following is a survey of the richness and diversity of cinematic scams: a few of the best (and worst) con artists; a sampling of the most entertaining confidence games; a celebration of cons great and small, classic and crude, mundane and inspired, across the decades and around the world. If crime is "a left-handed form of human endeavor" (to quote "The Asphalt Jungle"), this is crime cinema at its most ambidextrous. That makes us both passive accomplices and willing victims eagerly awaiting the final twist of narrative sleight of hand.

The Classic Con: "The Sting" (1973)
It wasn't the first or even the best, but "The Sting," with its charming hustlers, nostalgic hue and Scott Joplin lilt, is the quintessential Hollywood con-artist movie. You have the worn and weary veteran grifter (Paul Newman); the plucky, anxious protégé (Robert Redford) who rouses him to one last score; the sleazy cop (Charles Durning) dogging their trail; and the vicious fat-cat crook of a mark (Robert Shaw) hooked by wounded pride and the lure of easy money. David S. Ward builds a classic piece of criminal chicanery known as "the wire" into a colorful lark and schools the viewer in the fine art of flimflammery every step of the way, withholding just enough so that the last con is on the audience. Audiences ate it up and the lively, lightweight entertainment made off with seven Academy Awards, which may be the film's greatest scam of all.

The Long Con: "The Spanish Prisoner" (1997)
No American director loves the psychological blind alleys and manipulative mind games of confidence men and women like David Mamet, the patron saint of hustlers and swindlers. He dove into the genre in his directorial debut, "House of Games," and made it his own with "The Spanish Prisoner." The deliciously elaborate swindle about an inventor (Campbell Scott), a millionaire (Steve Martin) and a mysterious formula known only as "the process," is an elaborate conspiracy with so many layers that the ground shifts from under the viewer with every scene. That it all unfolds in Mamet's distinctive universe -- of enigmatic conversations of rhythmically terse talk, spoken by preternaturally poised characters -- only makes the scheme more fascinating. In Mamet's world, everyone is scamming everyone else. Only the stakes change.

The Merciless Con: "Nine Queens" (2000)
There may be no more satisfying scam in the movies than the mercenary machinations of Fabián Bielinsky's devious game of swindles and switchbacks. Ricardo Darin is the proudly amoral peacock of a shyster who is out for every penny he can bilk out of the urban jungle of Buenos Aires. Dollar signs flash in his eyes when he and his young partner in training (whose inconvenient ethical streak is a thorn in Darin's side) stumble into "the kind of chance you wait for all your life." You wonder who is playing whom as the scheme spirals wildly out of their control. Bielinsky conducts the symphony of spars and feints with the confidence of a master and ends it on a gratifying note of poetic justice.

Con-tinental Flair: "Trouble in Paradise" (1932)
Ernst Lubitsch's suave and witty tale of sophisticated jewel thieves (Herbert Marshall and Miriam Hopkins) who find the perfect mark in flighty heiress Kay Francis is quite possibly the most sparkling and sexy romantic comedy ever made. Their latest sting hits a snag when Marshall falls for his mark and the jealous Hopkins, his partner in crime and in romance, responds with a fiery display of emotional indignation. There's no elaborate plot here -- simply a matter of sex and seduction, as the otherwise blandly unremarkable Marshall makes himself over as a continental Valentino who could talk a girl out of her heart, her fortune and her clothes. Never has a mark been fleeced so sweetly and left so satisfied.

Con-nubial Revenge: "The Lady Eve" (1941)
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. In this case, vengeance is hilarious. Barbara Stanwyck is as crafty as she is vulnerable as the sexy con woman who falls in love with her socially awkward stiff of a mark (a perfectly cast Henry Fonda at his most dazed). The hard-boiled pro goes soft in the presence of the innocent buffoon, until her double life catches up to her and he unceremoniously dumps her. Only director Preston Sturges could make you believe that her delicious revenge could actually work: With nothing but a change of accent and a bright new persona, she charms the dope all over again and runs him through the ringer. One of the funniest mixes of slapstick and sophistication in classic Hollywood and the greatest screwball swindle of them all.

