Con Film Festival

THE CON MAN has been a staple of American cinema from its earliest days. But this familiar genre has acquired a new urgency as billionaire financiers Bernard Madoff and Allen Stanford are accused of perpetrating massive pyramid schemes.

The most famous such scheme - in which high returns to early investors are paid with money from subsequent ones - was the work of Boston's Charles Ponzi. This week marked the 127th anniversary of his birth, and on this occasion we offer our picks for what might be called the Con Film Festival:

In "The Sting" (1973), a con by Robert Redford and Paul Newman unfolds step by step in glorious detail. In "Paper Moon" (1973), father and daughter Ryan and Tatum O'Neal team up to bilk widows. Newman turns up again as pool player Fast Eddie in "The Hustler" (1961) and "The Color of Money" (1986). In "House of Games" (1987), a rich psychiatrist falls victim to an intriguing mobster. And in "The Grifters" (1990), a mother, her son, and his girlfriend plot against each other.

These stories reveal the noirish downside of the nation's get-ahead spirit: Schemers use the greed and naivete of others to their own advantage. Maybe this sounds familiar, as the economy reels from the end of a real estate boom built on the delusion of ever-rising home prices.

Cons do occur in real life. Indeed, the top award - call it the Greased Palme d'Or - must go to "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room." The 2005 documentary dissects the Houston energy giant whose business model depended entirely on puffing up its own stock price. As the movie shows, the line between a legitimate business and an outright scam can be fuzzier than one might think. Enron would have made Ponzi proud.