“The Hustle” is a rivals-in-crime feminista scam comedy set on the French Riviera, with Anne Hathaway as a drop-dead-elegant British seductress-grifter who fleeces wealthy suckers the way they deserve to be fleeced, and Rebel Wilson as a disheveled vulgarian who’s just as shrewd an operator (she works the same trickery on a more low-rent breed of men). The movie is a remake of “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” (1988), which was a remake of “Bedtime Story” (1964). And this trio of light-fingered films, each made decades apart, adds up to a peculiar footnote in the history of Hollywood con-artist deviltry.

Each film comes with a movie-star pairing that sounds, on paper, like wild-meets-debonair perfection: Marlon Brando and David Niven in “Bedtime Story,” Steve Martin and Michael Caine in “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” and now Wilson and Hathaway in “The Hustle.” Each film is a stylized confection of drawing-room class tension, airy sight gags, and...