No Honor Among Cons: "The Grifters" (1990)
It's maternal instincts versus survival instincts when career con Anjelica Huston is unexpectedly reunited with her estranged son (John Cusack) in the exquisitely tawdry adaptation of Jim Thompson's ruthless novel of petty con artists and small-time scammers. Cusack brings an amiable, modest amorality to his confidence-game cub, happily surviving on his penny-ante scams. Annette Bening pulls out her claws as the hardened girlfriend who battles for sway over him, but she is no match for the killer instincts of Huston's stone-cold schemer. Director Stephen Frears brings an out-of-time warp to the jaundiced pulp classic, smartly adapted by novelist Donald Westlake without a trace of sentiment for his cynical survivors.

The Rise and Fall of a Con Man: "Nightmare Alley" (1947)
Pretty boy matinee idol Tyrone Power makes for inspired casting in one of the most offbeat film noirs ever made. He's the Horatio Alger of hoax; an opportunistic carny who connives a mind-reading act from a rummy has-been in a two-bit sideshow. He tramples his partners as he takes his show out of the midway and into the nightclub circuit and, finally, to high society, where he scams the gullible rich as a phony spiritualist. It's a sleazy B noir with an A budget and a glossy director (Edmund Goulding) who's not quite sure what to do with it, which only adds to the weird atmosphere. Power's cocksure presence and mannered performance is perfect for this glib phony whose entire life is a show, and it only makes his rapid slide to degradation all the more satisfying ... and even a little tragic.

The Con-test: "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" (1988)
Sloppy, brash, American con man Steve Martin tramples through the carefully guarded French Riviera territory of elegant charlatan Michael Caine. This, of course, means war. The prize is the easy pickings of the rich widows who pass through the wealthy resort town. The battle? The first to separate a naïve American abroad (Glenne Headly) from her fortune. This remake of the largely forgotten 1963 comedy "Bedtime Story" actually improves upon the original. Director Frank Oz makes the battle of wiles between Martin's bumptious American cockiness and Caine's refined understatement both gracefully cultured and brightly exaggerated. Wit and culture and measured restraint take on unabashed brazenness and bullheaded improvisation in a crazy cartoon of the flimflam Olympics, which saves the biggest scam for an unexpected competitor in the gold-medal round.

The In-Con-petent: "Paper Moon" (1973)
Ryan O'Neal's Moses Pray is a con man without a heart of gold. This shabbily slick con man survives the Great Depression in the rural Midwest by fleecing widows and other bystanders for small change. Then, he unwittingly partners with a stubborn, smart-talking orphan (Ryan's real life daughter, Tatum O'Neal, in her Oscar-winning film debut) who proves to be a quick study, a born improviser and a sharp student of human nature -- in other words, a better crook than her mentor. Director Peter Bogdanovich evokes the dust-bowl photography of the WPA in his affectionate tribute to 1930s cinema. Just as important, he refuses to redeem the clumsy, cocky hustler who isn't half as smart as he thinks he is. Maybe that's his charm: On a list of fantasy criminal masterminds, Moses' tawdry talents and tinny values feel authentic.

The Con-noisseur: "F for Fake" (1974)
"Ladies and gentleman, by way of introduction, this is a film about trickery, fraud, about lies." Orson Welles is film director as magician and mountebank in the film that raises the level of the con to intellectual sleight-of-hand. What begins as a portrait of art forger Elmyr de Hory and his biographer Clifford Irving (whose own literary fraud is retold in Lasse Halstrom's "The Hoax") is transformed by Welles into a cinematic essay that rolls fakery and magic, performance and theater, celebrity and mystery into a study of our love of stories and our delight in being fooled. Not really a documentary, not exactly fiction, and certainly not a narrative in any conventional sense, this delirious film makes the case for cinema as the greatest con of all.

What is your favorite con movie? Write us at heymsn@microsoft.com

In addition to his regular contributions to MSN Movies, Sean Axmaker is a film critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and a DVD columnist for the Internet Movie Database. He regularly contributes to Amazing Stories, Asian Cult Cinema, Greencine.com and StaticMultimedia.com. His reviews and essays are featured in "The Scarecrow Video Movie Guide."

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