The Sting can take its place at the table along with The Usual Suspects, The Crying Game, and The Sixth Sense—this is a movie that ends with a huge "gotcha!"

But unlike most movies with a sneaky finale, this one leaves us smirking and satisfied…even though we realize we got played.

The movie makes us think we know everything about what's going on…but that's exactly how it manages to con us so badly. In the end, we're led to believe that Johnny has betrayed Henry to the FBI and that both men have ended up dead because of it.

And audiences in 1973 would have been especially uncertain of this ending, since George Roy Hill had just made Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969 with actors Paul Newman and Robert Redford and—huge spoiler alert—Butch Cassidy ends with the likely deaths of both men. It's safe to say that an early '70s movie-goer would have anticipated the worst and then been overjoyed when Johnny's eyes pop open in the end and they realized that the whole thing was just part of the plan.

One of the most brilliant things about the end of this movie is that the two antagonists—Lonnegan and Snyder—never have any clue that they've been conned. Henry and Johnny get to walk away from the whole thing with their enemies thinking that they're dead, which basically gives the two men a fresh start.