No one, in all honesty, would go to the best picture Oscar list for a defining rundown of the best American cinema. Too many short-shelf life films get through the voting process and rise to the top: Crash? A Beautiful Mind? Really? Middling-to-decent tends to triumph. Actual dyed-in-the-wool classics are rare: The Deer Hunter and The Godfather, and possibly No Country for Old Men and Birdman, are among the only highlights of the past five decades.

Then there’s The Sting (1973). Made at the crest of the Hollywood new wave, it may not be freighted with the state-of-American-society themes that weighted Coppola’s or Cimino’s films, nor the embedded cynicism that have made the Coens and Alejandro González Iñárritu beloved in a later cinematic era. But The Sting is the most purely enjoyable film in Oscar history – and that, I think, puts it in the most valuable American film-making tradition of all.

First and foremost, The Sting is simply a great caper movie. It wasn’t the first, of course – the convoluted-robbery film was a popular genre throughout the 1960s – but it’s got to be the most complicated brainteaser ever to reach blockbuster and major awards status. In fact, it disproves the idea that popular movies have to be dumb; maybe it’s just a peculiarity of the caper genre, but The Sting is as knotty as a differential equation. Its two-part narrative structure – first the card game on the train in which Henry Gondorff (Paul Newman) outmanoeuvres nasty Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw); and then the betting-office scam that ends with Hooker (Robert Redford) and Gondorff getting plugged – pleasingly follows the pattern of the old bait-and-switch itself.

The elaborate skill of the main scam – “the wire” – is still a delight, nearly 40 years on. It’s a beautifully stage-managed sequence, as Gondorff and Hooker exploit the time delay of the ticker-tape machine (cutting-edge tech in the mid-30s, you presume). As with Argo, Now You See Me and Ocean’s Eleven, The Sting has a sense of the pleasure of a skilfully delivered performance (I’m personally enamoured of Tom Spratley’s “Me specialty’s an Englishman”). There is something about the pride in actorly craftsmanship, underlying cinema’s fondness for cons, stunts and heists.

And The Sting doesn’t neglect to deal with suspension-of-disbelief issues. Cruder films would have had Hooker and Gondorff high-fiving each other as Lonnegan looked on, appalled, but The Sting inserts a final coup de grace – the row, the shooting – that is necessary to get Lonnegan out of the building with no possibility of revenge. But it’s so adroitly done that, until you know for sure, it looks as if Hooker and Gondorff might actually be going at it for real.

Some of the film’s brilliancies are purely decorative. That instantly identifiable theme, for example – Scott Joplin by way of Marvin Hamlisch – is still one of the all-time earworms, and I always find it funny that, despite all the chalkstripe suits and carefully titled caps, the film still looks more like the 1970s than the 1930s. Plus, it’s got one of the great movie bromances in Redford and Newman, one refreshingly free of machismo and manly bluster. The pair had already established their double act in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid four years earlier. It was a triple act if you include the director George Roy Hill, with whom they were reunited on The Sting, and who seems to have inexplicably fallen from critical attention in subsequent years.

But best of all, The Sting is a wonderfully moral movie – if that’s not a contradiction in terms for a story of rank deception. It’s more than a simple display of distraction-technique fireworks; there is sensitive narrative drama at the heart of the film. These are the deadbeat little guys banding together and putting one over on the vicious, flint-hearted, mean-minded man at the top. (Suddenly, it feels very topical.) Modern cinema could learn a lot.