By David Raether
In April 1849, the New York Herald reported the arrest of William Thompson. Why mention this? The publication referred to William Thompson as a “confidence man”—a term later shortened to con man.
Thompson’s method was to walk the streets of New York while dressed fashionably, come up to rich people, pretend to know them, and engage them in conversation. At some point, he would ask that person if they had confidence in him as a trustworthy person. If they said yes, he would ask them to prove it by giving him their watch, promising to meet them the next day to return it.
And that would be the last they would see of him.
In 1857, Herman Melville published a novel entitled The Confidence Man, based on the story of Thompson, although his version was more ornate. It was set on a riverboat steaming to New Orleans. A confidence man slips onto the boat and begins to work his cons on the various passengers. Told in the form of The Canterbury Tales, it’s a pretty good book—much more accessible than Moby Dick.
For the most part, cons boil down to the simple question William Thompson posed nearly 180 years ago: “Do you have confidence in me?”
And we keep falling for them. We keep placing our confidence in people who absolutely don’t deserve it. Ask any investor in WeWork, Theranos, Bernie Maddow, or any other number of spectacularly failed businesses. Why? Well, as the famous 19th-century con man Joseph “Paper Collar Joe” Bessimer observed in 1879: “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
The confidence man, the scammer, the flim-flam man, the grifter—these are all familiar figures in American literature and film culture. And it’s easy to see why. After all, con artists are rebels at heart. And one thing Americans really enjoy? A rebel. That is until he fleeces them out of their watches, money, or retirement savings. Then it’s not so amusing.
The first movie I recall seeing about a con man was the 1967 comedy The Flim-Flam Man. George C. Scott is a con man who comes to a small Southern town and cheats just about everyone. Unfortunately, it’s not available on DVD.com, but if you run across it somewhere, check it out because it is quite amusing—especially when contrasted with his signature role of General George Patton in Franklin J. Schaffner’s World War II drama Patton (1970).
So, for April Fools Day, how about some movies about cons and scams?
#April #Fools #Favorite #Movies #Scams
