Catch Me If You Can (2002)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
A true story about Frank Abagnale Jr. who, before his 19th birthday, successfully conned millions of dollars worth of checks as a Pan Am pilot, doctor, and legal prosecutor. An FBI agent makes it his mission to put him behind bars. But Frank not only eludes capture, he revels in the pursuit.
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40 films that influenced Catch Me If You Can
What critics say influenced Catch Me If You Can
The opening credit sequence of Catch Me If You Can (by graphic arts company Kuntzel & Degas) harks back to the animated geometric lines of Hitchcock's North by Northwest, and its main character, Frank Abagnale, Jr., reminds of that film's Oedipally arrested chameleon Roger Thornhill.
As a possible career pinnacle, Catch's closest analogue is Hitchcock's 1959 North by Northwest.
It's a jaunty mix of light suspense, romance and comedy in the vein of To Catch a Thief or Donen's Hitchcock pastiches.
The star's charm, Spielberg's slick visuals, and a couple of well-placed swing hits (including Frank Sinatra crooning "Come Fly With Me") combine in seductive sequences that evoke Rat Pack cool and the Newman/Redford spark of " The Sting ".
We honest folk enjoy hearing tales of cleverness and thievery, from "The Sting" to "Ocean's Eleven," particularly when the bad guys don't hurt or kill anyone.
Try Tony Curtis in The Great Impostor (1961), also based on a true story about a conniver named after his father.
The story is very close to the 1961 Robert Mulligan movie "The Great Impostor," which starred Tony Curtis as Ferdinand Waldo Demara, a real-life chameleon-crook who successfully posed as -- among many other things -- a surgeon, a naval officer, a Trappist monk and even a prison warden.
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With a Scorsese and a Spielberg film in release in the same month and having secured the title role in Baz Luhrmann's upcoming Alexander the Great, DiCaprio's star is once again one of the brightest in the sky.
Even the opening title sequence brings back memories of those clever 1964 titles introducing The Pink Panther.
In fact, the film reminded me quite a bit of Steven Soderbergh's remake of "Ocean's Eleven."
As Steven Soderbergh pointed out in Ocean's Eleven (Yea!) and with Full Frontal (Boo!), everybody needs a release.
He followed those two probing social dramas with the marshmallow-like retro-caper Ocean’s Eleven.
We honest folk enjoy hearing tales of cleverness and thievery, from "The Sting" to "Ocean's Eleven," particularly when the bad guys don't hurt or kill anyone.
It's a tribute to Spielberg's gifts as a director of suspense sequences that it doesn't matter that, as in Citizen Kane, the beginning of the film gives away the entire plot (with cheesy TV game show To Tell the Truth standing in for News on the March).
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Catch Me if You Can is one of those deceptively slight offerings that manages to reveal more about its maker than the intended masterpieces often do -- it has that Between Important Pictures feel of Ford's The Quiet Man, Kurosawa's Yojimbo, Coppola's The Conversation, or Scorsese's King of Comedy.
Spielberg is only five years younger than Hitchcock was when he made Northwest; and of course, the Master of Suspense followed that movie with a picture that was its tonal opposite, and which revolutionized movies: 1960's Psycho.